LINER NOTES: HARMONY IN MY HEAD [2007-08]

1.     No Pussy Blues – Grinderman

2.     Big in Japan – Tom Waits

3.     The Decision – The Young Knives

4.     Evergreen – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

5.     What Have I Said Now? – The Wedding Present

6.     Wings – The Fall

7.     House of Cards – Radiohead

8.     The Rip – Portishead

9.     Sugar Mountain – Neil Young

10.   Brides of Jesus – Little Feat

11.   The Pink Room – Angelo Badalamenti / David Lynch

12.   Pânico – Mercenarios

13.   Give It Lose It Take It – Field Music

14.   Bennie and the Jets – Elton John

15.   Contact – Bridget Bardot

16.   Lucky Number – Lene Lovich

17.   Harmony in my Head – Buzzcocks

18.   On My Radio – The Selector

19.   Gangsters – The Specials

20.   Pull Up to the Bumper – Grace Jones

21.   Let’s Dance – David Bowie

Bonus Tracks:

22.   L.E.S. Artistes – Santigold

23.   Black Magic – Jarvis Cocker

24.   Prodigal Son – The Rolling Stones

25.   Bird of Beauty – Stevie Wonder

26.   Cracked Actor – David Bowie

27.   Wordy Rappinghood – Tom Tom Club

28.   The Hungry Saw – Tindersticks

In his book A New Time for Mexico (and many other works besides) the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes affirms that, 'Religious temperament without religious conviction has branded some of the greatest works of the twentieth century.' He offers up Luis Buñuel, Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman and Graham Greene as examples of artistes who have attempted to make sense of suffering in the absence of Christ, to comprehend that which might be deemed sacred when divested of doctrine. Theism is antediluvian – predates the profits – but our contemporary morality is consociated with scripture and, by definition, the numinous. In other words, you can’t get shot of theology all that easily.

Fuentes might also have cited Nick Cave, who is not a man of proclaimed faith but nonetheless likes to make reference to Judeo-Christian subjects in his work. But not so with Grinderman. The album Grinderman is the sound of midlife crisis conveyed with such humour that you probably shouldn’t assume that the midlife crisis in question is necessarily Cave’s – or if it is then viewed from a distance. According to Cave, the song 'No Pussy Blues' was inspired by the negative reactions his Zapata moustache received. Cookie dusters are divisive at the best of times, so the result in and of itself is no firm indicator of middle aged angst, but the fact that Nicholas grew such a thing in his late 40s/early 50s maybe is.

I hadn’t made the connection when I put this compilation together – both tracks were provided by the lad who used to beat me at snooker, so I might have expected to – but Tom Waits was also 50 years’ old when he recorded 'Big in Japan' and also appears to be railing against his advancing years. Whereas Cave just isn’t getting any, Waits can at least console himself with the fact that he’s doing business in Asia. Despite Tom’s gruff incantations that form the spine of the song, 'Big In Japan' is a far more buoyant tune than 'No Pussy Blues' but still rough enough to perpetuate a sense of anxiety.

'The Decision' by The Young Knives supervenes, a continuation of the millennial post-punk revival, which was by now on the slide; credit to them that their album Voices of Animals and Men was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Prize in the face of this. 'The Decision' contains the lines, 'I'm your monarch, your supreme monarch. That decision was mine,' which I take to be a comment on the illusory nature of monarchy: as if to say, 'I am the Queen's subject, but might I not make the same claim for myself: that actually the Queen is in fact my subject.'

Have you seen the documentary Dig!? If you haven’t, and if you like music, which you doubtlessly do if you’re reading this, then I recommend you watch it. Its subject is the trials and tribulations of bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols from the mid ‘90s through to the early 2000s. I was done with The Dandy Warhols but had heard nothing by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, so I bought the double compilation album Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective which gathers together 38 tracks spanning a period of nine years. The Brian Jonestown’ sound is various but can be categorised roughly into three parts: melodic folk rock numbers, like 'Servo', 'Prozac v Heroin', 'Nevertheless'; tripped out psychedelia of the kind you hear on 'Anemone' or 'Whoever You Are'; and, especially early on, a kind of lo-fi take on shoegaze. 'Evergreen' is from the band’s first album, Methodrone, and sounds like Slowdive jamming with Yo La Tengo. The common thread running through their work is lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Anton Newcombe, who comes across as a sort of malevolent genius who wears his heart and influences on his sleeve. However, his obsession with the 1960s is not parodic; making use of 12 string guitars, tablas and sitars does not exempt ingenuity. 'The Beatles were for sale. I give it away,' Newcombe tells us 20 minutes into Dig!. You can be cynical towards that, but it’s not the sentiment of someone interested in pastiche.

I used to listen to a taped copy of The Wedding Present's Bizarro during my second year at university. I’d got rid of all my old cassettes by now and didn’t have anything to play them on anyway. Cue Bizarro, completely remastered and repackaged with seven bonus tracks and extensive sleevenotes, on compact disc. This time around it was the tune 'What Have I said Now?' that caught my ear – specifically the moment when, after chugging along in F (with transient forays into A#, A and C), it crashes into E after the second verse.

Cologne

It took a while to compile this compilation. The reasons might be: my continued indifference to current music; a temperamental MiniDisc player and my decision to switch over to MP3; the difficulty of converting vinyl to the MP3 format; training for the Fuller's Thames Towpath Ten (mile) run; vacations to Cologne, Istanbul, Lisbon and New York; handing in my notice in July 2008; a five week sojourn in Southeast Asia and the period of unemployment that followed; apathy. I’d also taken to making ‘best of ‘ playlists of individual artists: Best of… Stereolab, Best of… Talking Heads, Best of… The Fall, and so forth. Putting together the best of The Fall was especially rewarding for I had added the records Perverted by Language and Grotesque (After the Gramme) to my collection, as well as acquiring digital copies of The Wonderful and Frightening World of…, The Frenz Experiment, Extricate, Code: Selfish and Shift-Work to supplement what I already possessed on vinyl. Such was the weight of material that I felt it necessary to divide my anthology into two parts. (The only other artist that has bid the same approach of me is David Bowie.) I took five tracks from the album Perverted by Language alone, although two of these – 'The Man Whose Head Expanded' and 'Wings' – were singles tacked on the end of the re-issued CD in the form of bonus tracks. For the sake of this compilation, I went with 'Wings', whose tempo and monotonous groove is consistent with the tunes I’ve placed before and after. In this respect, this playlist is more calculated than many of my others, which is the benefit of working with MP3. Although MiniDisc certainly provides for a cut-and-paste approach to recording, with MP3 it's almost compulsory, and so one pays more attention to the order of things. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead does a good job of following on from 'Wings' but works even better as a precursor to 'The Rip' by Portishead. (Footage of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead playing an acoustic version of 'The Rip' appeared on the internet shortly after.)

I received my copy of Decade by Neil Young at the end of 2006, so by rights 'Sugar Mountain' should have kicked off this compendium. It wouldn’t have worked. 'Sugar Mountain' is a lament for lost youth (written when Neil Young had freshly turned 21) and nearly six minutes’ long – it’s not going to get any party started.

Atheism, as it is currently understood, may one day prove to have been a passing fad, if only because its antithesis – theism – might itself lapse. Such a narrow view of things is problematic, not least because the subject is rooted firmly in semantics. The scientific and the religious – and I refer to the religious in the theological sense rather than the dogmatic, which is merely the realpolitik of organised religion – are interested in the same thing and destined to converge upon ontological grounds. Whether this terrain will be defined as Cartesian or monistic remains to be seen.

Jesus has a firm hold on our collective consciousness and his presence looms large within the realm of contemporary music, through gospel, blues, country, soul, and thus rock and roll. 'You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus, you just want to see his face,' incants Mick Jagger on 'I Just Want to See His Face', and he’s not alone: The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Manassas, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Felt, Spaceman 3, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The Verve, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Half Man Half Biscuit… The Nazarene turns up in the most unlikely places.

Not a moment too soon, I discovered Minus Zero/Stand Out Records off Portobello Road. What’s this they’re playing? 'The Factory, Lowell George’s first band – you know, the guy from Little Feat.' I didn’t. After releasing but two singles, Lowell George joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist. His tenure was short lived and after contributing to Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped my Flesh he left to form his own band, called Little Feat. Not long after clarifying this chronology, I returned to Minus Zero / Stand Out Records and purchased the Little Feat and Dixie Chicken albums, paired together as part of WEA’s slightly weird ‘2 Originals’ series, which repackaged two albums by the same artist in a gatefold format. The music is reminiscent of that I heard playing in the Eiffel Bar in Copenhagen more than a year earlier, although persons I’ve played it too have tentatively asked if it might be the Rolling Stones – songs like 'Strawberry Flats' can give that impression.

The title and the lyrics to 'The Brides of Jesus' suggest the Parable of the Ten Virgins [Gospel of Matthew 25:1-13], yet the reference in the final line to ‘entertaining angels unawares’ is attributable to Hebrews [13:2]. It could be that Lowell is playing one proverb off against the other, saying that the ‘five foolish virgins’ who did not bring surplus oil for their lamps, and were denied entrance to the ‘wedding’ as punishment for being ill-prepared, should have been treated better, for they may have been actual angels. Lowell Gorge died of a heart attack in 1979, and I can find no evidence that he ever expatiated upon the song’s subject.

'The Pink Room' is from the soundtrack to the David Lynch film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. According to the credits, this swampy, instrumental dirge was written by Lynch himself, rather than Angelo Badalamenti who composed the film’s score. I once listened to 'The Pink Room' in a static caravan on a campsite in the New Forest, with The Wilkinsons, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, surrounded by conifers and pines.

The Sexual Life of the Savages is a compilation of São Paulo post-punk that I requisitioned from my Cornish friend. I must have kept hold of it for a while because it made more of an impact on the anthology I put together over 2009/2010. In the meantime, I recorded 'Pânico' by Mercenárias, which sounds a bit like very early The Fall fronted by The Slits, only sung in Portuguese. I wouldn’t ordinarily have followed on from something like this with anything by Field Music, but 'Give It Lose It Take It' is one of their livelier numbers. 

New Forest

Like a lot of people, I’m not too bothered with New Year’s Eve. Ideally, I’d attend someone’s house party, preferably not mine, but for three years running I spent New Year’s Eve at the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was all down to the girl who used to live with my partner on the Isle of Dogs who’d met the proprietors on a beach in Southeast Asia, kept in touch, and extended a repeated invitation to see in New Year’s at their fashionable establishment. In 2004, rolling into 2005, there had been enough room to spray a celebratory bottle of champagne around without getting in anyone's way. By the time 2007 was imminent, there was barely enough room to raise a glass (I decamped to Lisbon with guy who liked ‘The Stars of Track and Field’ and our partners to see in 2008). I don’t remember much else about that night but I do remember enjoying Elton John’s 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' playing on the jukebox. (Fortunately, it was a Sunday). Mr Wilkinson advised I buy the 1974 album Greatest Hits, which I subsequently did. Rather than go through the laborious process of recording 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' from vinyl onto our laptop, in real time, I later picked up a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on CD from a charity shop for a couple of quid, introducing me to the delights of 'Bennie and the Jets' in the process. 'Bennie and the Jets' is a strange song in that it’s made to sound like it was recorded live, which makes me wonder whether it sounds much different when it is played live.

I wandered into Beyond Retro in Soho and found something I hadn’t bargained for: not an item of clothing but a sound. A lot of people would have asked what was playing, but I’m not one for talking to people unnecessarily so instead memorised key components of the song and looked them up on the internet when I got home. I didn’t have much to go on: it was sung in French, sounded like it was more than likely recorded in the 1960s, and exhibited a one-word chorus that exclaimed ‘Contact!’. It was French chanteuse Brigitte Bardot, with a little help from Serge Gainsbourg, and I downloaded it from iTunes.

If not French psychedelic pop then what had I expected to find in Beyond Retro? Not sure but it won’t have been jeans, because fashion had finally caught up with itself. That is to say that the slimmer profile appropriated by purveyors of the post-punk and garage rock revival had begun to permeate the mainstream. Enter the Levi’s 504/514, a comparatively slim-fitting jean with a tapered leg offering a welcome alternative to the bootcut 507/517/527. The 504 would probably be considered fairly loose by today’s standards but in the mid-to-late 2000s was about as skinny as you could get. In 2007 I purchased a light blue pair of Levi 504s, which my partner ridiculed, and then a darker pair. In 2008, we flew to New York City and I picked up a black pair of corduroy 514s for a little more than $20, on sale in Urban Outfitters, which worked out at around £12. The 514s were slightly less tapered than the 504s and I had them altered to match.

Slimmer fitting knitwear was also now easier to come by. I’d been merrily buying my jumpers from Marks and Spencer since 2005 – specifically their Collezione range – and I was fine with that, but now I could find things in any high street store I’d be comfortable wearing: Fred Perry, Farah, Uniqlo, even Gap. Peacoats were all the rage too, whereas a few years earlier I’d been sifting through army surplus stock to find them. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Men’s mainstream fashion may finally have been shedding the boyish, post-Britpop baggy-isms that had preoccupied it for the last ten years but in its place was something almost schizophrenic. Whereas American groups such as Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Kings of Leon, were moving towards a leaner, more rugged sort of look, British groups like Hot Chip, Mystery Jets and Klaxons dressed like an explosion in American Apparel – tight jeans and baggy T-shirts in dayglo colours, with crazy hair. Ultimately, the boots, brogues and beards of our American cousins would win the war, but there was a very confused period in between where some of the worst offences of the 1980s threatened to take hold.

I got wind of 'Lucky Number' by Lene Lovich somehow – in another shop maybe. It was the brevity of the chorus that caught my ear: four dissonant chords sung in rapid succession and the ostinato that comes after. I found a copy of Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks on CD for £3 – the same album the chap who got me into Sarah Records had lent to me back in 1994/95 – and so reacquainted myself with that. The guy who used to own a pager was now playing guitar in a ska/two-tone covers band. Among other things, they’d make a good go of 'On My Radio' by The Selector and 'Gangsters' by The Specials, and I was encouraged to download them (from iTunes). These four songs were all released in the year 1979.

NYC

The laptop I was working from was not my own: it was my partner's and a mere repository for my music which I would then transfer across to my newly acquired MP3 player. The problem with interfacing directly with a mobile device is that you have direct access to everything stored upon it. You don’t even need to make playlists: just ‘play all’ or select ‘shuffle’ and let the hits keep on coming. The shuffle function is particularly pernicious. You find yourself continuously skipping tracks until something shows up worthy of your immediate attention. Furthermore, there’s nothing random about the algorithm that drives the shuffle function. Certain groups will make remarkably frequent appearances, whereas others will be conspicuous by way of their absence.

So I stopped using the shuffle function and set about putting together a compilation. I’d have normally done this with a certain amount of pre-planning, but found it simpler to make it up as I went along: Add to > playlist, notionally entitled ‘2007’, to be renamed at a later date when I felt suitably inspired. I listened to my incomplete playlist as I was compiling it, changing the running order here and there and re-transferring it across to my MP3 player as and when I added new songs. The problem was this mutable approach did not foment the urgency required to finish it. By the time 'Pull up to the Bumper' by Grace Jones and 'Let’s Dance' by David Bowie had been appended to the running order, I’d reached what would under usual circumstances have been my limit – the 80 minutes of time available on a MiniDisc. I had no problem adding to this duration, but where would I draw the line? At what stage would I stop subsuming music gathered in 2008 to a compilation intended to reflect 2007?

As it was, I felt the playlist worked well, so I decided to defer the tracks I had left over until the year after. It was not to be. The recording of vinyl continued to be an issue: the stupid device I had bought necessitated I record in real time and use software to isolate the individual tracks that then had to be saved as individual files of questionable quality. iTunes wasn’t as comprehensive as I’d been led to believe either, so I couldn’t source as much material as I would have liked. It’s conceivable that the reason why I included 'Pull Up to the Bumper' and 'Let’s Dance' is a direct result of this – as filler.

I have identified a number of tracks that might have originally featured on Harmony in my Head in less troubled circumstances, or could have gone towards a playlist for 2008.

American singer Santigold's second single 'L.E.S. Artistes' had been getting airplay, culminating in an appearance on Jools Holland. Her album, Santogold, was voted 2008's 7th best by the NME, while Rolling Stone deemed 'L.E.S. Artistes' to be the second best single. (MGMT and Beyonce topped the magazines' respective polls.)

'Black Magic' is off of Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis, which I have on vinyl. I don’t regret having it on vinyl because it’s got good artwork, and back then CDs were not much cheaper than their shellac siblings, so why not?

'Prodigal Son' is taken from Beggars Banquet, the record that kicked off the Rolling Stones’ golden age. The guy who used to own a pager first introduced me to it when he brought it to Exmoor with us in 2003, but it had been overshadowed by Their Satanic Majesties Request. This seems odd because I’m now of the opinion that Beggars Banquet is second only to Exile on Main Street in the Rolling Stones’ canon.

In 2008 I bought, in fairly quick succession, the Stevie Wonder albums Music of My Mind and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and was more satisfied with the latter. I recall being enamoured with 'Boogie On Reggae Woman', but nowadays I err towards 'Bird of Beauty'.

In September 2007, I went to see a David Bowie tribute band, at the Grey Horse in Kingston, called The Thin White Duke. The keyboard player resembled the actor Ian Smith, who played Harold Bishop in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, but they were actually quite good and their rendition of 'Cracked Actor' motivated me to add Aladdin Sane to my collection (which I think is a better album than Ziggy Stardust, and maybe Bowie’s fourth best after Station to Station, Low and Heroes).

Back in April 2007, I picked up a vinyl copy of Tom Tom Club by Tom Tom Club on a visit down to Plymouth (from Really Good Records?). It’s a cool record to have and a very good album to put on if you have people around socially. The Tindersticks tune was another offering from the lad who used to beat me at snooker.

There were other purchases, most notably records by Black Sheep, Main Source and Public Enemy. Maybe that’s why I never got around to creating a separate playlist for 2008: not because I was unemployed, spent five weeks in Asia or couldn't be bothered, but as a result of rediscovering a taste for the music I listed to in my youth after wandering into a bar in Cologne playing old-school hip hop.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: SOMETIMES A PONY GETS DEPRESSED [2006]

1. These are the Ghosts – The Bees
2. Stagger Lee – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
3. You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds
4.     It’s All in My Mind – Teenage Fanclub
5. What Goes On – The Velvet Underground
6. Her Name is Melody – Adrian Pride
7. Come See About Me – The Supremes
8. Animal Farm – The Kinks
9. I Can’t Be Me – Eddie Hinton
10. Guilty – Barbra Streisand
11. Enough Said – Devo
12. Red Sails – David Bowie
13. Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed – Silver Jews
14. The Lower the Sun – Tom Vek
15. Outlines – Clor
16. When You Get Home – The Research
17. Andy’s Chest – Lou Reed
18. Time Will Show the Wiser – Fairport Convention
19. Baby Please Don’t Go – The Amboy Dukes
20. Sway – The Rolling Stones
21. The Partisan – Leonard Cohen

'These are the Ghosts' introduces the album Free the Bees, and so it does Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed, a ploy that will be recognisable to anyone familiar with my compilations. You can take it from this that I acquired Free the Bees in 2005, not 2006. This does not always follow but applies in this instance; in 2005 the song narrowly missed the cut.

The way The Bees presented themselves disappointed me. As a band, they were more overtly influenced by the 1960s than many of their contemporaries, wrote better tunes than many of their contemporaries. There was an opportunity begging. Instead they elected to collectively dress like Badly Drawn Boy, as a bevy of hard-drinking skaters. Not important, just a shame, and it didn’t stop me from playing Free the Bees relentlessly for a period of time.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and her husband. It’s a bit in late in the day to be coining new nicknames but her husband probably deserves a sobriquet of his own. After all, he did introduce me to Boozoo Bajou’s 'Night Over Manaus', which appears on 2000’s compilation The Ladies of Varades, as well as 'Happiness' by Teenage Fanclub, which I included on the following year’s The Boys of Summer, and he came on both the associated holidays – at which he would mysteriously disappear and then re-appear, earning him the epithet ‘Teleport Man’.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and Teleport Man. Teleport Man has been shouted at for taking photographs in Freetown Christiania by one of its free-spirited natives. It is February, so fairly cold, and we’ve been out for much of the day. Everything points towards stopping somewhere for a drink. The Eiffel Bar is nearby, a locals’ sort of place, dank but possessing character. There’s country rock playing in the background but my attempt to extract from the landlord the artist responsible leads nowhere.

Two days later and it’s just me and my partner. We would like a cup of coffee and find a café on Larsbjørnsstræde. Music is playing. I'm fairly sure it's Nick Cave but I don't know which record - something about a guy called Stagger Lee. The proprietor speaks English. It is Nick Cave (with the Bad Seeds) and the album playing is called Murder Ballads.

It’s March. We’ve hired a cottage near Abergwesyn in Wales to belatedly celebrate the 30th birthday of the friend who dropped in Debenhams. It snowed on the drive in and it’s more than a foot deep in places. The lad who once lent me The Sound of the Suburbs (the same who would beat me at snooker) is here. Turns out he’s a big fan of Murder Ballads. He takes me to his car so we can listen to 'Stagger Lee' on his new car-stereo, at volume, late at night in the privacy afforded by Abergwesyn Valley.

It was the 1994 record Let Love In that first aroused my interest in Nick Cave but it was Murder Ballads that stepped it up. It’s literally an album of ballads concerning murder, and it betrays a humour in Cave’s work that had until now escaped me.

Wales

Having enjoyed the first two Flying Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe – I got around to buying Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I covered a bit of the back-story in my liner notes to Aka ‘Devil in Disguise’. I wrote thusly: '1968 was a period of transition for The Byrds. Having removed David Crosby from the fold, they were struggling to perform The Notorious Byrd Brothers in a live setting to a satisfactory standard. Enter Gram Parsons, initially on keys and then guitar. Gram had already cultivated a country-rock sound with his group The International Submarine Band, so it was a willing combination. By August, The Byrds had recorded and released their next album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, regarded by some as the first pure country-rock record.' I also remarked that Sweetheart of the Rodeo consists mostly of covers. 'You Don’t Miss Your Water' was a soul record released on Stax, written and recorded by William Bell. It also appeared as the final track on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, so it has good pedigree and the Byrds do a fine job on it.

I’m fairly sure it was me who used to play Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub back in the day, but my Cornish friend seems to have taken over the mantle. After enjoying Four Thousand Seven Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds - A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub in 2003, in 2005 he bought their new album, Man-Made, and in 2006 he let me borrow it. I normally prefer Raymond McGinley’s songs but 'It’s All in My Mind' is one of Norman Blake’s.

Back in Copenhagen, looking for somewhere to eat. It’s one of those evenings where you’re unsure of your appetite. After a few beers, proceeded by too much walking, we decide to take a chance on a place called Bang & Jensen. The gamble pays off: the food is good, the interior décor pleasing to the eye, the prices reasonable for a city with Copenhagen’s reputation, and they’re playing The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed. I know this because the CD case is propped up in front of the CD player. I am unfamiliar with tracks 9 and 10 – 'What Goes On' and 'Beginning to See the Light' – but they strike me as very much worth having. Within four days of my return to London, I will have bought both Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground.

My regard for the 1960s, and for psychedelic garage rock in particular, had persisted. I procured Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 prior to buying My Mind Goes High: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, but it’s the latter that makes the first appearance on this playlist in the form of Adrian Pride. 'Her Name is Melody' alone justifies the purchase: a psychedelic raga with an exquisite vocal, it deserves to be more well known.

I’d probably watched Catholic Boys again, because I’d resolved to include 'Come See About Me' by The Supremes on my next compilation. I was able to do so after finding 20 Golden Greats, credited to Diana Ross & The Supremes, among the detritus of my parents’ record collection. 'Come See About Me' originally appeared on The Supremes’ LP Where Did Our Love Go, released 1964. Catholic Boys (aka Heaven Help Us) is set in Brooklyn, circa 1965. 'Come See About Me' serves as the backdrop to a scene where Mary Stuart Masterson’s soda shop is raided by the ‘brothers’ who teach across the road at St. Basils. Andrew McCarthy hangs back to help her clean up the mess, and romance ensues.

If I’d converted to MiniDisc a few years earlier than I eventually did, it’s possible that 'Death of a Clown' by the Kinks would have ended up on one of my compendiums. A borrowed greatest hits collection was knocking around our flat in Brentford for a while, but, as is typical of so many self-serving anthologies, it lacked the necessary context to sustain my interest. By the time I’d got back into the habit of making annual compilations the opportunity had passed. It took an advert for digital imaging products for me to think about the Kinks, featuring the song 'Picture Book'. I’d neither heard it nor heard of it, but the album it heralded from was available from my local high-street record store for a mere six pounds. Most Kinks’ greatest hit compendiums completely sidestep The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society – unless you count 'Days', which never appeared on the original record but gets tacked on whenever the album’s reissued – but I can identify at least five tunes from it that are up there among the group’s best. When it came to selecting material for my annual playlist, I found it almost impossible to choose between two of them: 'Animal Farm' and 'Starstruck'. Consider these interchangeable.

No Eyes and Teleport Man were living in Brighton and Hove. In 2005 my lady friend and I visited four times. I don’t know on which stay it was, but I identified a tune on a compilation they owned called Country Got Soul Volume Two as worth having: 'I Can’t be Me' by Eddie Hinton. Primarily a session musician, Eddie Hinton played on the records of Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, but could also sing a bit himself (deliberate understatement). Muscle Shoals progenitor Jerry Wexler described Hinton as, 'a white boy who truly sang and played in the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated.'

I’d all but exhausted my parents’ record collection by this point. I made a final pass anyway and annexed their copy of 'Guilty' by Barbra Streisand, featuring Barry Gibb. I don’t buy into the concept of guilty pleasure (no pun intended) but this is the sort of thing people are alluding to when they make a claim for it. There’s nothing to be remotely embarrassed about. Even if there was, why not just concede to having philistine taste and be done with it? But 'Guilty' is not that. It is a flawless pop song, as good as anything contrived by the genre’s archetypes: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones. Time signatures are constantly changing, from 5/4 to 4/4 and back to 5/4 during the verse, and alternating between 3/4 and 4/4 in the midst of the chorus. There are some ingenious chord changes too. My favourite is the shift from Dm to Ebmaj7 and the way Barry Gibb vocally segues into it:

Dm        Am         Dm

You got a reason for livin'

Ebmaj7

You bat-tle on_with the love you're building on.

There’s nothing wilful about these unexpected deviations – the song’s mode is strophic: introduction, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental breakout, verse, bridge, chorus, refrain, fade – and each deflection serves to move the song towards its resolution (there aren’t the episodic digressions of, say, 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys). But it’s hard to call. Almost every line leads where you’d least expect it to, an exercise in suspense, patient with itself.

Secondhand vinyl can be surprisingly inexpensive. Rare pressings in mint condition, of the sort secondhand dealerships like to hang on their walls, might set you back a bit, but for anything else I wouldn’t expect to pay more than a cockle. Most of my David Bowie records cost around this, their popularity at the time of their release ensuring that supply continues to exceed demand. I think I paid the same for New Traditionalists by Devo, whereas Duty Now for the Future cost me a paltry £3. New Traditionalists is the better album and very underrated. 'Through Being Cool', 'Soft Things', 'The Super Thing', 'Beautiful World', 'Enough Said'… there’s barely a bad song on there.

David Bowie had championed Devo in their earlier years, to the extent that he co-produced their first album alongside Brian Eno (although by all accounts it wasn’t the most satisfying of partnerships). Might it have been this that directed me back towards David Bowie? More likely it was my trip to Berlin in October 2004, although before completing Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ with Lodger I first bought Station to Station, the album he recorded in Los Angeles before absconding to Europe. Station to Station is clearly the better album but its songs possess an epic quality that would have felt out of place on this compilation. That being said, Lodger could be Bowie’s most underrated work. To complement the nature of the previous track – Devo’s 'Enough Said' – I wanted to follow up with something urgent and was torn between 'Red Sails' and 'Look Back in Anger'. Bowie’s slightly more tempered vocal on 'Red Sails' swung it.

I purchased the LP Tanglewood Numbers by Silver Jews almost on the strength of its front cover. That’s not quite true. I knew a little about them – the fact that it was David Berman’s band but that Stephen Malkmus and Robert Nastanovich of Pavement often lent their services. Apart from providing my compilation with its title, I take great pleasure from the lyrics to 'Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed'.

My Cornish friend had already introduced me to Tom Vek the previous summer, and by the end of the year I owned a vinyl pressing of We Have Sound. This album hinted at a change in the musical landscape, relief from the dross that had pervaded throughout 2005: Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads, Bambyshambles – the fag-end of the garage rock revival. A new sound was emerging that incorporated synthesisers and would come to be known roughly as electro-pop. Whether Tom Vek fell exclusively within this genre is moot: he was making an interesting noise that incorporated abrasive guitars, keyboards, and drawled vocals, recorded in his parents’ garage.

Clor’s record was cut from if not the same cloth as Tom Vek’s then certainly a fabric exhibiting similar properties, perhaps of a more melodic denier. I first encountered them on MTV around the house of The Wilkinsons in Acton, and we then went to see them supporting Stephen Malkmus at the Koko in Camden. Clor split up not long after, which was a great shame.

The Research released their debut, Breaking Up, in early 2006, managed a second album in late 2008 and then went the same way as Clor. Their electro-pop was looser and more shambolic than Tom Vek’s or Clor’s. Lead singer Russell 'The Disaster' Searle would hammer away at a keyboard while bassist Georgia Lashbrook churned out Wedding Present-esque grooves. My Cornish friend took me to see them play at Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush for my 31st birthday, so I guess I was engaging with the contemporary music scene to some degree.

Come April I was abroad again, this time in Budapest. On our last day there, killing time before the flight home, my lady friend and I went for coffee in a cafe called Katapult Kavazo. What should be playing but Transformer by Lou Reed. I've never really liked the song 'Walk on the Wild Side', and can’t abide 'Perfect Day', so it was never an album I'd ever bothered with. But I hadn’t ever heard 'Vicious' or 'Andy’s Chest' or 'Hangin’ Around' or 'I’m So Free', so it was well worth a fiver to add the CD to my burgeoning collection.

I have no idea what inspired me to buy the first Fairport Convention album. If I was expecting something along the lines of The Wicker Man soundtrack then I was to be disappointed; folk rock, as I have touched on before, is very different to country rock. At the time Fairport Convention’s debut was written, however, folk-rock was more ‘rock’ than it was ‘folk’, taking its lead from Bob Dylan, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane, as 'Time Will Show the Wiser' amply demonstrates.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 was released in 1972 and has been reissued on numerous occasions since. This assemblage of music has been offered up as the antecedent of punk (although, as I’ve already discussed, it was jazz that instituted the manner by which punk was recorded). Dubious proto-punk credentials aside, it’s the perfect place to start for anybody interested in exploring the genre. The Amboy Dukes’ cover of 'Baby, Please Don’t Go' is a marked highlight, and at over double the length far better value than Them’s version.

What made me hark back to Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones and include 'Sway' on my 2005 compilation? I couldn’t say, but 'Sway' is assuredly one of my favourite Stones’ tunes, so there’s no harm in it being here. It might also be Mick Taylor's finest moment as a Rolling Stone, and he deserves the credit for it.

Budapest

In the summer of 2005, the Former Cohabitant from Brighton was house-sitting for his parents and invited me and the friend who foundered in Debenhams to pay him a visit. I came early, and we made arrangements to hook up with our Cornish friend later that evening for a spirited pub crawl around Brighton’s Lanes. Back at the house, the former cohabitant had a few things he wanted to show me (footage from our trip to the States; works in progress), and while doing so played whatever had been last listened to on the CD player.

Once when my mother heard me listening to them, she proffered that the Tindersticks sounded like Leonard Cohen. They don’t, but at some point Leonard started singing in a tone vaguely approximating that of Stuart Staples (during the 1980s, on Various Positions?). What I was hearing now did not sound remotely like the voice of Stuart Staples. It was the song 'Who by Fire', taken from Cohen’s fourth album, 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony. I read somewhere that Ian McCulloch thought that Greatest Hits was Cohen’s best record, so I took him at his word and bought a copy from a second-hand record store, I don’t recall which.

On the inner sleeve there are liner notes recounting the back story to every song. For example, of 'Famous Blue Raincoat' Leonard Cohen has this to say:

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.

Taking an opportunity to invite the chap who got me into Sarah Records back to my flat, I played the record and directed his attention to this specific annotation. He understood instinctively. 'The Partisan' is a cover of an homage to the French Resistance in World War II, written by the French journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: AKA DEVIL IN DISGUISE [2005]

1.  That’s the Way It’s Got to Be – The Poets
2.  Entry of the Gladiators – Nero & the Gladiators
3.  Pretty Ballerina – The Left Banke
4.  Song for Jeffrey – Jethro Tull
5.  Christine’s Tune (aka Devil in Disguise) – The Flying Burrito Brothers
6.  Rhyme the Rhyme Well – Beastie Boys
7.  Outdoor Miner [album version] – Wire
8.  Sunny Sunny Cold Cold Day – Herman Dune
9.  Warning Sign – Talking Heads
10.  Insight – Joy Division
11.  (Intro/Tokyo) City Girl – Kevin Shields
12.  Cruiser’s Creek [Peel Session] – The Fall
13.  Record Collection – Comet Gain
14.  Come Back Jonee – Devo
15.  King of the Rodeo – Kings of Leon
16.  Mod Lang – Big Star
17.  Road to Nowhere – Hearts and Flowers
18.  Angel – Rod Stewart
19.  Tell Me Why – Neil Young
20.  It Kills – Stephen Malkmus
21.  Mental Poisoning – Weird War
22.  Silly Girl – Television Personalities

Record stores come and go. Growing up in Plymouth, I used to shop at HMV and Our Price on New George Street, Rival Records on Royal Parade, and Virgin Megastore on the corner of Cornwall Street and Armada Way. I say ‘shop’ but I’d mostly go just to look, often on my way home from school after taking an unnecessary detour via the city centre, thus postponing the laborious task of tackling the homework set that day. Later, once I found a use for secondhand material, I’d frequent Purple Haze at Drake Circus, the Music and Video Exchange in the Pannier Market, Different Class on Frankfurt Gate (not so much), and Really Good Records back when it occupied one of a row of Victorian tenements next to Plymouth Library.

The only one of these businesses still doing business is Really Good Records. After occupying a plot in the now defunct Bretonside Bus Station, it can now be found on Exeter Street just above. A guy called Mike runs the place and he won’t open up before 10:30 – or at all if it’s a Monday. He is very persuasive. If money was tight I’d think twice about paying a visit knowing that I might leave with more than I literally bargained for. In 2005, I dropped by to look for a specific Jethro Tull album and left with two (This Was and Aqualung), as well as a psychedelic/garage rock compilation entitled Illusions from the Crackling Void, and only narrowly avoided adding something by The Seeds to my collection. When I returned some months later for Devo’s first album I also came away with Real Life by Magazine.

This sort of thing could happen on any one of my tri-annual sojourns to Plymouth to see family and catch up with friends. These apportioned visitations would reveal sudden physical changes to my hometown’s landscape, often to my dismay, occasionally my pleasure. Some were more substantial than others. When the council finally gave permission for the old Drake Circus to be redeveloped it came down very quickly, as most buildings do once the wrecking ball moves in, radically changing the terrain in and around. The planning process had been so drawn out that by the time the new Drake Circus Shopping Centre opened in 2006, it was immediately considered démodé. Not that I imagine the shopping obsessed hordes particularly cared; only those of us who remembered fondly Arcadia, Olympus Sport, Purple Haze or The Unity were in any way bothered by it.

Illusions from the Crackling Void turned out to be quite the coup. It is a collection of late 1960s psychedelic rock released on the Bam-Caruso imprint, the same people who put together the Rubble anthology comprising the same sort of thing, which was in turn inspired by the Nuggets series begun by Elektra and continued by Rhino Records. Most of it is fairly obscure, although The Poets, who were from Scotland, were probably one of the better known groups of the freakbeat scene, which was really just a British term for psychedelia with a mod-ish slant.

'What the hell is this?' quoth my lady friend; 'It sounds like clowns on acid!' The song, written by Czech composer Julius Fučík, had indeed found fame as a circus march, but why the allusion to hallucinogens? Nero & the Gladiators belong to that tame strain of instrumental rock & roll that was popular for a time in the early 1960s, as exemplified by groups like The Shadows, The Tornados, The Ventures. The source in this case was a long player entitled Decade of Instrumentals: 1959~1967, which was one of a number of the records the former cohabitant from Brighton brought over for me to listen to when I was living at 27 Hanworth Road. A man who moved house often, his records had since become an encumbrance and so he decided to pass them on to me. 'Entry of the Gladiators' starts with applause, then the spoken words, 'Hey, say there Brutus man, like, here come the gladiators,' before a woozy, reverb-drenched guitar kicks off the tune’s chromatic scale, making sense of my female companion’s startled appraisal. In retrospect, I’m surprised it never made it onto The Heroes of Hanworth.

Baroque pop is pop/rock that utilises traditional classical instruments, such as strings or harpsichords, and may employ musical strategies more usually associated with classical music. The Beatles were arguably the genre’s most accomplished exponents – 'In my Life', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Fixing a Hole', etc. (it seems to be more McCartney’s thing) – but the Stones contributed too, probably at Brian Jones’s behest – 'Play with Fire', 'Lady Jane', 'She’s a Rainbow'. It wasn’t by any means a British phenomenon. Love dabbled, and The Beach Boys too, but it was perhaps New York band The Left Banke who came the closest to being defined as an actual baroque musical act. 'Pretty Ballerina' is the last track on Illusions from the Crackling Void. In the 1967 television documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, Leonard Bernstein cheerfully observed that it incorporated, 'a combination of the Lydian and Mixolydian modes,' although did then go on to urge us to, 'never forget that this music [as in popular music] employs a highly limited musical vocabulary.' But he was right to single out 'Pretty Ballerina', even if I don’t understand his reasoning.

I purchased the Jethro Tull album This Was specifically for 'Song for Jeffrey' after seeing it performed on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (which funnily enough opens to the sound of 'Entry of the Gladiators'). As I have said, I was also cajoled into buying Aqualung, but This Was is a nicer object. The cover depicts Jethro Tull dressed up as old men surrounded by dogs, as if in a forest or wood. On the reverse the band as they are, laughing, not in colour as on the front but in a monochrome, yellowish green with their name and the album title writ large in red. It’s gatefold and so on the inside we get a picture of the group playing live on stage. The outer sleeve has a pleasing lustre. (Aqualung is drab by comparison, but it's probably the better record.)

1968 was transitional phase for The Byrds. Having removed David Crosby from the fold, they were struggling to perform The Notorious Byrd Brothers in a live setting to a satisfactory standard. Enter Gram Parsons, initially on keys and then guitar. Gram had already cultivated a country-rock sound with his group The International Submarine Band, so it was a willing combination. By August, The Byrds had recorded and released their next album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, regarded by some to be the first pure country-rock record. I bypassed this album – for now – and went straight for The Flying Burrito Brothers, the band Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman formed shortly after the release of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Whereas The Byrds had become Roger McGuinn’s band, The Flying Burrito Brothers was certainly Gram’s. I can only assume Chris Hillman enjoyed playing a supporting role, which is not to undermine his contribution or even how his contribution was perceived: just as Hillman is given credit commensurate with McGuinn on The Notorious Byrd Brothers, so he is with Parsons on The Gilded Palace of Sin (Sweetheart of the Rodeo consists mostly of covers). Band politics aside, the movement of staff doesn’t impact much on the music. Both Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Gilded Palace of Sin are sincere exercises in fusing rock and roll with country and western, demonstrating a complete disregard for the psychedelia or R & B that was more fashionable at the time. One wonders why 'Christine's Tune' wasn’t released as a single like 'Marrakesh Express' was, which featured David Crosby on harmony vocals.

It had been six years since the release of the Beastie Boys’ last album, Hello Nasty, and I hadn’t listened to much hip hop in the intervening period. My youngest brother burned me a copy of To the 5 Boroughs, with some Jurassic 5 tacked on the end of it, which I took back to London, along with all the stuff I’d purchased from Really Good Records. The album is more minimal than Hello Nasty, and 'Rhyme the Rhyme Well' is a good example of this. Save for the sampling of Chuck D’s opening salvo on 'Public Enemy No. 1', the track is built around nothing much more than a strong thumping beat and a weird descending keyboard effect. Country rock and hip hop aren’t the most complimentary of styles but the pared down sound of 'Rhyme the Rhyme Well' allows it to follow on from 'Christine's Tune' without too much bother.

To supplement my modest income I’d been attending focus groups on a fairly regular basis. They typically paid in the region of £50 for a couple hours of your time, give or take, and there might also be free food and drink. Since the last June, I’d offered my thoughts on Anadin paracetamol, Burger King, Twix, Foster’s lager, Threshers off-license, Right Guard, the BBC website, iced tea, Budweiser, and cigars. I didn’t even smoke cigars.

The day after expatiating on the subject of cigars, for which I was awarded £60, I was back in London to see Herman Dune at the 100 Club with the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records. This means that he would have already made me the compilation that included Herman Dune’s 'Sunny Sunny Cold Cold Day' as well as 'Outdoor Miner' by Wire (the album version). Wire had the same look that a lot of those early British post-punk bands had: Gang of Four, Magazine, Joy Division, and Siouxsie and the Banshees to an extent. It’s a very simple, understated look made up of plain shirts, suit jackets, sensible shoes and slacks in muted colours. I’ve often wondered where it derived from. Was this a deliberate attempt to eschew the showier visage of early punk: the torn fabric, piercings and sculpted hair of bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned? Or was it a nod to the drab functionalism of Dr Feelgood and the pub rock scene? Television, Blondie and Talking Heads manifested it too – all of them American – so maybe not. That aside, 'Outdoor Miner' by Wire doesn’t sound much like Wire – they’re not normally so melodic – but how is this for an opening stanza:

No blind spots in the leopard's eyes,

Can only help to jeopardize,

The lives of lambs, the shepherd cries.

Talking Heads: I’d owned the live album Stop Making Sense since my first year at university (on tape). In 1998, I bought True Stories on a hungover Sunday morning with the guy who used to own many indie tapes, who by now owned as many CDs. The intent was always there to explore the group’s back catalogue in more detail, but the Stones, David Bowie, The Byrds, Led Zeppelin, jazz, funk and ska must have got in the way.

I purchased More Songs About Buildings and Food on a whim in 2005 after finding it in the ‘£5 or less section’ of HMV in Hounslow. The front cover intrigued me – a group portrait made up of 529 individual Polaroids. Its date – 1978: the same year of Plastic Letters by Blondie and Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! by Devo – inferred the album might exhibit the sort of new wave qualities that appealed to me: intelligible vocals, keyboards, rhythmic guitars. On playing the CD this was found to be true. I was taken aback by how good it was and how so few of the songs had been released as singles (just one: 'Take Me to the River', a cover of an old Al Green song). I liked the record so much that I quickly surmised it might be one of my favourites.

'Warning Sign' is a very highly strung tune. It starts with Chris Frantz knocking out a few bars on drums, Tania Weymouth then embarks on a wandering groove, David Byrne’s guitar gradually chimes in before Jerry Harrison on second guitar. After 1 minute and 7 seconds of this, the whole thing shifts: Byrne mutates his instrument into a discordant siren and starts ranting on about how he’s got money now and that we should look at his hair because he likes its design. It could be a comment on how wealth corrupts the individual, but I can’t be sure.

What Brian Eno brings to More Songs About Buildings and Food is comparable to that which Martin Hannett lends to Unknown Pleasures. Both producers subject their musical constituents to echo and delay, with a particular emphasis on drum and bass, to create a sort of industrial sonority. However, the prevailing mood on Joy Division’s record is very different. Insight: a distant drone, a faint whir and the sound of a door being opened and shut – a prison cell is implied. Cymbals and guitars gradually fade in, then Peter Hook’s bass in a register diametrically opposite to Tina Weymouth’s. The variance between the respective vocals is even more pronounced. Where David Byrne offers abstruse verbalism, Ian Curtis’s tone seems to be one of resignation. His inflection is more nuanced than he’s given credit for, and nowhere is this more true than on 'Insight', his bass-baritone sounding at moments almost fragile.

I used to watch more movies in those pre-internet days, such as Lost in Translation. If I had been connected to the internet then I would have downloaded 'City Girl', but I had to buy the film’s soundtrack, and did so for this song alone. When it came to including it on Aka ‘Devil in Disguise’ I was unable to physically dissociate it from 'Intro/Tokyo', a segment of ambient sound that wouldn’t feel out of place on the second side of David Bowie's “Heroes”. This turned out to be not such a bad thing, providing a dissonant bridge across from the relative clarity of 'Insight' to the melodic oddness and distorted guitar of 'City Girl'. It’s a song that doesn’t really resolve itself. The same chord cycle repeats itself four times, without any real regard for what might be a verse or a chorus, except each time the tempo is increased slightly. I could listen to it all day.

In 2005 I turned 30. We gathered at The Endurance in Soho to celebrate: myself, my partner, the guy who keeled over in Debenhams, the former cohabitant from Brighton, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, ‘The Wilkinsons’ and the boys who lived at The Grosvenor, No Eyes and her husband, Queen of Tin (an old university associate we became reacquainted with during our Brentford years), and my brother (the one who recorded Orbital for me, not the Beastie Boys). A few days later I was in Tuscany for the wedding of an old school friend. A city-break to Barcelona in July, camping in Wales at the end of August, and an excursion to Berlin with The Wilkinsons in late October. Badminton had died a death but I was now playing 5-a-side with the guys at work; I cycled to work. My brother (Orbital) challenged me to run the Brighton 10K with him in mid-November, to which I acceded. Work, on the other hand, was on a real downer.

For my birthday, The Wilkinsons very kindly gifted me The Fall: The Complete Peel Sessions 1978–2004. The Fall was known to be 'my' group. In truth, I hadn’t listened to them much over the last five or so years and hadn’t bought any of their records for longer than that, but I welcomed the prospect of reacquainting myself with the world of Mark E Smith. These Peel Session tracks would proceed to form the backbone of the ‘Best of The Fall’ playlist I subsequently compiled and prompted me to purchase a few of the earlier albums that had previously escaped my attention. For the time being, 'Cruiser’s Creek' features here.

Comet Gain are another by-product of the compilation the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records put together. The song 'Record Collection' tells of not being able to listen to certain records because they remind the protagonist of his ex. Sarah Records guy and I have a shared appreciation of many musical moments: the sudden shift from Gbm to D in 'Marbles' by the Tindersticks; the strained harmonies in 'Solace' by The Sea Urchins; Arthur Lee pleading that, 'we’re all normal and we want our freedom,' towards the end of Love’s 'The Red Telephone'. On the other hand, whereas I’m interested in rhythm, Sarah Records guy is all about melody. If there’s a space where we meet in the middle, Comet Gain occupy it. He took me to see them at The Water Rats in King’s Cross at the beginning of the year, and I understood perfectly.

I doubt very much the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records has much time for Devo. This is because he would perceive them to be a comedy band, and if there’s one thing he can’t stand it’s that. But he wouldn’t be quite right. There’s certainly a humorous element to Devo’s act, but it’s equally kitsch, subversive and satirical. Not that that would impress Sarah Records guy either – as far as I know, he has no time for Weird War. Myself, I have no problem mixing music with mirth. How I laugh to myself every time I catch a glimpse of the back cover of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! depicting various band members with stockings pulled over their heads (actually a stilled image from the band’s extended music video The Truth About De-Evolution, which I recommend highly).

It might appear that I was still avoiding contemporary music but this is only partly true. In September I saw Stephen Malkmus touring his latest album, Face the Truth, supported by a band called Clor. My friend who passed out in Debenhams pointed me in the direction of Tom Vek. Field Music, who had impressed in support of The Go! Team the previous year, released their debut album. Weird War had a new record out. They even played twice in support of it: at the Camden Underworld in May and again at the Highbury Garage in November. Aside from Illuminated by the Light by Weird War, bought within days of its release, it took me a while to absorb the rest, but ultimately I did.

In the meantime I purchased Aha Shake Heartbreak by Kings of Leon on double 10” vinyl. It is a nice object and a good album. The drums are sometimes off the beat, the guitars often in opposition to the melody, and Caleb Followill’s vocal delivery is intense. My only complaint is that lyrically they seem to be interested in nothing more than sex, drugs and rock & roll. This ended up being somewhat true of The Strokes too.

Barcelona

Early in the year I thought I’d have another stab at Big Star. I took a chance on #1 Record and liked it so much that within a matter of weeks I’d bought Radio City.

It can be hard to discern from my playlists what sort of thing I might have been into at the time I compiled them. Generally speaking there’s no particular strain of music that predominates, but sometimes there is. I’m alluding to music in the wider sense, encompassing its broader aesthetics. For example, the collective presence of Blur, The Jam, the Small Faces, early Rolling Stones, Love, The Beatles, Herbie Hancock, The Yardbirds, and Saint Etienne on Carrington Classics and The Heroes of Hanworth is indicative of the Britpop scene and its many cultural accoutrements: Fred Perry polo shirts, V-neck jumpers, desert boots, anoraks; films like Blow-Up and The Ipcress File; cafes; a Ballardian relationship with one’s environment; a sense of irony; whatever Graham Coxon was into. By the time I’d made Bully for Bulstrode such inclinations had dissipated. After the eclecticism of the French Gite compilations my view began to narrow once more (although this didn’t really take hold until after my travels in 2002/03). The artistes this time around were The Byrds, Gram Parsons, Neil Young, Syd Barrett, The Amboy Dukes, Led Zeppelin, Big Star, golden era Rolling Stones, and, as we have seen, a miscellany of psychedelia, garage and country rock. It was something approaching Americana and found its representation in: pale-blue denim, checked shirts, Cuban heels and black leather bomber jackets; films like Zabriskie Point and Buffalo 66; the works of Hunter S Thompson; the tattered reputation of Richard Nixon; my American road trip of the 2004, which was basically the enactment of some sort of fantasy; Keith Richards sat outside the burnt hulk of his Redlands estate in cut-off denim shorts and a tight-fitting shirt with the sleeves rolled up. These are trivial matters, but when I look back over certain periods of my life, to the clothes I wore, the places I ventured, the music I listened to, the films I watched, then suddenly there’s meaning where there didn’t appear to be in the moment.

Anyway, Big Star: I’d explored power pop without having to resort to Cheap Trick or The Knack. 

Let’s all give Mike at Really Good Records a big round of applause. The third and final track taken from Illusions from the Crackling Void – and there could easily have been more – is 'Road to Nowhere' by Hearts and Flowers. A Goffin/King composition, you might call it country rock, and it could be seen as the climax to the compilation.

As much as Rod Stewart’s personality can be slightly nauseating, he’s undoubtedly a great singer. There’s a folksy feel to 'Angel' that follows on from 'Road to Nowhere' nicely, although it was Jimi Hendrix’s tune originally, concernng his mother. Ronnie Wood’s guitar playing is loose, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead of the beat, always deliberately so. The verse builds to a crescendo and at the moment of release we get congas.

A lot of country, folk and psychedelic rock is fairly interchangeable (excepting the strain of British folk rock that developed into the Canterbury Scene, but that’s not relevant here). Take Neil Young’s work with Buffalo Springfield. At the time it could conceivably have been characterised as folk rock with a psychedelic edge. When Young went solo he jettisoned the psychedelic and rockier elements in favour of a more country inflected sound, and yet you’d be hard pushed to call it country rock in the vein of The Byrds or The Flying Burrito Brothers. Nor could you call it southern rock, a derivative of the genre that was gathering pace. What you might call it is country folk. Pedantic taxonomy aside, I added After the Gold Rush to my collection and sought to include a track on this compilation. Still beholden to MiniDisc, I was going to go with 'Cripple Creep Ferry' but found I had almost three minutes to spare after opting for 'Silly Girl' by Television Personalities, at 2 minutes 45 seconds, ahead of 'Cross-Eyed Merry' by Jethro Tull, which comes in at 4 minutes and 6 seconds, and so settled for 'Tell Me Why', which lasts 2 minutes and 54 seconds.

I was initially a bit disappointed with Weird War’s Illuminated by the Light. It lacks the urgency, the mania and the effect pedals of its predecessors. However, its lethargic funk grew on me and the material worked well live. But Svenonius was done with Weird War. He took a break and returned four years later with a new outfit, called Chain & the Gang.

Berlin

In October my partner and I moved to the more salubrious environs of St Margarets, Twickenham. I didn’t want to but circumstances dictated that we did. I had liked living in Isleworth, having the Red Lion as my local, St John’s stores at the end of my road, the H37, ‘St John the Baptist’.

'Silly Girl' by the Television Personalities, courtesy of the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records. I’ve only got two Television Personalities songs to go on: this and a track called 'Back to Vietnam' which the chap played to me around the time he introduced me to Sarah Records, and did so with a smirk. I don’t know what to make of them and haven’t invested the time to find out, which I should probably put right.

 [Listen to here.]