That Music List: LIST 249

Hello again,

This week has found your writer once more doing what he always promises himself he won't do ever again, and that's listening out for real or perceived factual errors during one of BBC Radio 6 Music's deep dives into a year or decade rather than just enjoying the music contained therein.

This last Wednesday's romp through 1991 certainly contained a few tracks that stretched the definition of "a track from 1991". All on You (Perfume) by Paris Angels had already been a top 100 hit in July 1990, a whole year before its final reissue; whilst Good Beat by Deee-Lite was a 1991 single from a by then heavily milked World Clique album that had been released the previous August and recorded over the three years prior to that. Defining sounds of 1991, then? That's open to debate.

Harder to view in any way charitably was the insistence of one 6 Music DJ during the day that difficulties, and mistakes even, in pinning a track to a year were perhaps unavoidable, due to the absence of some historic release data. In the present day, where a resource such as Discogs in particular can offer all of the clarification required, I'm not sure that argument flies.

I can quite believe that there may be the odd song or two innocently, but wrongly, attributed in any of the many Lists I've done dedicated to a given year. I'd suggest, however, that a national music station has a greater resource of materials and people available to it to ensure error-free research than just little old me tapping away at a laptop when the kids are asleep.

If nothing else, the week's events have prompted me to revisit the two 1991 specials I published on That Music List at the back end of 2011 as List 79 and List 80. Both have now had their links repaired and videos embedded in the current house style, making them the third and fourth vintage Lists to be so treated. I'd like to get round to smartening up all 236 of the pre-hiatus Lists eventually, and whilst that's obviously no small undertaking my progress on that project, fitful as it will inevitably be, can be found here.

The other recent piece of 6 Music broadcasting to attract my attention was Guy Garvey's return to the Night and Day Cafe on Oldham Street, Manchester, which clearly informed him profoundly as a musician, band member and person. It quickly became apparent, however, that Guy and I occupy parallel universes where our gig-going experiences at the late owner Jan Oldenburg's former chippy turned redoubtable gig venue are concerned.

Not for me the nights of seeing Elbow or I Am Kloot (two acts who practically owe their existence to the place), or the production line of Oasis-alikes that the gig booker interviewed had been asked to prioritise finding for a while.

Instead, the likes of Milky Wimpshake, Sally Skull, Urusei Yatsura, Helen Love, Superstar Disco Club, Polythene, Red Monkey, Godsister Helen, Dominic Waxing Lyrical, Coping Saw, Silver Apples, Alphastone, Marine Research, Bette Davis & the Balconettes, The Yummy Fur and Lung Leg. Several of these - plus some of the doubtless plenty more I've forgotten to include - seen on multiple occasions, and all of them seen during a golden period from late 1996 until the of 1999 (whereafter the trips across from my by then new Scarborough base started to become a bit much on a work night).

Highlights are too numerous to mention from among those acts named, though seeing Simeon Coxe III living and breathing - and manipulating those oscillators of his - on what were still at the time the very earliest stages of Silver Apples's comeback felt particularly special.

Bette Davis and Polythene carried a barely hinged menace about them that exhilarated; the former likely to try decapitating the audience with an instrument flung at a second's notice, the latter favouring covering such stage as there was with army netting and playing guitars with vibrators.

(Godsister Helen - Night and Day, Manchester, 09/10/1997. Picture is author's own)

The above list will confirm that Scotland's bountiful mid-late 1990s supply of acts playing angular, concise, irresistible, third wave feminism-informed, Riot Grrrl-adjacent (inspired?) indie-pop punk fare found themselves reasonably well served by Night and Day, and as well as those named, I'm sure either or both of Dick Johnson and Pink Kross played there also.

My memories of a tremendous set there by one such act, Glasgow's Lung Leg, have been stirred again latterly by the band's successful return from over two decades' hiatus and appearance in Since Yesterday, the 2024 documentary by Teen Canteen's Carla J Easton telling the story of - as Carla herself perfectly puts it - "the Scottish girl bands missing from bedroom walls".

The stories of the past six decades finally, and deservedly, given an audience and room to breathe in Since Yesterday are frequently as depressing as they are fascinating.

Whilst Lung Leg's own may not have been characterised by sustained financial exploitation quite on the scale that befell sixties siblings The McKinlay Sisters (for all that some of them were obliged to sell their own furniture just to eat late on in the band's original lifespan), or else by the same assumptions as regards any future plans to have children as were made of the Hedrons only fifteen or so years ago, the frustrations at the frequent trashing from familiar bêtes noires such as the NME and misogynistic promoters and bookers were real enough.

Just as real, however, and thankfully so, was (and is) the lasting sense of camaraderie, driven by a fanzine culture of a magnitude and productivity since lost to the mists of the time, and also by the efforts of Vesuvius Records' co-founder Pat Crook (from Melody Dog) and Sally Skull bassist and gig promoter Saskia Holling.

Annie Spandex of Lung Leg noticeably swells with pride in recalling the evening that saw three of that cohort's bands, her own included, supporting The Raincoats at the Cathouse, whilst members of many others watched on. Validation of their "primitive fizzy pop with punk noise" (Carla's words again) from the people who really mattered.

If you haven't already guessed, placing Lung Leg's two contributions to this week's List - one of them the fine comeback single from last year - right next to a recent single from Carla is entirely deliberate. And if you can find a way to watch Since Yesterday - there are plans to show it again on BBC Scotland a week on Thursday (the 23rd), and it pops up occasionally on YouTube - you can be certain it comes with my unreserved recommendation.

Mention of the Silver Apples in that aforementioned list of Night and Day concerts seen leads me to touch briefly on Nothing Gonna Stop by Folk Implosion, a very affectionate tribute to that legendary act - numerous of their seminal tracks are namechecked - which I'd somehow not managed to pick up on before now in three decades of owning the parent CD single (Natural One) from which this b-side is lifted. Dearie me.

Further similar oversights on my part corrected in this week's List include the specific tracks by David Holmes and The Holloways, each of which I could have sworn went up a decade and a half ago; and no less incredibly the first ever appearance in a List of briefly prolific Shinkansen signing Monograph.

Other potential highlights among the many other goodies this week may be:

A return to 2010 for One Million Year Trip, the Laetitia Sadier track which endures now as then as my favourite song of that particular year. An in parts too personal a work to warrant just being buried under a band moniker, and coming into being at the same time as stumps were being drawn with both Monade and (in the event, temporarily) Stereolab anyway, the parent album The Trip had been recorded shortly before the suicide of Laetitia's sister Noelle, to whom the album was ultimately dedicated. What a pity that her appearance at Indietracks five years later, in support of by then three solo albums, coincided with a some of the most biblical, crowd-thinning rainstorms that festival ever witnessed - it, and she, deserved better luck.

(Laetitia Sadier - Indietracks Festival, 26/07/2015. Pictures is author's own)

In what's already been a year of extensive Cardiacs and Cardiacs-adjacent activity, here's some new output by Spratleys to enjoy. Dates for their brief autumn tour with another former Tim Smith vehicle in Panixphere are helpfully attached to the end of the video - see you in Leeds.