Saturday, 28 February 2026

LIST 243 - 28/02/2026

Hello again,

First up, here's something for you TML nostalgia buffs.  With a few minutes of spare time last night, I revisited the very first List from almost exactly seventeen years ago, retested all of the links (most of them needed replacing, in truth), and gave the whole thing the same treatment as I apply to new Lists, nested videos and soforth.  All much easier to navigate than first time around, and if I do say so myself, the song choices mostly hold up even now.  Feel free to take a look, and a listen.  Have fun.

As regards this week's choices, two more features seeing the light of day for the first time today are A Session of Sorts and Bulletproof.  

The former is, I suppose, simply a neat way of sharing four songs not previously included on a List by the same artist or performer, stretching across the entirety of their careers wherever possible.  And on this, the twentieth year of a career determinedly forged on their terms and their alone, Lancaster's finest sweary, red wine-marinaded husband and wife DIY psychedelic punk combo The Lovely Eggs are as deserving candidates as any.  Long may they prosper.

Bulletproof may evoke thoughts of Pop Will Eat Itself among some of you, and yes, I expect the early-mid 1990s Oldham club night which gives this feature its name was equally inspired by that leave-your-brain-at-the-door stomp by Stourbridge's finest.  It's Senser, however, that get a run out this time, Eject still a towering example of the rap-rock crossover genre du jour.

Now a mere 33 years of age (and how old does that make me feel typing that), it's unarguably of its time, but what an invigorating, exciting time that was.

The aforementioned Lovely Eggs - spoiler alert - will make an appearance in the Favourite Song of the Year feature at some point before long, although I'll leave you to guess what year and what song.  It's a short trip back to 2023 for today's favourite, a meeting of active minds between Ben, son of entertainer Roy, and Matt Berry in full Bonzo's The Intro and the Outro mode.  

Playful, self-effacing (there's at least the acknowledgement that not everyone gets jazz, even if Berry then shoots them down in familiar fashion) and not overstaying its welcome, it's also just about the only thing you'll see on here this week ever to have found its way into a question on Radio 4's Counterpoint (on which my scores continue to increase gently - I'm still not going on it, though).

The simple act of gathering all of the material used or intended for use in this blog's original 2009-2018 run into one Google Doc recently has proven a useful exercise, not least in surfacing a slew of tracks I could have sworn I'd included before now but actually never had.  

Hence, at long last, Mary Bobbins by Gabrielles Wish, at least as much of a cult Manchester act as The Fall, if not more so, and with a not dissimilar (if generally less acrimonious) revolving door of members pivoting around founder and sole constant presence Robert Corless.  

The Rob's Records mid-1990s incarnation of the band represented here remains my firm favourite, a feverish, tense post-punk brew enriched by the sound effect treatments of then member David Peplow (the same David Peplow who lectures here in Sheffield these days?  I wonder...).  Within the confines of a small venue such as the Star & Garter in Manchester, where I saw them support Half Man Half Biscuit and Calvin Party, it made for an intense listening experience.  The almost pop stylings of over a decade and a half later, not so much.

Other things to enjoy this week include, but are absolutely not limited to:

  • Tracks from opposite ends of the career of the recently reactivated Would-Be-Goods, Jessica Griffins' singular Received Pronunciation delivery and ear for a tune both still present and correct decades on,
  • A splendid late single from Fosca, the post-Orlando vehicle from academic, diarist and flaneur Dickon Edwards and another act hitherto hideously underrepresented in this blog,
  • Форум, reckoned to be the first synthpop act in Russia.  I'd been in two minds as to whether to include them as a Eurotastic act, the desire to observe the pre-hostilities Eurovision interpretation of what comprises "Europe" wrestling with Russia's current exclusion from said contest.  Ultimately they're not appearing under that banner,
  • The same David Westlake as whose career misfortunes were referred to in the C86 book review I shared last week,
  • A small tribute to Ken Downie.

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/02/2026).


FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2023


A SESSION OF SORTS: The Lovely Eggs

BULLETPROOF



A SESSION OF SORTS: The Lovely Eggs


THEN AND NOW: Would-Be-Goods



A SESSION OF SORTS: The Lovely Eggs

(NB Playback on Blogger disabled for this video - click on link to visit YouTube.  Apologies!)


IN LOVING MEMORY: Ken Downie

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Sunday, 22 February 2026

LIST 242 - 22/02/2026

Hello again,

As promised, part two of this weekend's double-header.  Monsieur, with these Blogger postings you're really spoiling us, as the Ferrero Rocher lady once nearly said.

Among the new and old fare on offer this time we have the first outing of the Straight In At... feature - or to be more accurate, its first outing on That Music List.

This is something salvaged from Twitter, my engagement with which is now at the barest of bare minimums for all of the same reasons that many of yours will be also.  Straight In At... was a feed I ran on there for a few years, wherein every new entry in the Official Singles Chart on the given date in a past year was surfaced and reviewed.  

For years in the 1950s and 1960s with not even one hand's worth of new entries per week, it wasn't a hugely time-intensive exercise.  For years in the late 1990s and early 2000s with as many as 35 new songs hitting the then top 100 each week (and invariably disappearing again right away), it absolutely was.

The volume of stuff to wade through wasn't an issue for me, however.  Instead, I found myself having to think of things to write about too many songs which, with the best will in the world, I really didn't like at all.  Some people are of course of a disposition to be able to do that without it becoming wearying, and for a living at that; but I gradually found it a less than satisfying, less than optimal use of my energies.  

That's by no means a whinge - these were the parameters I'd set myself, so I had no grounds for complaint.  I just had to go there to find out it wasn't for me.

The Straight In At Twitter feed thus died a quiet death around the end of 2022, at a time when my love for music wasn't all it should have been in any event, but even then I wasn't wholly prepared to walk away from it forever.  Hence Straight In At... That Music List style, with charting songs still included from today's date in history, but just not all of them.

Four selections from February 22nd 1981, then, and no more than four.  No sign of that week's highest new entry (19) from Status Quo, as it's not a favourite.  No Walking On Thin Ice by Yoko Ono (the next highest entry but way down in position number 50 - these were very different times), as, love it as I do, it's been on at least one List already and I found other things I'd rather include for the first time.

Instead, plucked from the lowest fifth of the then top 75 we have a still just about pre-mainstream crossover Human League; an also still just about pre-mainstream crossover Classix Nouveaux; Yorkshire-born and raised Euro disco gentleman Geoffrey Bastow (appearing here under his K.I.D. alias); and finally the commercial highpoint in the career of Landscape, one which underlines as much as anything else how broad a church 1981 was in terms of what could become a hit.  It's my favourite year for chart music on that basis, an opinion which has only firmed up over time.

Six years further on from 1981 finds Hebden Bridge's finest export Bogshed in typically idiosyncratic form, and their inclusion gives me all the excuse required to include a link to a review I originally penned on Facebook two years ago of Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?, Nige Tassell's exhaustive quest to find and interview at least one member of all 22 acts - of which Bogshed were of course one - featured on the NME's eponymous compilation cassette.  

It's an impressive, accessible piece of work, as well as at times poignant, considering the fates to have befallen some players in the piece in the four decades since C86 was released.  It's possibly not giving too much away to confirm that the quest would likely fail if commenced only in 2026.

From West Yorkshire past to West Yorkshire present, it's a pleasure to be able to include some Craven Faults for the first time here.  It can be assumed that this (by design) anonymous producer of compelling, pictorial, sometimes darkly ambient electronic music would have been as regular a fixture as any had TML not gone on its extended hiatus, given new album Sidings, from which today's selection is taken, is already an eighth in six years.

I'll eat my own arm if I haven't found a way to include some of their more extended pieces in my The Long Goodbye feature before this year's through.  Today, however, that honour goes to some classic Kraftwerk - as if there's any other kind.

From Germany to France, and the first appearance of Fabriqué en France, another new feature which showcases French and Francophone pop.  I have a correspondence a couple of years ago with the very fine Leeds indiepopper Owen Radford-Lloyd (formerly known as The French Defence) to thank for tuning me into Mylene Farmer's very early output - I'd only really picked up on her from a certain early 1990s monster European hit onwards.

The more I've explored Mylene, the more it's occurred to me how the likes of Florence Welch and Alison Goldfrapp owe at least as much to her as they do other more often cited touchstones such as Kate Bush and Noosha Fox. See what you think.

Please also feel free to enjoy the wholly unexpected return of Sugar after 32 years; a 1987-88ish cut from celebrated Zimbabwean Chigiyo pioneers Zig Zag Band; an early single of the year contender for me from Mitski; a reminder of the pristine pop wonderment of La Casa Azul, whose 2009 set is still talked about in revered tones by us Indietracks stalwarts; an example, for those not yet aware, of why Knitting Circle are one of the most vital, important acts in DIY/punk/indiepop right now (with an album very recently recorded and to follow); and a wee tribute to Jimmy Cliff.  

Actually, please feel free to enjoy it all.

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 18/02/2026).




FABRIQUÉ EN FRANCE

THEN AND NOW: Sugar


IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE


STRAIGHT IN AT… February 22nd, 1981

(Bandcamp link - no video)


STRAIGHT IN AT... February 22nd, 1981





IN LOVING MEMORY: Jimmy Cliff

THE LONG GOODBYE


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Saturday, 21 February 2026

That Book Review: Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? by Nige Tassell

(NB If you've come here via a link in a List, please click on your browser Back button once you're done to return there).


For those of us with interests in racing and indiepop, this is in essence the latter's equivalent of the former's Go Down to the Beaten.

Instead of Chris Pitt finding one defeated rider from every Grand National since 1946, here Nige Tassell attempts to find one member of every band (22 of them) to have contributed to the NME's era- and (for good or ill) genre-defining cassette compilation of four decades ago.

Nige succeeds, and indeed exceeds his brief in some cases (all five original members of Mighty Mighty). Not that, admittedly, the likes of David Gedge (The Wedding Present) or Vickie Perks and Maggie Dunne (Fuzzbox) are notably hard to find nor generally anything other than wholly generous with their time for interviewers.

However, many discoveries required serendipity, patience or inexhaustible supplies of careful persistence and trust building. Stephen Pastel, for one, did reward Nige's powers of gentle persuasion in spades. Malcolm Eden (McCarthy) and Cath Carroll (Miaow), sadly, could not.

Having found his interviewees, Nige had the good sense to let them talk... and talk... For all he'd done his research beforehand, few if any preconceptions and precious little in the way of an ego influenced the line of questioning.

These were stories to be told, in full, whilst an often fleeting - and in some cases never to be repeated - opportunity had arisen.

The humanity of the interviewee is frequently as evident as that of the interviewer. A number of those approached were dealt a succession of bad hands post-C86 (many at the hands of feckless record labels) which wrecked highly promising careers - David Westlake of The Servants perhaps suffered more than any. No bitterness. 

Others still found themselves fired from their respective C86 band when assuming to be set fair - q.v. the aforementioned Wedding Present's Peter Solowka. Again, no bitterness.

Instead, a sense largely pervades of a deep gratitude to have been involved in something they love(d), captured on a compilation whose influence and legacy couldn't possibly have been anticipated at the time.

Anno domini and all that dictates that nobody associated with the book is even remotely close to young adulthood anymore. Many careers have been forged among the C86 alumni, from academia (several of these) to driving instructor (Sushil Dade of the Soup Dragons), from bicycle repair shop proprietor (David Keegan of The Shop Assistants) to Jeremy Irons' body double (Julian Hutton of The Shrubs).

All adult human life is covered, even if some of it not in particularly generous distributions. The listing of all performers in the glossary serves, presumably unwittingly despite one contributor making the point explicitly themselves, to reiterate the predominance of white males in '80s independent music.

In interviewing Sushil, Nige speaks to just one of two people of colour among the 94 musicians all told. In talking to Vickie and Maggie, plus the then Pastels drummer Bernice Simpson (now a major player in Big Pharma and a pioneer in fairtrade contraceptives), he catches up with 30% of the compilation's female performers (all condensed into five bands, none appearing earlier than track 11). The days of, say, Indietracks' line-up gender parity feel a long way off.

The passing of such a long period of time also, inevitably, increased the likelihood of that total of 94 personnel having been depleted in number in the meantime. Even so, the revelation that three-quarters of Hebden Bridge's finest musical outsiders Bogshed were lost to cancer before reaching their sixties (including Nige's interviewee, the caricaturist Mike Bryson, prior to publication) was genuinely saddening, the most poignant moment in a book not otherwise devoid of them.

An involving and affecting read, therefore, and one which can't help but lead those of us who have grown up with the compilation (it was certainly among my earliest purchases from the late Rae Donaldson at the Vinyl Exchange) to listen to it again with fresh insight. Not that prior knowledge of C86 would necessarily be a prerequisite to enjoying its accessible, easily digestible 400 pages.

It will also make you love some people - John Peel, the ruinously generous Dave Parsons of Ron Johnson Records - even more than you ever did previously; make you eyeroll at BBC session producer (and former Mott the Hoople drummer) Dale Griffin's sniffiness towards musicians bigger on heart and creativity than stultifying proficiency; and make you realise Denise Johnson and Martin Duffy were far from the first collaborators whose treatment by Bobby Gillespie left something to be desired...
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LIST 241 - 21/02/2026

Hello there,

Here's something to tie you over during the half-term holidays - two Lists this weekend rather the one.  And in a blog not short of personal indulgences, I fear that today's is probably the biggest yet.

Despite being a format broadly suited to one, That Music List doesn't exist as a radio show.  It has never come close to doing so, and I suspect it never will.  Those of you reading this (and there won't be many in the middle of this Venn Diagram) who are also familiar with my eight-year tenure (2007-2015) as a horse racing pundit on the radio will be as aware as I am of my limitations as a broadcaster - too quick, quiet and unnecessarily convoluted a delivery when conciseness and clarity better fit the constraints of time.  

Given another crack at it in the present day, I suspect that, now in my fifties, I'd find those traits are more baked in than ever.  Oh well.

However, in a parallel universe where I didn't carry on like Kafka with concussion behind a microphone, and TML did transfer to the airwaves, two of today's tracks would have appeared in every show.  

I've long loved Holland Street by The Field Mice, one of relatively few instrumentals in their published oeuvre (hence its inclusion here in the No Language In Our Lungs feature) and one that evokes thoughts of glistening urban streets at sunrise the morning after the rain in some celebrated small-budget flick.  

It's also the one song I've long thought absolutely perfect to play after the opening track of a radio show; the one over which, in appropriately truncated form, I'd do my welcomes and introduce the show's contents.  Mark Radcliffe would use Sombre Reptiles by Brian Eno for the same purpose in his mid-1980s Piccadilly Radio show which informed a lot of my then burgeoning musical interests.  I guess that first planted the idea.

Although an older track by more than a decade, The Wild Places by Duncan Browne is a somewhat newer discovery for me, only really in the past five years.  It's certainly of its time, an example of such late-1970s defiantly adult-oriented pop-rock as continued to rage against punk's fire, and the stagecraft which accompanied the promotion of the track - essentially a leopardskin leotard-clad woman writhing on or around the performing Browne - is perhaps best confined to the annals.

This is a track which plays its best suit late on, however, in the form of a soaring, dramatic coda from around 4 minutes 18 seconds onwards.  "My favourite codas" isn't a feature on TML, though if it were, the example in The Wild Places would rate second only to the wildly playful example at the end of Taco's Europop cover of Puttin' on the Ritz.  It would serve much the same purpose at the end of my radio show as Holland Street at the start, being the penultimate track or even outro over which to wrap things up.

If you're feeling sufficiently indulgent, try doing your own voiceover on top of the relevant parts of either track.  I can neither confirm nor deny how often if at all I've done this, though you're of course free to guess.

As well as No Language In Our Lungs, another feature making its first appearance in a List today is A Tangle Of Jangle, a trio of tracks which broadly fall under the janglepop umbrella.  I've surprised myself, and probably those who know me, by including neither a Sarah Records nor a C86 track in this initial selection - next time, maybe.  

It is an international trio, at least, taking in Belfast (Language of Flowers), Limoges (Caramel) and Illinois (Star Tropics).  Members of the first-named would resurface in 2008 as the driving force behind Help Stamp Out Loneliness whom - and I understand it's sacrilege in some parts to say so - I never managed to warm to quite as much as this earlier incarnation.

None of them were released in 1997, and had they have been, they still wouldn't have been able to dynamite Flutter By Butterfly by Flowchart out of the way as my favourite song of the year.  They still wouldn't even now.  

There was a brief period in the late 1990s when I could trust the Wurlitzer Jukebox label implicitly, so consistently strong were their singles releases at the time; and this insistent, magical, looping pocket symphony, rather perfectly described by one organ then as "the moment at which Richard Wagner meets Walt Disney", was snapped up despite my having heard only one other Flowchart track previously.  

It's clearly a track which others hold dear also, the late Sean O'Neal having admitted in the sleeve notes to a later singles compilation that Flutter By Butterfly was the one track Flowchart always got asked for the most on their very occasional live forays.  Now that I would have liked to witness.

Anything else to mark your card about this time?  Well, it's all good (I would say that), but some other potential highlights include the world's coolest 72-year-old (Kim Gordon); the vital sound of Mexborough, circa 1979 (Hobbies Of Today); a prime example of Sabadell Sound, a Spanish variant of Italo Disco, replete with all its chief characteristics such as a long intro and a local performer with an English stage name (Alan Cook); the world's most sinister harmonium (Nico); and your favourite whimsical poet with your favourite indiepoppers (Brian Bilston & The Catenary Wires).

J xx


Click on the video to play each tune (links last checked as all working 18/02/2026).




NO LANGUAGE IN OUR LUNGS


FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 1997


THEN AND NOW: Neosupervital

    






EUROTASTIC








A TANGLE OF JANGLE
LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS - You’re The One (2004)









IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE




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Saturday, 14 February 2026

LIST 240 - 14/02/2026

Hello again,

To the surprise of I suspect few if any of you, I can confirm that I've usually got a few weeks' worth of That Music Lists already compiled and written up in advance, so as to account for holidays, vicissitudes of life, etc.

However, that doesn't preclude the possibility of me swapping in a track or two at short notice if something presses a claim for immediate inclusion rather than waiting several weeks hence, and two of this week's choices weren't going to be choices until earlier this week.

I hadn't even come across Angine de Poitrine before then, which is a shame, as I've long said there just aren't enough French-Canadian duos who specialise in microtonal experimental rock whilst dressing like a combination of Strawberry Switchblade, Chrome Hoof and Mr Noseybonk.  I've long said that, haven't I.  Yes.  Long said.

I've genuinely long admired their currently (terminally?) inactive fellow Québécois act Malajube's determination to perform in French, only French and nothing but the French, but Angine de Poitrine take their refusal to compromise many stages further - sexless polka dot costumes teamed with identity-masking headgear; ambiguous pseudonyms (Khn and Klek de Poitrin); and a complex, loop pedal-enriched music with nods to Primus and mathrock, yet also on sufficient nodding terms with jazz to afford them column inches in the likes of Jazz Times.

It's quite extraordinary stuff, performed and delivered by a duo so tight as to understand each other telepathically, it seems, unless the occasional exchanged grunts do actually mean something.  I'd love to see them come over to Britain for dates, or at the very least a Freak Zone session.

(An aside: what does it say about me that three of the acts I've been engaging most with recently are all named after horrible medical conditions - Prolapse, Cardiacs (Cardiac Arrest as was, of course) and now also Angine De Poitrine (the French for Angina Pectoris)?  Answers on a postcard.  Or a medical chart).

Also added at short notice is the lead single from The Banishing, the most recent (2024) album from Kavus Torabi.  It's funny; I'd gone seventeen years without watching Kavus in person before last weekend's appearance at Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield (my first gig of the year), and now our paths are set to cross twice inside five weeks with Cardiacs to look forward to in Manchester next month.

Always happy to play Sheffield in general and evidently Sidney & Matilda in particular, and a warm, generous presence on stage, Kavus coped with the vicissitudes of malfunctioning monitors and a capitulating harmonium in good humour.  That harmonium had certainly earned its keep, not least during a majorly extended interpretation of The Sentinel, an instrumental invocation originally uploaded to Bandcamp in 2020.

The admittedly wholly subjective measure of What People Look Like would have suggested a crowd neither drawn primarily from the Gong, nor from the Cardiacs, nor from the Utopia Strong end of Kavus fandom.  Me?  I might have been sporting the only Cardiacs top on show, but I loves me some looped, sequenced psychedelic drones as much as the next person, so all was well.

And we all also loved and felt the impassioned run through The Skulls We Buried Have Regrown Their Eyes, a Knifeworld era track which, as Kavus noted himself, is as horribly relevant now as it was on release back in 2014.  

In fact, the whole recent solo tour has been a strange and emotionally charged experience for this British Iranian, playing out as it has against a backdrop of the ongoing major crisis in Iran, an uprising followed by a massacre of citizens by the state on what's believed to be an unprecedented scale.  Kavus's Facebook updates on the situation, in so far as credible updates are available to him, are recommended listening.

Live conflict and ongoing struggle inform another List choice this week, if in a more overtly, determinedly political form.  Formerly an educator, news reporter and activist as well as a musical reality show star, Elaha Soroor's is a voice which won't be easily silenced even as a now exiled Hazara Afghan.  

Our Freedoms Must Be Won, the latest in a series of collaborations with the London world/electronic act Kefaya, sets Soroor's protest lyrics in Farsi to a pounding, almost waltz-time wash of busy percussion and stark synths, the latter immediately redolent of early 1990s Wau! Mr Modo acts such as Electrotete.  

I don't care much for the term world fusion, covering as it can a multitude of sins - cynical, will-this-do adding of Western beats over a kora, say - but this meeting of two musics has genuinely excited me more than anything in this loose-ish genre since Mbongwana Star's 2015 masterpiece From Kinshasa, to all intents and purposes a Congolese interpretation of PIL's Metal Box.

Not far off twenty-one thousand YouTube views for Our Freedoms Must Be Won in two and half months hopefully suggests a degree of sympathy for the ongoing fights for intellectual and ideological freedom in Afghanistan (for women especially), as much as it suggests an enthusiasm for the music.  The smattering of dehumanising, racist comments left on the sponsored Facebook post for it, on the other hand, sadly suggests that some hearts and minds aren't for winning over.

Heavenly, of course, were another act to attract their own share of aggressively derogatory comments back in the day, invariably utterly disproportionate in their venom relative to the apparent crime of marrying pointed, principled, sometimes dark lyrics to the sweetest of indie punk pop confection.  

Words wound, and the then Sarah Records roster were obliged to wear more music magazine-inflicted wounds than most.  Alongside Steven Wells' recommendation to Secret Shine to arrange a date with a warm bath and a razorblade, the infamous "Die, Heavenly, die" review in Melody Maker of Heavenly's Decline and Fall of Heavenly LP endures to this day as the most shocking of the lot.

It is the opening track of that third Sarah Records album which forms the Then part of a Heavenly Then and Now which I wouldn't have reckoned on ever needing to add to That Music List until the band's unexpected reactivation in 2023, one whose gathering momentum has now reached the point of new album and extensive tour.  

As it is, this decade has already been a golden period for lovers of all things Amelia Fletcher, Rob Pursey, Peter Momtchiloff and related.  The Catenary Wires collaboration with poet Brian Bilston; membership of Swansea Sound; guest appearances on stage with erstwhile Sea Urchin James Roberts and on 6Music's Roundtable singles review with Huw Stephens; the return of Would-Be-Goods; curatorship of the Words & Music alldayer in Rolvenden Layne; and running the immaculate Skep Wax Records imprint, home of The Cords, Tulpa and European Sun and the putative home of the C25 movement. 

And on top of all that activity, now this.  And it's a big this, the tour alone set to take in 26 venues across Britain, Greece, France, Canada and the US.  

"Die, Heavenly, die"?  Heavenly could hardly be more alive.

Suffice it to say I'll be there with bells on when the tour hits Sheffield on March 21st, for what is currently planned to be my first gig of 2026 not to feature Kavus Torabi.  Now how's that for bringing this opening full circle!

Oh, there are plenty of other treats this week as well, don't worry about that.  Here are just a few:

  • A Loved Album revisits Autogeddon, the third part of Julian Cope's early-mid 1990s trilogy and my favourite long-player of his by a good margin.  Punk, pop, folk, krautrock and lots more besides all chucked in, but a highly cohesive piece of work nonetheless; and if not a seller in its millions, still sufficiently high-profile to net the Archdrude a memorable appearance on Top of the Pops, performing I Gotta Walk (included here) in little more than a sackcloth.
  • Sheffield's very lovely Pink Opaque, or as you might also know them That Danielle off of Only Connect and That Pete off of Colin Murray's Great Football Songbook and That Both Of Them off of lots of previous ace indiepop acts.   
  • Hubert Kah.  Fronted by Hubert Kemmler, originally one of the more striking and provocative breakout stars of the Neue Deutsche Welle (appearances in makeup, straitjackets, nightdresses and all), but seen here in the early throes of his maturation into one of the most omnipresent figures in German 1980s pop variously as performer, writer or producer.  Kemmler's career would eventually be hamstrung by sustained battles with depression, but this will not be the last time our paths cross with him on TML by any means. Nor will it this track's producer Michael Cretu, better known to British audiences as the brains behind Enigma, but responsible for so much more than that.
        (NB Dedicated Germanophone viewers may like to scour YouTube to find a version of this song performed on the pop show ZDF Hitparade.  Not just for Hubert Kah themselves, but for the preface to introducing their song by show creator and host Dieter Thomas Heck, wherein he issues a bollocking in absentia to sardonic Austropop trio STS for claiming their music was too atypical for the show and they weren't coming to play it.  Silly sods).
  • The Melons.  Vanessa Vass (nee Turner) won't remember this, but we exchanged a number of letters circa 1995-6, such was my enthusiasm for her and the late Sheggi Clarkson's engaging run of Mark Radcliffe-endorsed sevens. 
  • Rose City Band.  A sublime, gentle, beautiful chug from Ripley Johnson, he of Moon Duo and Wooden Shjips.  The spelling of the last-named always raises a smile - do you think the band's favourite fish might be tjuna chjunks in brjine?
  • The Cure, by way of a tribute to the late Perry Bamonte, whose left-handed six-string bass helps make this 1992 single in particular.
  • Earthling is this week's Rapping Song.  I was this many years old when I learned they were British, let alone Bristolian.
  • The Supremes don city gent inspired outfits and brandish umbrellas to take the Beatles to Motown.
  • At ten minutes plus, Tailspin by Trembling Blue Stars provides A Long Goodbye.

J xx


Click on the video to play each tune (links last checked as all working 12/02/2026).





THEN AND NOW: Heavenly



A LOVED ALBUM: Julian Cope - Autogeddon (1994)


DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT


A LOVED ALBUM: Julian Cope - Autogeddon (1994)

RAPPING SONGS

A LOVED ALBUM: Julian Cope - Autogeddon (1994)


IN LOVING MEMORY: Perry Bamonte

THE LONG GOODBYE

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LIST 243 - 28/02/2026

Hello again, First up, here's something for you TML nostalgia buffs.  With a few minutes of spare time last night, I revisited the very...

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