THE GO-BETWEENS: Streets Of Your Town (7″, Beggars Banquet BEG 232, 1989)

I’m not normally much of a ‘multi-formatter’ – I don’t tend to buy the same release on every format that a record company feels the need to issue. I’ve never reached the level of fanboy obession that’s driven many to covet the same songs on 7″, 12″, CD1, CD2, tape, eight track, flexi, wax cylinder etc etc. Even the ‘bonus’/'extra’/'previously unreleased’ filler material that normally backs up the main songs tends to be slightly outside the reach of interest for all but the most special of bands.

Weirdly though, I’ve got ‘Streets Of Your Town’ on both 7″ and 12″. Not by design or by obsession, but by virtue of having an awful memory and hence having bought each format completely separately, years apart from each other, in different places, with no clue that (in the latter case) I already owned this record.

BUT… for some reason the 7″ is BEG 232 and the 12″ is BEG 218T, suggesting that they’re not actually multiple formats of the same release at all. Checking the Beggars discography online confirms this: the song was released twice within as many years, with different B-sides taking up the slack on each version. No idea of the story behind this, but Beggar (ho ho) me if I in fact don’t own the same release in two formats – I own two releases from Beggars’ and The Go-Betweens’ discographies respectively, and I am hence a better collector than I realised.

To finish, Grant McLennan R.I.P.

THE CHARLATANS: One To Another (7″, Beggars Banquet BBQ 301, 1996)

Ah, happy mid-90s Britpop times, I was at university, enjoying life, swaggering about wearing a charity shop Adidas tracksuit top and a pair of Puma States, smoking fags inside and getting caught up in the post-Oasis-going-big revelry that – deny it if you will – was genuinely exciting and fun. I think that the Charlatans were at their peak at that time, having matured from their early, brilliant Hammond-infused incarnation into a groovy, danceable band that totally exuded confidence and warmth. Tim Burgess was looking particularly cool in photos around this time, too.

I saw the Charlatans play a couple of times; one that springs to mind was at the Rivermead Centre in Reading, in a basketball-court-turned-venue that was, the same night, the happy coincidental time of a surprise meet-up with my old pal Colin, who had popped over from Worcester for the night to see the band. Always good to see him, and it’s been a long time now since I did. I was with my sister, if memory serves correctly; we weren’t often at the same gig but she loved the Charlatans too (and, indeed, introduced me to them through her own listening habits a few years beforehand).

Peter Hook’s super-dull outfit Monaco were support at the show, and amusingly drove around 75% of the crowd out of the room and into the bar for the duration of their set. Yes yes, he was in Joy Division and is therefore an untouchable, but my word Monaco weren’t good. It was a pleasure to see that he did indeed wear his bass guitar as low to the ground as legend has it, however.

Not sure why Tim Burgess has no shoes or socks on on the cover of this record. He has big feet that look like they’d whiff a bit. Is that rock and roll, ’96 style? I just can’t remember.