VARIOUS: Easy Listening (2LP, Polydor 2675 002, ?)

I love the photographs on this sleeve – a happy female music listener on the front, and a happy male music listener on the back. The gatefold sleeve opens up to reveal nothing more than an overview of other Polydor releases that the keen easy listening fan could purchase: “Polydor and easy listening go together”, it says. So, that means a variety of releases from easy listening heavy hitters like James Last – including All Aboard! With Cap’n James, whose cover shows James Last in naval gear sporting a cheeky, knowing glance, and Bert Kaempfert, Roberto Delgado and Norrie Paramor.

This double album, then, would seem to serve as a taster for the rich world of easy listening that Polydor had to offer – it’s a compilation featuring all of those heavy hitters and more, listed in a gloriously tasteless selection of typefaces on the front cover. It’s a great album, too: I purchased it second hand at some point in the early 1990s, when a wave of easy listening nostalgia was sweeping the UK, most obviously in the form of Top 40 hits by Mike Flowers Pops, but also in a huge number of club nights like Smashing, Blow Up and Disques Vogues that were taking place. For a time, everybody seemed to be wearing charity shop clothing and dancing badly to whatever cheesy-yet-brilliant, richly orchestrated records the DJ could find that week. Maximum enjoyment was reserved for those songs that cranked up the Hammond organ swirl, whipping up the crowd into a frenzy of retro excitement.

There’s no release date mentioned on this record, but I’d imagine it came out in around 1970 or so. The cover states that this double LP set originally sold for 19’10d. According to this handy ‘old money to new money’ currency converter, that equates to around £10, if it were being sold today. That’s kind of a bargain – over twenty tracks over four sides of vinyl! For a time, this compilation was worth a little bit, as it includes ‘Daydream’ by The Gunter Kallmann Choir, which was heavily used as the basis for 2004′s ‘Daydream In Blue’ by I, Robot, which was all over the place that year, as memory serves.

THE CAROLINE KNOW: Nail (7″, Bus Stop BUS012, 1990)

This is one of a little batch of records that my Dad once bought for me. He was away on a trip in America – I forget where, New York perhaps? – and decided that I might like some records as a holiday gift. This was a most wise decision! Enterprisingly, he made his way to a record shop and asked the owner to recommend a few records based on some facts about what I was into at the time: I liked indie-pop, I liked seven inch singles, and I seemed to like those records with wraparound sleeves that came in plastic bags. The shop owner picked out around five new releases that fitted the bill and, well, it was a great gift to receive!

I know next to nothing about The Caroline Know. Based on some information gleaned from the sleeve and insert that comes with the record, let’s fire up the ol’ internet to see what we can find out:

• The band is called The Caroline Know: Seems that they were based in Northampton, Massachusetts, although the contact addresses on the record suggest otherwise. They did live in New York; after that, Northampton. They have a MySpace page.
• The band includes people called Stephen Rand, Les Labarge and J Loenstein: Very sadly, Stephen Rand passed away earlier this year. My condolences to his friends and family. The J stands for Jim: Jim Loenstein. Google tries to alter this name to Lowenstein.
• According to the sleeve, the band could once be contacted by writing to 226 East 2nd Street, 4B, New York: Look, that’s here.
• According to the insert, the band could also be contacted by writing to 102 Bedford Avenue, 2R, Brooklyn, New York: That’s here. Looks nice! I like Brooklyn. There’s a place called Turkey’s Nest Tavern on this street as well; I wonder what it’s like? According to Yelp, they do alcoholic drinks in a jumbo size, and offer an absinthe margarita!

I’ve quite a few records on the Bus Stop label, and they’re one of the labels that I’d like to gradually collect everything from. There’s a partial discography, and brief introduction to the history of the label, here.

SPACEMEN 3: Sound Of Confusion (LP, Glass GLALP 018, 1986)

Ah, don’t they look so young on the cover of this album? Although having said that, Sonic Boom has aged surprisingly well, and doesn’t look too much older 25 years later than he does on the front of this record. In my opinion the photograph on the back cover of Sound Of Confusion should have been the front – it’s great, showing the band staring into the middle distance whilst swathed in multicoloured psychedelic projected light. Very cool.

I like the lettering style used on the cover – it’s a slightly refined version of a very typical style that was used all over a lot of psychedelic posters from the 1960s onwards. It’s a surprisingly straightforward style to recreate: consider that each letter is made of a single square block, and then consider removing oval shapes from within, to build up the negative space that creates the letterforms. For a while, once I’d cracked the trick to quickly and easily use this style, I used it a lot on gig posters and lettering that I was doing in the early 1990s, and even felt proficient enough to paint my own Spacemen 3 t-shirt, freehand, with the band name lettering as per this record cover, and the Spacemen 3 logo that would appear on later records. Somewhere, I think, I still have this t-shirt. For a brief period I got very into painting my own t-shirts, and produced them not with the Spacemen 3 logo, but also the Huggy Bear lettering from their first single, and the Love logo featured on their albums. The Love t-shirt was so well regarded that I was commissioned at least twice to paint similar t-shirts for others!

I bought this record second hand quite some time ago. Within the sleeve is the original insert that came with the release – allowing the owner to send off for a copy of the limited ‘Live’ 12″, containing recordings from a performance at Amsterdam’s Melkweg club in 1988. As the insert puts it, the Melkweg is ‘a well known drinking and hashish club’. Whoever previously owned the record had cut off and returned the form to claim this record; I wonder who it was? Did they enjoy the record? I own a copy of the ‘Live’ 12″, which I bought separately and second hand. Who knows, maybe the person who previously owned this Sound Of Confusion also previously owned the 12″ which is now in my collection?

MELT BANANA: 666 (6″, Level Plane LP37, 2002)

Yes, you read correctly – 6″. A six inch single. I had to go and create a new WordPress category for this post, and everything. I think within my collection I’ve got 5″, 6″, 7″, 9″, 10″ and 12″ records. So, a few gaps to fill. The five inch is almost impossible to play on an automatic turntable, as the arm is so close to the centre when beginning a side, it lifts up and retreats straight away. Six inches, however, just about works. I’m not sure if anybody has ever broken the 12″ barrier and created records that pretty much won’t fit on any standard turntable that exists, but if they have, I tip my hat to them. Such pointless exploits are the very reason I enjoy collecting weird and wonderful records.

Melt Banana: what a band. Relentlessly experimental and innovative noise; what’s seemingly random is – I hope – carefully constructed. I think it’d have to be, because it always tends to work, and if it was just some folks messing around and making noise, well, it’d just sound too chaotic, and not in a good way. That’s what a lot of people don’t think through when they throw ‘it’s just noise’-themed insults at music like this. It’s not just noise, it’s music that’s different to other music.

I’m not sure if I have ever seen Melt Banana play live, but my mind seems to be pinging into action and telling me I have. No recollection where, or when, however, which makes me wonder if it’s a false memory that I’ve created purely because I want to see them play live so much. There have been a few bands who have utterly blown me away with invention and entertainment in a live context – Hella, Battles and Boredoms spring to mind – and I feel like Melt Banana would be another such experience.

I first heard them some time ago when I used to tape-record tracks I liked the sound of on John Peel’s show, which would inevitably result in cut-up snippets of his chat accidentally making their way into the recordings. This was just such a case, and I can clearly remember him telling me how what he’d just played was from a Melt Banana album named Scratch Or Stitch. I kept that snippet of chat for reference. I miss John Peel.

RED CHAIR FADEAWAY/FUDGE: Never Remember/Girl Wish (7″ flexi, Waterbomb! SPLAT 002, ?)

Ah, the flexi. Truly the symbol of all things DIY, cheap and cheerful and not as disposable as one might think. Put a flexi in a wraparound sleeve, as in this example, and print that wraparound sleeve in a single colour, and you’ve got an archetypal indie-pop release. Waterbomb! was a fanzine, if memory served correctly, and they gave out flexis with each issue – and also, unless I imagined this, made more flexis available for other fanzines to give away as well. There’s no date on this record, but I’d position it at somewhere towards the early 1990s. That time must have seen endless charity shop raids for 1960s annuals and magazines, as no end of records like this, and fanzines of the time, featured copied images of happy, free, nouvelle vague-looking females doing their own thing. On this record, there’s one on the front, one on the back, one on the insert within and even one on the flexi itself!

There’s a lot of indie-pop heritage in this little flexi. Members of Red Chair Fadeaway also played in The Carousel, Dandelion Wine, Razorcuts, Talulah Gosh, The Cinematics, Heavenly, Marine Research, The Would-Be-Goods and Saturn V. Members of Fudge were in Engine No.9. Across the lot of ‘em, they’ve probably released a hundred records at least, and yet the average fellow in the street wouldn’t have heard of any of these bands. Maybe that’s a good thing? There’s a whole secret world going on in music, all of the time. “My Secret World”, to quote the Golden Dawn…

A friend of mine recently informed me that you can still get flexis manufactured – this is great, I thought they were a thing of the past, a strange anachronism of ‘this used to all be fields’/'I remember the days before CDs’-type old-man chatter. Maybe I’ll get a flexi made… they’re pretty expensive, though!

TILLMANNS: Run EP (7″, Fraction Discs FRACTION 001, 2006)

This is one of those mysterious records that I’m sure any ardent record collector will have several examples of. I have literally no idea where it came from – I certainly don’t recall purchasing it – and I don’t know who Tillmanns are, or why a release on Fraction Discs was something I’d be interested in. The record does come housed in a wraparound sleeve, which is often (in the case of records I own, at least) a signifier of some kind of indie pop. According to this review I just found, that seems to be very much the case.

Because the internet is a wonderful thing, I can visit the URL on the back of the sleeve and, although it doesn’t tell me much beyond the fact that Tillmanns have other releases, I can then find my way to the Fraction Discs website, which makes it clear that the record label is very much a continuing thing, and that Fraction Discs is in fact a shop selling all kinds of indie pop releases. You could even buy this Tillmanns record from them, if you wanted to, for 45 SEK, which, according to Google, is equal to around £4.36.

I like the artwork on this record’s cover. It’s a good use of a single-colour print*, setting up a graphic style which has an pleasantly abstract feel to it but which seems to carry some meaning. To me, this looks like the side of a large boat – does that make sense? According to the sleeve, the artwork is by Jörgen Svensson – possibly this guy, who looks to be rather a well-established Swedish artist.

Well, a mostly single-colour print. The Fraction Discs logo on the reverse of the sleeve contains a tiny little red-coloured segment, which doesn’t look as if it was coloured in by hand, but is in fact part of the printing. I respect this: accepting the cost of printing an extra colour (which won’t have been insubstantial, in the scheme of things) to make sure that the logo is displayed correctly.

THE GREAT SOCIETY WITH GRACE SLICK: Conspicuous Only In Its Absence (LP, CBS 63476, 1968)

Grace Slick would, of course, become more famous as the lead singer with Jefferson Airplane, but The Great Society is the band that came before, which featured other Slicks. There was Grace’s then husband Jerry Slick on drums, and Jerry’s brother Darby on guitar. A veritable slick of Slicks, indeed. Some Great Society songs came with Grace as she moved from them to the Jefferson Airplane – not least ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody To Love’.

Jefferson Airplane would, of course, lead to Jefferson Starship, who led to Starship, who – as we all know – built this city on rock and roll. I feel compelled to present the true awfulness of the video for that song:

Get over the shudders induced by that ‘orrible mess by reminding yourself of how cool Grace Slick was, when she was fronting the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane. The band are looking good on the cover of this record, in spite of the cover designer’s strange idea to overlay a photograph of a wicker chair on Grace’s face. I’m not sure why that was thought to be a good visual effect. But hey, the 1960s were a crazy time. It’s a lovely colour scheme on the sleeve, nonetheless.

I have three tapes somewhere which are all packed full of brilliant 1960s psychedelia and garage tunes. They’ve entertained me for over a decade now, at least. I think I may have mentioned them before here. Slowly but surely, I’m picking up the original releases of a lot of those tunes. ‘Somebody To Love’ by The Great Society is on one of those tapes – albeit not in the live version to be found on this album – and for years I always listened to it and thought “what a great cover of the Jefferson Airplane song… so close to the original in the vocal style… who are these Great Society pretenders, anyhow?” I guess there are always new facts to learn as way make our way through our musical lives.

THE ELEMENT OF CRIME: The Things You Do For Love (7″, Soul Static Sound SOUL 2, ?)

I really like this record’s packaging. A simple, cardboard sleeve, with a folded-over photocopied sheet of paper glued on, and – on the back of the sleeve – a hand-stamped Soul Static Sound logo and catalogue number. This was a second-hand purchase – from, as I remember, a record shop in Wellington, Telford called Langland Records, which used to have a small box of second-hand seven-inch singles on its counter. The shop is still there, I think, in a different and smaller location, but when I was growing up I used to enjoy visiting it regularly. It was my go-to shop for records during my formative years of getting into what was then more genuinely called ‘indie’ music – back when that term meant something, grumble grumble. It was also directly opposite my pub of choice The White Lion, and its owner would often be brought pints from across the street to make his working day more, um, relaxed.

The glued-on paper has long since become unglued – indeed, it was that way from when I purchased it. This has revealed that whoever glued it on did so using criss-cross lines, and a single square outline of glue, which is – to anybody familiar with glueing – a normally excellent technique. Perhaps they used something that wasn’t built to last, like Gloy. I always used to prefer Cow Gum, but – unfortunately – I think that’s unavailable these days. Perhaps because of the outrageously noxious fumes it would release, that would turn one’s glueing session into impromptu glue-sniffing. Actually, perhaps that is why I used to prefer it, rather than for its sticking capability.

The Element Of Crime was a UK Riot Grrl-related outfit, featuring (I think) members of Huggy Bear. Let’s see what the internet has to say. Aha! It turns out – according to this blog, at least – the band included members of not only Huggy Bear but also Linus, Blood Sausage, Skinned Teen and Sister George. Pretty cool – at least to anybody into that whole scene in the early nineties. That was a fun time, and a lot of records were released back then. It was like bands released records just for the sake of the music, or to reinforce a point they had to make, rather than with some kind of career in mind. Does that still happen?

BIG BUSINESS: Head For The Shallow (LP, Wäntage USA WAN037, 2004)

As I ran my finger along the spines of records on my shelves, trying to find this one to pull out and photograph, I noticed that Big Business – Head For The Shallow on the album’s spine is in bold, chunky, capitalised and unmissable text. And there’s your analogy for this band.

I saw Big Business play live as a two-piece at an All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Pontins in Camber Sands, some years ago. They were fantastic: heavy, riffy, funny, goofy and captivating. At the time, I wasn’t particularly aware of the work of Melvins, who I then saw at a similar event – albeit one at the somewhat posher Butlins in Minehad – a couple of years later. By that time, Melvins had integrated the two Big Business folk into their line-up, resulting in a mind-blowingly outstanding set of musicians who tore through one of the finest live performances I’ve ever seen. This line-up had two drummers, and multiple drummers are something I always enjoy watching – the interplay between them, the reflected silhouettes of their drumming arms as they collectively weave rhythms.

But back to Big Business. Apparently one of them used to be in Karp, a band who are currently on my ‘why have I never heard them – everybody keeps telling me that they are legendarily brilliant’ list. I’ll get around to them, one day… if they’re even half as good as either Big Business or Melvins, they’ll be worth the investigative time.

Watch this video and join me in slack-jawed, wide-eyed amazement:

PRIMAL SCREAM: Kowalski (12″, Creation CRE 245T, 1997)

This came out in 1997 – really? – thirteen years ago! Wow. It genuinely doesn’t seem that long ago. For me, ‘Kowalski’ and the Vanishing Point album from which it was taken are pretty much the high point in what’s been an amazingly long career for Primal Scream. At this stage, they were at the apex of messed-up coolness, and injecting a lot of weird, experimental stuff into what remained some very accessible music.

This record is dedicated by the band to Cleavon J Little, the guy who played Super Soul in the Vanishing Point movie which Primal Scream were obsessing about around the time of these records coming out. Super Soul was the hypercool blind DJ who guided, via radio, the lead character Kowalski as he drove across parts of America. As I remember it, Vanishing Point the movie doesn’t really stand up to repeated views – it gets kind of boring – and I prefer Blazing Saddles, Cleavon J Little’s other most well-known role. I like the idea of an alternate past where Primal Scream get obsessed with that movie, instead, and release records based around the idea of eating beans and acting like idiots. “Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome. C’mon in…”

Around the time of these records coming out, or shortly after, I saw Primal Screaam play at Brixton Academy. It was outstanding. Asian Dub Foundation supported, and did a largely instruments/backing track-free set that didn’t kick off until around midnight. Primal Scream, as they say, ‘tore the roof off,’ with a set that featured My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields on guitar, along with guests including Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan and (I think) Paul Simonon of The Clash. They were playing a lot of stuff that would later form the Xtrmntr album. It was a late night, and it was busy, and I got separated from the friends with whom I’d gone to the gig. Leaving the venue at around 3.30 am or so, worse for wear, I decided to wander the Brixton streets to find a taxi, before hopping into an unmarked car and drunkenly guiding it back to where I was staying in London. My friends weren’t there, and didn’t return for a couple of hours, during which time I slept peacefully on their front steps. Looking back, there’s many reasons why I shouldn’t really have survived that evening without more incidents or injuries. Luck was on my side.

Here’s the Vanishing Point trailer, for some fun: