That Music List: LIST 247

Hello again,

On to this week's selections shortly. I promise. First of all, however, and for the second week running, it's a pleasure to be able to enthuse about a very, very good gig attended since the last we met.

Heavenly's storming set at Sheffield's redoubtable Sidney & Matilda last weekend will live long in the memory, delivering as it did everything one would hope a Heavenly set in the 2020s possibly would.

A splendidly curated collection of tracks new (eight from Highway to Heavenly) and old (ten from the Sarah and Wiiija days), light and shade (no eschewing of the darker subject matter in the band's catalogue).

Performers older, wiser, kindly and highly amusing; though following an adroit bit of on-stage trolling guitarist Peter Momtchiloff might just hope his day job with Lex Academic doesn't require him to visit either university in Sheffield any time soon.

A crowd both big and spread across the age range. The enormous numbers of streams which the likes of P.U.N.K. Girl and Me and My Madness have been netting on TikTok and Spotify had played at least some role in driving Heavenly's return to active service. It's not much of a reach to suggest that part of that newly found audience were in attendance here.

Validation, then, and in the most positive senses of the word, vindication also.

And joy. Lots of joy. From the rapturous reception to opener Portland Town through to the delightfully genderblind reading of C Is The Heavenly Option, gig co-organiser and All Ashore!/Plouf! mainstay Elodie Ginsberg occupying the persona of Calvin Johnson for one night and possibly one night only.

Tulpa were in fine form also, and if it's not too wide of the mark to suggest as much, the winning chug of 1980s era Wedding Present that I can detect in certain of their tracks came more to the fore live than on record. They can consider themselves rightly pleased with their evening's work also.

Just up the road the same evening at the Network, in the sort of timetable clash that used to give us Indietracks attendees aches of the head and heart, Gina Birch was by all accounts delivering a barnstorming set in support of The Au Pairs.

I've been looking forward to finding a space for the lithe, addictive title track of Gina's 2023 album ever since this blog was reactivated, and this feels like the perfect moment to do that; something from the 2025 follow-up will also appear in due course. If I'm even remotely as cool as Gina when I eventually hit my seventies, I'll be... well, astonished really.

Staying with things which take place in Sheffield, one of the absolute joys of rediscovering my mojo with all things music has been to invest more time in listening to The Breakdown, Sheffield Live's two-hour Saturday afternoon radio show dedicated to interesting new tracks.

Usually the preserve of regular presenters and all-round good eggs Joel Rigler and Steve Vickers, Joel was instead joined a few weeks back by Ian Turley, the second All Ashore! member to get a mention this week already but invited to the show in his other guise as My Lo-Fi Heart, purveyor of (as his YouTube channel nicely puts it) lo-fi love songs for lo-fi lovers.

Two things in particular struck me in Joel's interview with Ian as regards approaching blog writers with new tracks. This is where you all scream at me that this sharp practice has been going on since Jesus was in short trousers, but Ian noted that plenty of music bloggers out there demand payment from an act before consenting to write about their music.

Seriously? Hand on heart, in seventeen years of maintaining That Music List, on and off, the thought of asking potential contributors for money has never even remotely entered my head. I'm genuinely just thrilled whenever I alight upon something I love sufficiently to want to include. That feels like payment enough for me.

Secondly, Ian meditated briefly on how siloed genre-wise so many blogs still appear to be, citing the personal experience of his tracks having been liked by some bloggers, but not included on their blogs for being too EDM for the indiepop kids and vice versa.

Good grief. There are acts out there who have made the melding of those sorts of styles pretty much their modus operandi. Joel quickly gave the example of Fujiya & Miyagi, veterans of nine albums and a smattering of TML appearances, and that's an excellent shout.

Suffice it to say, Ian, that this is a blog which is not remotely troubled by how great a degree of genre cross-pollination there may or may not be in your material. It all sounded great at Hatch before Xmas, both tracks played on The Breakdown likewise, and it's nothing but a pleasure to be able to include We Can't Fail this week.

If 2025-26 has given the aforementioned Heavenly more than they could ever have dreamed of, broadly similar must also be true of Prolapse, spasmodically active for about a decade (my spreadsheet tells me it was June 2015 when I saw them in Nottingham) before finally aligning their diaries sufficiently to make a proper crack at a comeback in 2024.

As well as genuinely delighting the band, the anointing of On The Quarter Days as Dandelion Radio's number one in the 2025 Festive Fifty just felt right - a reminder to those Johnny-come-lately peddlers of sprechgesang over choppy guitars (hello, Yard Act) that somebody else was doing it earlier, and better.

This week's A Session of Sorts takes in four tracks from the length and breadth of the career of "the most depressing band ever" (their words), starting with the lead from their second ever EP and concluding with another highlight from last year's I Wonder When They're Going to Destroy Your Face.

It's not vocalist Linda Steelyard's face which is currently destroyed, but rather her right foot, following a recent accident on her stairs at home. Nevertheless, pot or not, expect her to be holding her own, and still responding in kind when Mick Derrick gets right in her face, when they play Hebden Bridge, Birmingham and the Wales Goes Pop festival at the start of April.

Meanwhile, My Forgotten 80s... this week lands upon the sad story of Scottish popsters and former Fire Engines alumni Win.

All set for a sizeable hit with their McEwans beer advert-soundtracking You've Got the Power, an intervention from then chart compilers Gallup incorrectly attributed their strong local sales to illegal hyping of the track in Scottish record stores.

A further theory I've seen doing the rounds, namely that only so many sales from Scottish bands per week were counted, and that Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me hoovered up most of that allocation, might be tempered to an extent by the fact that track was on its way down the charts and ranked no higher than #68 during You've Got the Power's two weeks in the very basement of the top 100. Put simply, it alone won't have been preventing a five-figure number of sales for Win from being registered.

A real shame, all things considered. Stripped of all of the association with the advert, and those chart machinations and manipulations, it's still a belting track all these years on and deserved better.

Other highlights this week are not in short supply, but you might be particularly interested in:

A reminder of the joy of early 2000s Japanese one-album wonders Yumi Yumi. Having never attended anything like Primavera Sound, they'd be one of very few bands I can claim to have seen do a set on a beach, courtesy of a short-lived festival on the sands which coincided with my time living and working in Scarborough. Other than Belle and Sebastian's visit to the now sadly demolished Futurist Theatre a few years prior (which did spill out onto the beach for a signing session afterwards), this would be as much indiepop as the town offered me back then - trips to Leeds and London filled in the sizeable gaps. They were certainly the only act I ever saw in Scarborough - or anywhere else - who insisted a teddy bear on stage with them was a bona fide third member of the band, apparently operating the drum machine on their behalf.

A reminder that The Montgolfier Brothers were, and always will be, more than the sum total of a David Gilmour endorsement and cover. Like so many before him, from Nick Drake to Tim Smith, how I wish that the upturn in the appreciation of Roger Quigley's work could have been enjoyed during the artist's actual lifetime.

A reminder that, love them as I do, mid-late 1990s female DIY/indiepop/punk bands from the north east didn't start and finish with Kenickie. Not by a long chalk. There have been a number of contemporaneous acts featured on here over the years from the Slampt label in particular, but you also need Scooter Swing/Underwear recording artistes Delicate Vomit in your lives. Here you go.

An unflinching story of alcoholism by The Handsome Family, as featured in Christy Moore's 2006 covers album Burning Times. Moore's talents for picking just the right songs to reinterpret seldom lets him down, and when I next get round to doing another List comprised solely of cover versions (it's been a while) I'll be astonished if he doesn't get a look-in.

This week's most poignant moment, a tribute to the recently parted Danny Coughlan, and a track which itself was made in memory of Tracyanne Campbell's late Camera Obscura colleague and friend Carey Lander.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/03/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

GINA BIRCH - I Play My Bass Loud (2023)