LINER NOTES: THE SOUNDS OF BADEN PEARCE [1993-94]

1.    Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants

2.    Lenny Valentino [Album Version] – The Auteurs

3.    No. 13 Baby – The Pixies

4.    Cannonball – The Breeders

5.    Rebound – Sebadoh

6.    Trigger Cut / Wounded Kite at :17 – Pavement

7.    Arms Control Poseur [Album Version] – The Fall

8.    Ghost Highway – Mazzy Star

9.    Capital Letters – Moonshake

10.  Marbles – Tindersticks

11.  Transona Five – Stereolab

12.  Tearing Apart My World – Beatnik Filmstars

13.  Water – Automatic Dlamini

14.  White Shirt – The Charlatans

15.  For Tomorrow – Blur

16.  Line Up – Elastica

17.  Columbia – Oasis

18.  His ‘n’ Hers – Pulp

19.  Red Right Hand – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

20.  Hand in Glove – The Smiths

21.  Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) – Buzzcocks

22.  Naked Cousin [Peel Session] – PJ Harvey

Bonus Tracks:

23.  Bike – Pink Floyd

24.  The Gift – The Velvet Underground

25.  Ballad of a Thin Man – Bob Dylan

26.  The Chain – Fleetwood Mac
27.  Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five – Wings
28.  Reflections in a Flat – Half Man Half Biscuit

The Sounds of Baden Pearce: ‘Baden Pearce’ being the name of my hall of residence at my West London university, 'The Sounds' being a collection of tunes encountered over the academic year I resided there. Baden Pearce tended to be the domicile for people who came through clearing – ‘clearing’ being the system whereby you applied anew for a place at a particular college or university after receiving your A-level results, maybe because you did better than expected and wanted to explore other opportunities, or worse and were obliged to. (I had done better.)

Our rooms were meagre cuboids: a tiled floor, a rug, a single bed, a wardrobe, a desk come chest-of-drawers, a shelf and a large cork notice board with room enough for that Reservoir Dogs poster which came free with Select magazine. Boys were slept on the ground floor, girls on the first in what was a two-storey building. There were no en-suite bathrooms; sinks, showers and toilets were shared. My lodging overlooked portacabin-style classrooms. Ducks used to congregate outside my window some mornings. There was a television, piano and table tennis table in the common room. It was a lot of fun but there were only two washing machines and no tumble dryer to speak of. One’s radiator took on a more vital dimension.

Eager to expand my knowledge of all things ‘indie’, I made an association with a guy who was well acquainted with the genre. He had tapes of the stuff and seemed to make a new purchase almost every week, which we would listen to in his room.

Sartorially, indie music could be hard to pin down but appeared to have little to do with fashion. Footwear and jeans might be bought new but T-shirts, jumpers and coats were typically found in charity shops and weekend markets – Camden and Portobello in our case. Brands and labels were meaningless conceits. Having much money did not make you a better dressed person. Clothes were not worn to reflect status or hierarchy; indie was supposed to be beyond all that. The attitude was that anything was permissible, both with regards to music and a band’s image: alternative, lo-fi, shoegaze, grunge, baggy, dream pop, chamber pop, jangle pop, art pop, drone pop, noise pop, slowcore, sadcore, hardcore, post-hardcode, post-punk, straight edge, industrial rock, garage rock, gothic rock, experimental rock, art rock, noise rock...  The indie scene was a very broad church.

This being said, there were a number of identifiable looks. Fans of American indie generally favoured plaid shirts, Converse trainers, suede jackets, well-worn denim and long hair. Skateboarding gear would also feature – apparel for the 'slacker generation'. The British scene was more eclectic and slightly smarter. With their mop-top hairdos and roll-neck jumpers, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of St. Etienne and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream appropriated the 1960s long before Britpop laid claim to it. In the wake of their album Modern Life is Rubbish, Blur came up with a sort of Mod/Skinhead hybrid involving Fred Perry polo shirts, blazers, Harrington jackets, desert boots and Dr. Martens. Pulp had also developed their own style, a retro, charity shop get-up comprising nylon and corduroy. Tindersticks wore suits. V-neck jumpers were doing the rounds. I sifted through my dad’s old clothes and found a few, including a brown leather ‘car coat’ dating back to the early 1970s worthy of Luke Haines (of The Auteurs) himself.

The Sounds of Baden Pearce was the name I whimsically came up with when I began collating the music I had on cassette and transferring it onto MiniDisc in and around the year 2000. In actual fact, there was no cassette carried over from this period. I would certainly have thrown something together during that time – possibly a number of tapes pertaining to various genres – and I’m confident that many of these tunes would have appeared on one compilation or another, if only because of the strong association they still hold. The first 18 tracks are particularly poignant, although thereafter the connections become more tenuous.

Nothing dubious about the first track. I already possessed a copy of Flood by They Might Be Giants, but 'Ana Ng' comes from an earlier album entitled Lincoln that I borrowed from the guy who owned all the indie tapes. They Might Be Giants were by now old hat, but I was playing catch-up and did not know this.

I’d read about The Auteurs in that copy of Select magazine and was persuaded to buy Now I'm a Cowboy on the strength of the single 'Lenny Valentino' – the album version is even better. Unfortunately, Now I’m a Cowboy didn’t live up to the expectation that The Auteurs’ debut album, New Wave, foisted upon it.

Every aspiring indie-kid listened to the Pixies and the Breeders, most to Sebadoh and some to Pavement (as well as Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Nirvana, etc.). If any specific sound defined indie music back in the early ‘90s it was expressed via bands like these. The guy with the tapes provided The Pixies, The Breeders and Pavement, while I bought Sebadoh’s 4 Song CD – on vinyl – on his advice. All the songs worth hearing on this EP later appeared on the album Bakesale, rendering it obsolete.

The Fall were at the height of their popularity after 1993’s The Infotainment Scan had entered the album charts at no. 9. I borrowed Extricate from the guy with tapes, which was the only Fall album he had, and played it to death. Come the end of the academic year, I’d own This Nation’s Saving Grace, The Wonderful and Frightening World Of..., The Frenz Experiment, Bend Sinister, Shift-Work, Code: Selfish, The Infotainment Scan and Middle Class Revolt. 'Arms Control Poseur' is my favourite track off of Extricate, although frustratingly it isn’t included on the abridged vinyl copy I picked up years later.

Tapes guy purchased the Mazzy Star LP So Tonight That I Might See as soon as it came out (October 1993). It made such an impression that I quickly bought their earlier record, She Hangs Brightly (May 1990). We journeyed to the Mean Fiddler intent on seeing the band play live only to find the gig had been cancelled. If we’d procured tickets in advance we would have probably been notified of this, but as it was we had no way of knowing – no internet, no mobile phone, no anything.

Moonshake utilised drum machines and samples but were still considered an indie band. Tapes guy had a copy of their first album Eva Luna, and on a visit to Bristol to see family I purchased the mini-album Big Good Angel, from which 'Capital Letters' is derived. This was last release featuring the old line-up, before band member Margaret Fiedler left (or was kicked out) to form Laika. Tapes guy and I went to see them play at Highbury Garage, I suppose to promote their third album, The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow. All I remember of it was a loud brass section, tapes guy chatting to a member of The Family Cat, and Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab asking me for a cigarette.

Tindersticks were from Nottingham and seemed older and more sophisticated than many of their peers, which they were. Their music could be described as dark chamber pop, incorporating string arrangements, woodwind instruments, horns, Spanish guitar. Tindersticks’ eponymously titled debut was nominated album of the year by the magazine Melody Maker, and deserved to be. (When it was suggested by Melody Maker [March 18 1995] that their look was contrived, Stuart Staples retorted, 'It's not that we wouldn't be able to make the music we do in jeans and T-shirts, it's that if we were the sort of people who did wear jeans and T-shirts, we wouldn't make the music that we do.')

The passage of time has tricked me into associating Stereolab with a period of my life it can’t have had much to do with. I purchased the Ping Pong EP in July 1994, which was almost as soon as I returned to Plymouth for the summer holidays, and the LP Mars Audiac Quintet in August. Regardless, this music has a strong association with that which surrounds it, lending weight to the theory that I did indeed compile something representative during this period, perhaps in Plymouth.

The Beatnik Filmstars had a hard, lo-fi sound more akin to American indie-rock, but with the softer vocal inclinations of British jangle pop/shoegaze. Automatic Dlamini was John Parish's band, but their second album, 1992's From a Diva to a Diver, included musical contributions from Polly Harvey. Both groups where part of a Somerset and Bristol based indie scene that the guy with the tapes was also part of, by way of his involvement with a band called The Tony Head Experience.

As well as hanging out with the guy with all the tapes, I was friendly with a Welsh lad who looked a bit like Keanu Reeves (it was his hair more than anything else). I possessed the Charlatans 12" 'Weirdo' but nothing other than that. Welsh lad had The Charlatans’ first album, Some Friendly, on vinyl, and we both bought Up to Our Hips on tape when it was made available in March for the paltry sum of £3.99 (tapes normally retailed at around £8, give or take, while CDs would set you back about £12). 'White Shirt' is my favourite tune from Some Friendly and better than anything off of Up to Our Hips, which isn’t The Charlatans’ best work.

The Charlatans would later find themselves co-opted into Britpop movement – willingly, I feel – but the zeitgeist that was to beget the scene had yet to be given its name. You sensed something was happening but didn’t know what it was. The term new wave of new wave (NWONW) was being bandied about, with regards to groups like Elastica, S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men, but it never really caught on. In any case, Pulp and Oasis couldn’t have sounded more unlike each other. The scene as it was, there was plenty of room for both and no obligation to align yourself this way or that. If you stopped the clock here – 1993 running into 1994 – you might think British indie music was a wonderfully diverse and multi-faceted thing.

At any rate, 'For Tomorrow' by Blur correlated with my impression of London: trips to Portobello Road on a Saturday with the guy with the tapes, exploiting all-you-can-eat buffets at pizza restaurants on Leicester Square, drinking in shabby pubs in Camden. I perceived Elastica to be a more local concern. Lead singer Justine Frischmann grew up down the road in Twickenham, and tapes guy and I once ran into her shopping with her mother in Richmond. Tapes guy was never very shy, and so he introduced himself, informed her we were fans, to which she responded with good grace.

A couple of weeks before Blur released Parklife, Oasis unleashed their debut single, 'Supersonic'. Whereas Blur’s game changer shot straight to number one in the UK album charts, Oasis’s single only made it as high as number 31 in the concomitant ranking. 'Supersonic' was a good song, as was Columbia, which appeared on the CD version. The next two singles leading up to the album ('Shakermaker' and 'Live Forever') fared much better, and by the time Definitely Maybe hit the shops in August Oasis were easily as popular as Blur.

Meanwhile, Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers had almost slipped under the radar, although it still peaked at number 9 in the charts, which was more than respectable. The title track wasn’t actually included on the album but surfaced on The Sisters EP released in late May, just in time for my 19th birthday (a present from the guy with tapes).

I didn’t take to the front cover of Let Love In by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but trusted that the guy with the tapes knew what he was buying. I don’t actually recall much of the album other than the track 'Red Right Hand', but it’s quite some track and one that Cave  plays live to this day.

I picked up a copy of The Smiths’ debut in an indoor flea market in Richmond that no longer exists for about £3 (along with the 12” of 'Hey! Luciani' by The Fall). The tapes guy had Hatful of Hollow on tape so this purchase was by no means out of the blue, but having a vinyl copy of that album felt significant somehow.

Another one of my university chums owned a compilation entitled The Sound of the Suburbs, all about punk and new wave. This is where the Buzzcocks tune came from, and it also put me in touch with The Jam, The Undertones, The Stranglers and Blondie. Actually, I was already a bit into Blondie on account of a girl who was a massive fan, and with whom I had a bit of a thing going. (She also provided me with a copy of Definitely Maybe on the day of its release.)

As well as lending me his cassettes, the guy with the indie tapes introduced me to a number of other things, such as the NME and Melody Maker, suede as a viable material, the films of Woody Allen and John Peel’s Festive 50. I must concede to having never listened to John Peel up until this point in my life, and although I didn’t suddenly start tuning in religiously I did make a point of recording that year’s Festive 50. This allowed me to obtain a copy of 'Naked Cousin' by PJ Harvey, which hadn’t featured on any of her records and was only made commercially available in 2006 when she collated her Peel Sessions onto an album.

Massive Blondie Fan

It became evident that to fully appreciate indie music you had to know a bit about the history of alternative music in general and some of the acts that comprise the cannon: The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Smiths. The Welsh lad who looked vaguely like Keanu Reeves was very into The Beatles, and many evenings were spent listening to  Abbey Road and ‘The White Album’, as well as Paul McCartney and Wings. My parents used to play these records when I was younger, but it was revelatory listening to it now as a teenager, earnestly in a darkened room. I was also introduced to what might be called progressive psychedelic rock: bands such as Gong, Caravan, Camel, Focus. I never really liked this music enough to bother recording any of it, although I did enjoy Angel’s Egg by Gong. The same cannot be said of Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which I obtained from the lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs. There are far better songs than 'Bike' on the album, but when I was putting this compilation together I felt I needed to convey some of the more humorous aspects of the music I was being introduced to (see also Half Man Half Biscuit).

Indie tapes guy obliged with the first VU album but I never gave it the attention it warranted; all I cared for was 'Venus in Furs' which had recently featured in an advert for Dunlop tyres. However, tapes guy also had a recording of 'The Gift' off of Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. It tells the improbable tale of Waldo Jeffers who, lovesick, mails himself to his long distance lover, Marsha Bronson, only for her to inadvertently skewer him with a sheet-metal cutter as she struggles to open the box that transported him. The plot is not so much the thing, it’s all about the language, the phrasing and John Cale’s delightful Welsh lilt.

The Welsh lad who looked like Keanu Reeves – who didn’t have a very strong Welsh accent, come to think of it – also liked Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac. My old man liked Bob Dylan too, but his music had never left much of an impression. Repeated listens in Welsh lad’s room to Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde saw this right. Fleetwood Mac I was more familiar with, but again I’d never made any effort to properly engage with them. Welsh lad had Rumours, and I borrowed my father’s copy of Greatest Hits (the 1971 edition). Over the years I have included both 'The Chain' and 'Dragonfly' on this compilation, but never at the same time, so take your pick. Similarly, anything from Band on the Run by Wings will do.

The calm before the storm. I’d seen The Breeders supported by Luscious Jackson at The Forum in Kentish Town, The Fall at the same venue (different night), The Fall again at The Fridge in Brixton, Moonshake at The Garage, the Moonflowers somewhere between Fulham and Hammersmith – all in the company of the guy with the indie tapes – and These Animal Men at Connections in Plymouth. The criteria for going to these gigs were just fancying it and the availability of tickets. There was never any question of being part of something, of it being a communal experience. When did it all change? When did indie music become embroiled in another scene?

Britpop’s ascendancy was gradual and by no means assured. The received wisdom is that it started with 'Popscene' by Blur in the spring of 1992. If that’s true then nobody really noticed, and besides, it was Suede who were making waves. Their debut single 'The Drowners' was voted single of the year in the NME, although it only reached number 49 in the charts, which isn’t the stuff movements are made of.

How about 1993? Did that April issue of Select Magazine – the one that’s wheeled out every time the origins of Britpop are being discussed, with the serpentine Brett Anderson on its cover – not signal the start of something? To a degree: both Suede’s eponymous debut album and Blur’s second, Modern Life is Rubbish, made it into NME’s top 10 albums that year. But then so too did Black Sunday by Cypress Hill, Come on Feel the Lemonheads by the Lemonheads, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Star by Belly, and Bjork’s debut, Debut. (Cannonball by The Breeders was voted best single.)

What about April 1994, the month that saw the release of two of Britpop’s defining albums: His ‘n’ Hers by Pulp and Parklife by Blur? Possibly, but the effect was not as immediate as one might assume. Britpop’s prime movers were still sharing a fair proportion of airtime, the front covers of magazines and placings in polls with acts as diverse as R.E.M., Manic Street Preachers, The Stone Roses, a recently deceased Kurt Cobain, Morrissey, Primal Scream, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Auteurs, The Prodigy, Jeff Buckley, Beastie Boys, NAS, Public Enemy, Johnny Cash, Pavement, Sebadoh, Pearl Jam, etc.

You have to hand it to Oasis. It was Definitely Maybe that promulgated Britpop’s arrival as a populist movement. The lads who had been grooving away to The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Inspiral Carpets just a few years earlier were not the sort to be seduced by the likes of Suede, Pulp and Blur. But know this: it took until 1995, maybe even 1996, for the aggro vested upon fans of alternative music – or towards people with alternative lifestyles in general – to finally settle down, for the jibes and the dirty looks and the threats of violence to subside, the objections towards how you wore your hair or how thin you were, or something as innocuous as a leather jacket or a roll neck sweater.

[Listen to here.]