Month: February 2006

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, been pored over and become a primary source of inspiration for any dark, vitriolic, spiky, rigidly ordered performer you’ve ever cared to listen to for the next 2 decades. Or rather you don’t know what you’ve got until you know where it’s come from. Bauhaus’s heyday may be buried physically beneath a quarter of a century’s history (give or take a current reunion), but they’ve inadvertently become as current as most Continue Reading

Free Surf Music #3 is the sound of someone joyriding a UFO. It’s The Stray Cats with their drinks spiked, or a Tarantino movie set in the East Midlands. Put another way, this album is fourteen tracks of gloriously unhinged guitar twangs, inspired drum bursts of the Keith Moon variety, and moments of off the wall humour. Alan Jenkins (The ‘Phil Spector-from-Leicester’) has helped a whole host of offbeat bands produce  some of the most original yet determinedly uncommercial records Continue Reading

When The Minus 5’s ‘Down With Wilco’ album landed on my desk sometime early in 2003 I was tickled pink by what amounted to a veritable wish list of indie luminaries and a ‘multi-layered tier-cake of sounds and threads’ with tunes and ideas that literally buzzed, shook and rattled. So when this mighty illegal gathering of talents returned with a bevy of other bodies that included the Decemberist’s Colin Meloy and REM’s drummer for hire, Bill Rieflin I was naturally Continue Reading