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.]

LINER NOTES:THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIX-TAPE [1992-93]

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that the word 'mix-tape' would continue to resonate well into the next. The physical archetype practically obsolete, it has been superseded by the 'playlist', but the concept is the same and the term 'mix-tape' is understood as its equivalent.

There was nothing wrong with cassette tapes. You could record onto them from vinyl, compact discs, the radio, and from other cassette tapes. The point of engagement was controlled manually and so periods of protracted silence before and after a particular tune could be edited away. Volume could be regulated too, although you needed to have an ear for it. Finally, they normally came packaged with a J-card insert and a set of rectangular labels, allowing for a DIY aesthetic that other formats have lacked. Their weakness lay in a tendency to physically unravel, and the fact that you couldn't determine very accurately how much free space there was left to record upon; a song might cut out at the most inopportune moment. Some people might also cite a lack of audio quality, but I don't recall being too bothered at the time.

Cassette tapes were superseded, with respect to the making of mix-tapes, by the MiniDisc. People who used them remember them fondly. Their size – and of the MiniDisc players themselves when compared to portable cassette players – was conveniently diminutive. The MiniDisc could be edited with unprecedented precision. Track listings could be shuffled at will and undesired periods of silence retrospectively isolated and excised. You could delete individual tunes if you got bored with them and replace them with others.

The format’s only evident drawback was its packaging. The sheaves those 68 x 72 x 5 mm housed discs slotted into offered small room for manoeuvre, and it was often a challenge to annotate track listings of length, or those of groups and songs compromised of many characters. Another concern was the same that plagues all digital forms: once a disc or machine begins to play up, that's that. I’ve disentangled many a cassette from its player and, using a pencil hexagonal in section, wound the tape back around the spools. There is no equivalent remedy when faced with a malfunctioning disc.

The MiniDisc began to die off sometime during the first decade of the 21st century. The iPod was undoubtedly responsible, and the MP3 player soon became ubiquitous. This represented more than simply a change of format. In some sense the MP3 player is an entirely disposable device. Portable cassette and MiniDisc players were something to be valued in the same way that hi-fi systems once were (still are by people who take an interest in such things). The iPod and the MP3 player, while not necessarily unattractive, do not leave so much of an impression, their size being prohibitive to the variance in configuration bequeathed upon its forbears. They are utilitarian, mere conduits designed to be tucked away into a top pocket, to travel light with. Moreover, the absence of any external data storage device, to be manually inserted into your player, means that the mix-tape has become something that exists as a file in Your Documents, or as a playlist on Spotify. It is no longer a physical thing: it is an abstraction, a concept, and a malleable and fleeting one at that. The 21st century is not interested in permanence.

This elusive nature is not altogether a bad thing. Since owning a laptop and utilising MP3 technology, I’ve been able to create notional playlists to be manifested at will, as and when I acquire the digital information to satisfy them. The nature by which one obtains this data takes on many forms, none of which are as awkward as the real-time transference that recording on or from a tape or MiniDisc demanded. A playlist can be realised in a very short space of time, almost frivolously, and edited ad infinitum. Still rather have some sort of physical evidence that your playlist is more than a figment of your imagination? Burn it onto a CD.

This is what I’ve been up to. Not long ago I suffered a meltdown of my laptop and feared I may lose the playlists I’d pieced together since surrendering myself to the MP3 format. Fortunately, I succeeded in backing up most of my content before the laptop finally packed itself in. A piecing-together process ensued, and I decided I’d better get around to what I had intended to get around to years ago. The discs themselves aren’t so important. I may never even play them and will more than likely be able to transfer the material over to future laptops (or onto as yet uninvented data forms) by way of the memory stick.

The exercise is one of consolidation. Over the years, some of my playlists have become distorted, or have gone missing entirely, in between format changes and the migration of information. I have had to reconstruct certain arrangements from memory alone. In some instances, I am no longer certain they existed at all. They are the sum of many parts, but they do represent something or other: a time and place, a house lived in, a state of mind and affairs, or maybe a journey taken to a foreign land.

The autumn of 1993, and I'd not purchased a hip hop album since The Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde nearly a year prior. I sensed this purchase to be symbolically conclusive of something, or an indefinite cessation of affairs at least – a result of the fashion for ‘gangster rap’ that had begun to proliferate, which I wasn’t into. In the interim I'd enjoyed a dalliance with Acid Jazz, my father's collection of jazz proper (by no means exhaustive), and an incipient interest in 'indie' music that I was intent on developing.

It was an odd period of my life. From 1988 through to 1992 I’d listened almost exclusively to hip hop, which lent itself to the compiling of compilations, but now, in this transitory phase, almost none – or nothing that was not already in my possession. Had I ever put something together to represent 1992/93 – my A-level year, the year I turned 18, an enjoyable year – it could have run something like this:

1. Hercules – Aaron Neville
2. Grounded – Gloria Taylor
3. The Girl Who Was Death – Corduroy
4. BNH – The Brand New Heavies
5. Riot On 103rd Street – Mother Earth
6. New World Order – Galliano
7. Retro-Active – Too Darn Hot
8. Atlas – The Robin Jones Seven
9. Cucaraca Macara – Harvey Averne Barrio Band
10. Besame Mucho – Wes Montgomery
11. Far More Blue – The Dave Brubeck Quartet 
12. Poova Nova – Dudley Moore
13. Afinidad – Erroll Garner
14. Little Green Bag – The George Baker Selection
15. Hounds of Love – Kate Bush
16. Shallow Then Halo – Cocteau Twins
17. Dusted – Belly
18. You Are the Everything – R.E.M.
19. Someone Keeps Moving My Chair – They Might be Giants
20. Weirdo – The Charlatans
21. So Young – Suede
22. Rid of Me – PJ Harvey

This list chronicles a more enthused excursion into soul and jazz than I’d cared to remember, but it explains how I must have got by on not adding to my hip hop collection. A couple of these tracks resurfaced on future compilations, and around the turn of the millennium I would explore the genre in much greater depth.

The inspiration in the first instance was hip hop, especially those acts who sampled jazz and funk. This was compounded by the discovery of a club night called Jelly Jazz taking place every Wednesday at the Quay Club, a small establishment overlooking the Barbican in Plymouth. My forays into nightclubbing had been generally disappointing up until this point: Ritzy, the Warehouse, house music all night long, and the spectre of violence. Jelly Jazz provided an alternative outlet and broadened my musical palate to incorporate soul, funk and Latin music. I'd go there with a few friends, wearing a Brand New Heavies T-shirt, but also a pair of Dr Martins because I had yet to discover the desert boot or old school sneaker. The crowd that gathered there were eclectic bunch, so it didn't really matter. I don't suspect drugs were particularly prevalent, although I’d have been oblivious to it regardless. There was certainly never any fighting. Some local cat used to stand around wearing flared jeans, a roll neck jumper, Chelsea boots and a leather jacket. My friends and I thought he was really cool but didn't have the confidence to plagiarise his look. We wouldn't have known where to pick up those threads anyway.

Acid Jazz was a strange phenomenon. Groups such as Corduroy and the James Taylor Quartet took their lead from the swinging sixties – E-Type Jags, Michael Caine, the Hammond organ. The Brand New Heavies and Mother Earth erred more towards the funkier, seventies end of the spectrum, with soulful vocals thrown over the top of their retro wig-outs. Corduroy and the James Taylor Quartet wore their hair short, were clean shaven, almost beatnik in appearance; The Brand New Heavies and Mother Earth were more hirsute – especially the latter – and wore beads and flares and Cuban heels. It was all very retro before retro became the thing, before the independent music scene appropriated it.

Acid Jazz was also a record label that as well as releasing records by current artists re-released material dating back to the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking the the Acid Jazz compilation Totally Wired 6 as an example, of the nine tracks that comprise it only six are contemporaneous. Interestingly, of the three that aren’t, I’ve included two on my notional compilation: Hercules by Aaron Neville and Grounded by Gloria Taylor.

Looking back, it's hard to know when and why I started listening to indie music. I know where I got the stuff – off my friend Dan, at his discretion – but what was it that piqued my interest? It certainly wasn't anything to do with ‘grunge’ – Nirvana held no sway – and the prevalent vernacular among my comrades was dance music and rave culture (although there was probably more interest in alternative music than I observed at the time).

It could have been this: Sheffield Sound City 1993: "One Week of Music Live to the Nation on Radio 1". I chanced upon it, an incidental sally into uncharted territory. I recall hearing Weirdo by the Charlatans, which was great; something by the band Kingmaker, which begged indifference; and Glam Racket by The Fall, which bewildered and intrigued in equal measure.

This was after 'baggy' and before 'Britpop'. These were the years in between when indie bands didn't tend to bother the top ten and being into this kind of music could invoke the rancour of those who weren't. Youth culture was clearly demarcated, and even a fondness for something as ostensibly benign as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers could attract negative attention. If you were into The Levellers you'd better watch out (I liked neither).

What was it that drew me in? What was it that made me buy the April edition of Select magazine without knowing anything about the band names featured on the cover, and what was it that I could have possibly got out of it other than the free Reservoir Dogs poster? Did in fact my desire for a Reservoir Dogs poster inadvertently determine the course my record collection would take over the years that followed?

STADIA: FRATTON PARK (PORTSMOUTH) AND HOME PARK (PLYMOUTH)

The Good Companion pub on Eastern Road, less than half a mile from Fratton Park, where the fans of Plymouth Argyle have gathered before the game against Portsmouth. This assemblage cannot be offered as a cross-section of Plymothian society, but they are legion: the total attendance of away fans on the day will reach 2,405 – way above average for League Two. Many of the older supporters look out-of-shape, unwell, lacking any concern for their appearance. The younger are more neatly dressed but have drank too much, some of them spilled over tables next to barely touched pints, others behaving more boisterously. The bar is at least three deep, and this is not a small bar. The staff is doing its best to chronologise service, but it cannot be guaranteed. There is queue for the men’s toilet that leads well out of its door. Approximately 90% of those present are male, all are white. There is nothing to fear; the partisan is reactive, moved to oppose only when opposed. The atmosphere is congenial, if unrefined. Pasties are being hawked in the car park.

The North–South divide is mythic, a dichotomy that supposedly hard northerners perpetuate when wishing to denigrate supposedly soft southerners. I determine so because whenever I've travelled somewhere in this respect considered 'north' – Edinburgh, Sedgefield, Leicester, Nottingham, Grantham, Cardiff, small towns and villages in Wales and Lincolnshire – I've found the manner and attitude to be comparable in tone to that found in places like Plymouth, Bristol, Exeter, Torquay, Southampton, Portsmouth, small towns and villages in Cornwall and Somerset. The implication is predictive by dint of geographical allusion: it is not a North–South divide at all but a South East–the rest of it divide.

This still doesn’t quite satisfy. Romford and Southend hint at trouble, Cambridgeshire is as bleak as hell, and I’ve heard the Medway towns are very rough also. Jonathan Meades talking to The Quietus:

I don't think the South is a paradise, that's a complete nonsense. I have a friend who grew up in Liverpool 8 above a pub, and he went to university in Southampton and he said that Liverpool will kick you but then say, ‘Sorry, whack,' but Southampton will just kick you. We're talking about places that are hard, without any doubt, especially port towns – Plymouth and Portsmouth as well. Say if you go to the Medway towns, they're very hard and rough places.

My formative years spent in Plymouth give credence. Whenever I return from London I’m reminded of the variance in mood, the dissimilar mores. The city isn’t as violent or shabby or parochial as it was, yet there’s still something inured about many of the residents. Not a more pleasing quality necessarily, but maybe more sincere.

Specks Lane around the back of the away (‘Milton’) end at Fratton Park, the sort of passageway you wouldn’t want to be caught walking along, having visited as an opposing spectator, by an active mob of Portsmouth fans coming the other way. The rear gardens of terraced houses look over it from behind breeze-blocked walls and incongruously large flat-roofed garages. Facing this are graffiti covered concrete slabs aligned vertically, like a portion of the Berlin Wall. This is by far the cared less for quarter of the ground. Signs assert “No Smoking”. Fag-butts, ubiquitously littering a weedy declination held in place by those concrete monoliths, suggest otherwise. This is what all inner-city football grounds were once like, built ad hoc, giving rise to strange wasted spaces with no access; buildings born of utility, it is the spectacle within that counts.

The view from the Milton End may be the best Fratton Park offers: the South Stand to the right, North Stand left, the Fratton End straight ahead with just four spindly stanchions required to carry the corrugated iron roof above it. If the goals go in here you won’t miss a thing. The South Stand is by far the most interesting, dating back to 1925, designed by Archibald Leitch (responsible for the Johnny Haynes Stand at Craven Cottage, Ibrox, much of Villa Park, etc.) and one of the few examples of his work that remains. The North Stand exhibits a certain charm too: its rectangular shape is compromised at one end, rather like Everton’s Goodison Road stand. (It is unclear why as behind lies simply a car park, as opposed to the residential housing that hampers at Goodison.) Both stands are double tiered but the South Stand more elegantly so. The Fratton End is an example of the sort of single-tiered structures built over the last twenty-odd years where clubs have been unable to redevelop, or move away from, their existing ground – or there just isn't the attendance to justify it. In and of themselves they’re rarely much to look at but are usually raked more steeply and their roofs cantilevered, which benefits sight-lines greatly.

Portsmouth was competing in the Premiership as recently as 2010 and had intended to build a new stadium elsewhere in the city. Following the club’s calamitous decline these plans were shelved. Vague ideas concerning the redevelopment of Fratton Park have since been proposed but such schemes are unlikely to come to fruition while Portsmouth remains playing in League Two. Yet how many other clubs’ home fans get to enter their ground via a mock Tudor façade dating back to 1898? And despite the business parks to the west (a contemporary conglomeration of hotels, supermarkets, gyms and fast-food establishments) and north (red brick industrial units and warehouses), much of the surrounding area is still residential. There are parks nearby too.

View from the Milton End. Archibald Leitch's stand is just visible to the left.

Central Park, not New York but Plymouth. See it on a map, it’s no token recreational space. There is: a library; a clinic; pitch-and-put; 5-a-side; extensive leisure and sporting facilities in the form of the Plymouth Life Centre; allotments; a cemetery; a number of playgrounds; a bowling green; a baseball field; more allotments; ample seating; Home Park – residence of Plymouth Argyle Football Club.

Central Park is 'trust land', which is how it continues to exist – only leisure related facilities may be raised upon it. Like much of Plymouth, it undulates. Home Park occupies the western apex of the park adjacent to a large open carpark that adjoins Outland Road (a component of the A386, which continues up to Dartmoor and ultimately as far as Appledore on Devon’s north coast). To the east this verdant landscape falls away, meaning the stadium’s profile appears more elevated from its eastern aspect than from any other vantage point. When observed from the higher ground of the suburb of Hartley the impression is of a stadium almost twice its actual size.

In fact Home Park is of modest proportion, always has been. In 2001, the ground underwent redevelopment. The Lyndhurst Stand and Devonport and Barn Park Ends were knocked down and a continuous all-seated U-shaped structure built in its place. This reconstruction contributed little in terms of capacity and was focussed mainly on comfort and improving viewing angles, as well as complying with legislation that applied to the leagues Plymouth was rising towards at the time. Phase 2 of Home Park’s development was to involve replacing the existing Mayflower Stand with a new multi-tiered grandstand that would have granted an all-seated capacity of 18,500. Like at Portsmouth, the project was put on hold, and the Mayflower as it was survives to this day, restricting the capacity to around 16,000.

Artists’ impressions tend to deceive, so it’s hard to say whether Home Park has missed an opportunity or benefitted from a stay of execution. Clad in corrugated aluminium, the Mayflower may be outmoded but it simultaneously remains a far more arresting structure than the Devonport/Lyndhurst/Barn Park combo presently surrounding it. It looks like another Archibald Leitch job but was in fact built some ten years after his passing, a testament to his influence in the field. With a shallower rake, the grandstand rises only a little higher than the rest of the ground but its two tears impose a much more commanding disparity. Only from the air does it appear insubstantial.

Not to say that progress should be resisted. The old Home Park was a rickety and disjointed affair. None of the roofs stretched as far as the goal-lines; the Barn Park End didn’t even have one. The Devonport End was set at a funny angle and the uncovered junction separating it from the Lyndhurst – the Spion Kop – lacked cohesion. The Lyndhurst – rectilinear, fan-trussed – afforded a little more protection, and actual seats were installed toward the end of the 1980s. (The crowd leapt out of them and jeered as Gascoigne’s reputation preceded him in a pre-season friendly against Tottenham Hotspur.)

But for all that, the general feeling was one of openness and of free movement (despite the perimeter fencing, which was deemed reasonable back then). You could look towards the Barn Park End and see Hartley rising up above the dot-matrix scoreboard (prone to malfunction) and the trees beyond. Like at Portsmouth – and at Fiorentina to a fanciful degree – there were separate sections you could move around in, with views towards the rest of the ground that were unique to where you stood. Light permeated almost throughout. There was shade if you preferred. Now, aside from your allocated seat, the only place to loiter is within the industrial interior of the stands themselves. Try to imagine what it might be like having a quick pint in your local B&Q.

Home Park pre-development. Plenty of space to move around in.

Fratton Park and Home Park feel comfortable in their surroundings. So do many modern stadia, but when you consider that those surroundings are more usually out-of-town industrial estates then maybe that’s not so much comfort. It becomes not so much a question of architecture relating to its surroundings – although it is still that – but finding surroundings worth relating it to. In the case of Portsmouth and Plymouth, if undertaken with sufficient regard, their surroundings could have a positively mitigating effect. My fear is that, when it finally comes to pass, these grounds will be subject to either the cheapest tender or the demented ego of some preening architect, determined to leave their mark where it’s not welcome.


[This article also features in The Football Pink.]

STADIA: WEMBLEY STADIUM AND THE EMIRATES, LONDON

The fad in England for fabricating stadiums from scratch is relatively new. Take the Premier League. Anfield, Goodison Park, White Hart Lane, Old Trafford, Selhurst Park, Stamford Bridge, The Hawthorns, Turfmoor, Vicarage Road and St James's Park have all evolved over time, unbeholden to any overarching scheme or long-term vision. Like Theseus's proverbial ship, they have mutated, in fits and starts, and resemble little their nascent self. (At Old Trafford they have aspired to create the illusion of architectural forethought, but those horribly disjointed corner sections fool no-one.) Conversely, the Emirates Stadium, Britannia Stadium, King Power Stadium, Kirklees Stadium, Liberty Stadium, Vitality Stadium, St. Mary’s Stadium and Falmer Stadium are all ‘new builds’. That’s a lot stadium, constructed to replace grounds that were deemed variously to be too small, too old, too awkward, too dangerous, too uncomfortable, or too ugly – and irredeemably so. Unfortunately, from an architectural perspective many of them can be found wanting. Much of them look like they have been assembled by the same firm that knocked up your local supermarket (and may well have been). They have also been divested of their original name, to be rechristened in honour of the patrons who pay money to be honoured.

It is a matter of cost and spatial constraint. The clubs that have developed their existing homes remain where they are. Those that have built new stadiums have done so out of town, or – particularly in London where out of town can manifest itself as somewhere else entirely – on derelict land, probably at greater cost. Indeed, out-of-town developments appear to be all the rage, again echoing the sort of cheap and prefabricated buildings that are more usually built on the fringes of urban conurbations – supermarkets, factories, storage facilities, head offices.

Other stadia have neither been razed to the ground nor replaced stand by stand but built upon and expanded upward and outward. This has certainly happened at Old Trafford, and it is in the process of happening at the City of Manchester Stadium (upon a stadium purpose built in the first instance but now regarded as lacking capacity). This approach has precedence elsewhere, particularly in European countries lining the Mediterranean: the San Siro in Milan; Bologna’s Stadio Renato Dall'Ara; the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille (hard to tell since they wacked a roof on it); the now demolished Estádio das Antas in Porto which was extended downward to increase capacity; Barcelona’s Camp Nou, Estadio Santiago Bernabeu in Madrid, and stadiums in Spain generally; as well as the Philips Stadion in Eindhoven, where the effect is reminiscent of that at Old Trafford.

It has been suggested that by the time Wembley Stadium had been rebuilt its design was obsolete. The conceit is that it was the last of a generation of stadia constructed in the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s that might be said to include grounds such as the Amsterdam Arena (opened in 1996), Stade de France (1998), Cardiff's Millennium Stadium (1999), Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz (2003). The supplanting of the original Wembley Stadium (and whether or not its iconic twin towers could be incorporated into any notional design) was conceived in the late 1990s, scheduled to commence in the year 2000 – ground was eventually broken in September 2002 – and completed in 2007, by which time it was one of the most expensive projects of its kind.

The economics, politics and general shambles of the whole affair aside, the new Wembley Stadium, with its iconic new arch, appeared to go down rather well. I suspect that those who applauded it didn't bother too much appraising its exterior but were pleased with the scale and uniformity of its interior, which wouldn't look out of place hosting American Football (which it does from time to time). In comparison to its predecessor, the thing is luxuriant.

And what of its exterior? It is inoffensive enough, and from the air the roof imparts a certain fragmentary appeal. The arch, which can be illuminated, seems less of a gimmick now than when it was first proposed as some sort of conciliatory exchange for those famous twin towers. Overlooking the decision to install bright red seats, it is a decent enough stadium, albeit, in an architectural sense, a very predictable one. It presents as a rotunda of glass, steel and plastic, just like any other inner-city edifice.

It was perhaps Munich’s Allianz Arena that underlined the fact that stadium presentation had moved beyond more familiar modes of urban planning. From within, the Allianz Arena doesn’t appear to break any moulds, although the seats are a pleasing shade of grey, which in itself is refreshing. From outside the stadium’s ambition is immediately apparent. Shrouded completely in Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene – a fluorine-based plastic – when illuminated the effect has been compared to that of a paper lantern, or lampshade. You get the feeling the whole structure could at any moment float upward like some benign zeppelin. Moreover, the roof can be scrolled backward in sections to let in light and aerate the interior as required. Wembley’s roof can move about a bit too, but more laterally and with a greater sense of burden.

Wembley’s lack of imagination is not confined to its sense of inertia or its garish seating. The matter is not one merely of materials, or that it could so easily be mistaken for something else. The removal of the twin towers, and the arch in its place, is forgiven. What disappoints is that the design for Wembley Stadium was so obviously derivative. It looked around at what other cities were building and elected to do blandly the same, just on a slightly larger scale.

The Emirates, home to Arsenal FC, doesn’t suffer from the same deficiencies. By embracing its financial limitations, and making a virtue of them, an idea relating to its specific purpose is embraced. Ostensibly, this ground is as conservative as Wembley: oval, the seats are red again, oscillating top tier, plenty of glass and steel. But these constituents have been arranged differently, with more thought. The almost perfectly elliptical perimeter of the building is broken up into alternating sections of glass, then concrete, glass, then concrete, etc. The fashion for cladding has been resisted, nothing is hidden, utility defines it. There are pleasing touches, such as vertical slits cut out in these concrete sections that reveal the stairwells behind them. The glass fronted portions of the building are canted and protrude slightly, overlapping over the joins with the concrete. The underside of the roof is smooth, reflective, and supported by steel trusses painted in white. Overall, the structure is not as cumbersome, more airy, and doesn’t impose so evidently upon the surrounding (and less industrial) environment. It conveys that what goes on here is something out in the open. I stare at Wembley Stadium and imagine a thousand office workers sat at their desks.


[This article also features in The Football Pink.]