That Music List

Saturday, 14 November 2026

LIST 280 - 14/11/2026 (Feature Fest #3)

(The post-Indietracks washing line, our back yard, 28/07/2015. Prolapse didn't play this or any other renewal of Indietracks, but as my most recent t-shirt purchase at the time the TCR top was always going to get an airing that weekend. Retro gaming fans might just recognise the figure on the right of the photo also. Picture is the author's own)

Hello again,

Following on from Lists #245 and #257, this week I bring you the third renewal of Feature Fest, the occasional showcasing of as many of the portfolio of twenty-five different That Music List features as I can fit within the usual ~120-minute running time.

I've managed to squeeze in twenty (including all of the lesser-spotted ones), and of the five that missed the cut four have appeared within the last three weeks and the other (Straight In At...) will appear three more times between now and Xmas. Job done, then.

I don't have any sizeable essays to write about any of this week's choices, you'll perhaps be relieved to learn, but a few of them do warrant a word or two.

The arrival of a new Nouvelle Vague album reminded me that I've never thought to include any of their sublime bossa nova reinterpretations in any of our cover versions specials (daft, really, given that cover versions is exactly what Nouvelle Vague are all about), or indeed in any other List at all before now.

I'm happy to rectify that situation belatedly here, courtesy of a Then and Now taking in a track from that new collection of Depeche Mode covers alongside a quite mesmerising take on The Cure's A Forest from two decades prior.

The theme of loss inadvertently recurs a few times during this week's List, and it probably behoves me to acknowledge that the continuation of Nouvelle Vague following the passing in 2021 of co-founder Olivier Libaux hasn't sat 100% comfortably with absolutely all of their fanbase. Ditto the various departures, albeit not of this earth, of singers Camille Dalmais, Élodie Frégé, and Mélanie Pain; though on the evidence of this new reading of Enjoy the Silence, you'd do well to convince me that Skye Edwards of Morcheeba doesn't has a voice or presence that fits the Nouvelle Vague idiom neatly.

If Nouvelle Vague make magic from some already pretty nifty tracks of yore, my favourite song of the whole of 2022, It's Over, If We Run Out of Love by David Holmes, turned base metal into pure gold.

I won't bore people with my broader thoughts on Oasis, Oasis spin-offs and their respective material here, beyond noting that Acquiesce is the one such track which stands the greatest chance of ever appearing on a List in its original form.

This is the Place, from the 2019 EP of the same name by Noel Gallagher's post-Oasis vehicle High Flying Birds, did little for me when first seeing the light of day. Take the lyrics from its two verses, however, add them to a chorus and middle eight proffering raging-against-the-light optimism in the face of mounting odds, and set the whole thing to a pulsing synth line, a shimmering guitar riff, Raven Violet's well-judged deadpan and a rhythm track with the perfect combination of restraint and spank, and the alchemy is complete.

Given the acclaim afforded to several of his solo studio albums, the work produced for Killing Eve as one third of Unloved, and a number of his soundtracks, I'd tentatively suggest David Holmes hasn't necessarily always been feted as much as he ought to be as a singles artist. All I know is that in It's Over, If We Run Out of Love and 2008's Martin Rev collaboration I Heard Wonders, David has delivered two of my favourite singles of any genre so far this century.

Saturday, 7 November 2026

LIST 279 - 07/11/2026

Hello again,

Out of tragedy and loss, unadulterated joy.

On a cold Thursday evening just gone in Sheffield, Mariam Doumbia sang the bright, addictive Afro-funk that she and husband Amadou Bagayoko popularised over more than four decades.

Amadou is no longer here, having passed away in spring 2025 at the age of 71. My foolish decision not to see them play a Migration Matters concert at the Leadmill the previous summer thus became an irreversible error. I was never going to make that mistake again this time.

Amadou's fluid, impeccable guitar lines were always going to be tricky for anyone else to replicate, but Sam Dickey, a Californian who'd studied under another titan of Malian music in Toumani Diabate, absolutely nailed the brief (as, in truth, did the remainder of a supremely tight, animated backing band), whilst also serving as Mariam's between-song translator where required.

Either side of a solo appearance by another Sam, Amadou and Mariam's own son (the de facto support act, albeit appearing bang in the middle of the evening's entertainments and at the finish), Mariam offered up a selection drawing from the duo's final studio album L'amour à la folie (whose title track I include this week) all the way back to their early-mid 2000s crossover albums, if not further.

If Sam Dickey's commentaries were taken as gospel, the emphasis appeared to be on the songs in the Amadou and Mariam canon emphasising love, companionship and the sanctity of marriage. Not surprising, arguably, given a marriage of over forty years that had had its origins in the music rooms of Mali's Institute for the Young Blind.

The duo lived these songs. Mariam still can, and whether out of a sense of joy, catharsis, or whatever else, still wants to. I'd be fibbing were I to say I have the linguistic gifts to interpret much of many of them, but a heart-rending reading of 2008's Sabali - sentiments of with you life is beautiful, I give you a big kiss, I hold you tightly, etc., - near the end of the set cut through the language barriers most powerfully of all.

And to that track, and to everything else during an action-packed ninety-minute set, an Octagon Centre audience jumped and celebrated and danced with such enthusiasm as to belie - disguise, even - the fact it was, sadly, barely half full. The wrong choice of venue, perhaps (Crookes Social Club might have suited better), or Bonfire Night competition? Who knows.

Either way, more fool those who stayed away. After all, now 68 years of age herself, who knows how many more global tours this much-loved world fusion pioneer has left.

***

In common with Amadou and Mariam, there is a missed gig element to my journey with The Chameleons, too. Unlike that example, however, it was borne of wanton ignorance.

I mentioned in another recent List that the Middleton quartet hold the distinction of being the musical act which I took longer than any other to "get". Longer than any of the French pop acts I've come to embrace. Longer still than Cardiacs. It must have taken me nearly three decades. Not three decades of continuously trying, mark you, but still.

Hailing from the part of the world covered by Piccadilly Radio, to which I listened day and night through the mid-1980s, I concede at this remove that I may have been introduced to them too early, and that may have soured me.

Compared to the janglier local acts I'd have been listening to contemporaneously, they appeared too intense, not sufficiently poppy, and their ideas seemed to be teased out for too long (Tears, with its I wasn't worried at all motif, was as close as I got to finding them memorable, but for me this too overran). In short, I spurred them for all of the reasons which I would eventually come to love them.

This was a prejudice I carried with me, its validity basically untested beyond failing to engage any more successfully with some of Chameleons leader Mark Burgess and Yves Altana's mid-1990s collaborations, into the 2010s.

It reached its nadir one late spring night in 2011, when deliberately delaying my arrival at Mercury Rev's complete run through Deserter's Songs at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall specifically to miss Mark's then project Chameleons Vox.

I know, what an utter pillock. Recalling this now, it disturbs me somewhat that I was still capable of making such blinkered decisions within the lifetime of this blog (however early on, and before encountering the transformative writings of Tom Ewing, David Bryant et al), whilst actively trying to encourage readers to give new or different stuff a go. Some music lover, that.

The thunderclap moment whereupon everything changed was owed, would you believe, to an online shopping mistake a couple of years after that. Really really.

I can't even remember what it was all these years later that I had ordered from a seller on Discogs. I only know two things. One, it wasn't the CD of The Chameleons' Radio 1 Evening Show sessions which I'd ordered, but it's what arrived. Two, I'm as certain as I can be that I didn't pay anywhere near as much as the £7.40 lowest price which any of the last 30 buyers of that album on Discogs has forked out, otherwise I'd have sought a refund.

Instead, I did what I do with any album I intend to sell or pass on, as sell or pass on I was determined I was going to do, and made sure it played properly. Which I did.

...and immediately fell head over heels for album opener Thursday's Child.

The flinty, agitated quality of Dave Fielding and Reg Smithies's opening guitar salvos. The echoey, fluid guitar washes a little later on. More relatability to the lyrics than I'd ever given the band credit for previously - perhaps serendipitously in the case of this song of years gone by and of ageing. The relative economy of the track at three and a half minutes, give or take.

Not that the length seemed to matter anymore, all of a sudden. Game on. Let's give this a proper go, after all.

A total Damascene conversion this was not, in so far as a few of the session CD's ten tracks still didn't land immediately and wouldn't number among my favourites to this day, but what did land landed with a vengeance. The haunted, two-sectioned hallucination of View from a Hill. The unmet need to be understood of Nathan's Phase (historical resonance for me there). The parallel universe stadium anthem of Home Is Where The Heart Is, icy synths, lurking sense of menace and all. And, perhaps inevitably, Up The Down Escalator, fundamentally as good a post-punk single as has ever been written.

I need hardly add; said CD never did make its appointment with the charity shop or selling-on Jiffy Bag.

Those last two tracks, or at least the studio equivalents thereof, are shared as two parts of this week's A Session of Sorts, together with a personal favourite from turn of the century first reformation long-player Why Call it Anything and a bang on-message track from last year's Arctic Moon to bring the story of The Chameleons, and my relationship with their music, right up to the present day.

I generally tend to shy away from laying on too thick any didactic message in these List essays. However, if there's anything that I'm happy for you to take from such as the above, it would be; revisit and revaluate everything whenever you have opportunity, both the music that's already in your collection and - at least as importantly - the music that isn't, as the listener you were half a lifetime or more ago isn't necessarily going to be the listener you are now.

***

Moving on, an already exceptional year for new output from Cardiacs alumni past and present has been improved yet further by the arrival of Moulded by Industry, the first album by "classic line-up" Cardiacs keyboard wizard William D Drake for eleven years.

A couple of tracks will be familiar as singles from 2023-24; a third, Me Fish Bring, from its original incarnation on 2011's The Rising of the Lights. The remainder, however, is both new and for the greater part influenced by the works of John Clare (1793-1864), "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and in the opinion of some the most powerful writer on both nature and alienation that the rural labouring classes have ever begotten.

If that sounds potentially dry and overly scholarly, worry not - the music isn't. Listeners to Marc Riley (in particular) of late will already be reassured that William's playful, light-touch take on eccentric English almost-pop, chamber music, prog and folk hasn't left him one iota, and there's even a discernible peppy, Europhile cool to parts of Bliss Again (the end of the first two verses each threaten to break briefly into L'Augmentation or Stereolab territory).

It ought to fall upon a more prolific editor of Wikipedia than me to update the entry on John Clare's page listing the instances of his work set to music, as no mention of Moulded by Industry exists four weeks on from its release.

***

Saturday, 31 October 2026

LIST 278 - 31/10/2026

(Gourock Outdoor Pool, as *not* featured in Lido, Darren Hayman's album dedicated to outdoor swimming pools. Maybe in a future sequel? It does have at least one music connection already, being the setting for the video of F.O. Machete's cover of Olivia Newton-John's Physical, q.v. List #77. Picture taken on 28/05/2026 is the author's own)

Hello again,

"Shouldn't Darren Hayman have won some sort of award by now?", Stewart Lee mused in The Sunday Times back in 2012, further dubbing him "the thinking person's indie-pop legend and unaccredited national treasure". Both true.

An extraordinarily wide, rich, thoughtful, intelligent back catalogue added to over the course of more than three decades now has certainly garnered fewer gongs than the critical acclaim afforded to most of it would seemingly justify, with only a Hardest Working Musician award conferred by the Association of Independent Music in 2016 immediately springing to mind.

It would be an act of some hubris on my part to suggest that getting the A Session of Sorts treatment in this week's List goes any way at all towards redressing the balance; more still to claim that the four tracks I've selected here come remotely close to covering every musical or thematic angle of Darren's work. Nevertheless, it's been a pleasure to revisit a number of his albums and singles to finalise a choice of three to go with something from the newly released I'm Your Team long-player.

Note "newly released" as opposed to "new", I'm Your Team having been recorded in its entirety back in 2022 and only now seeing the light. It's easy to imagine there'd been little free time in his schedule to have put it out before now.

Just like the TV Themes EP released only a month prior as The French (thus temporarily reactivating one of Darren's longer standing post-Hefner projects), the new album is largely a vintage synthesizer-led affair - the once ubiquitous Yamaha DX7 predominates.

That's probably about as much of a concept as can be found in I'm Your Team, but it would be remiss to go this entire feature without referencing any of Darren's well-researched yet precisely and economically executed subject-driven collections.

The aforementioned AIM award acknowledged the work undertaken for his Thankful Villages project - not just writing a song about each of the 55 villages to suffer zero losses in World War I and releasing them across three albums, but making a film for each also. Either side of that, it's possible to find albums each dedicated to one of The English Civil War, the works of William Morris, every man to have walked on the moon, the Essex Witch Trials and more besides. He'd dot up in the specialist round of Mastermind.

I couldn't not include something from my favourite Darren Hayman themed album of them all, 2012's delightful and evocative instrumental collection Lido. Fourteen songs, each inspired by one of Britain's open-air swimming pools, replete with field recordings where practicable.

Living as close as I do to (and a user of) one pool not covered, namely Hathersage Pool in the Peak District, I'd like to assume the way to a sequel to Lido some day isn't permanently closed. How Darren would represent by instrumentation only the smell of the village's heavenly chippy, located conveniently few minutes' walk from the pool, might be an interesting challenge.

***

(The Sunbathers - Indietracks Festival, 28/07/2019. Pictures are author's own)

From swimmers to sunbathers, regular readers will remember that the A Loved Album on List #262 from mid July was The Sunbathers' 2018 debut, A Weekend Away With... To this day it remains the newest album to receive such treatment.

The suggestions back in the summer that a long-awaited follow-up may almost be upon us have proven well founded, Answers on a Postcard appearing as September became October on Jenny's Feather Factory, a newish Birmingham imprint run by TV and radio presenter, journalist and consumer champion Adrian Goldberg. Poignantly, the label takes its name from the factory the eponymous Jenny, Adrian's great-aunt and a Holocaust victim, had run in Berlin in happier times.

I'm sure Adrian must find releasing gorgeous indiepop a nice diversion from the day job of exposing sharp practices on the high street or bemoaning football teams' financial impropriety; and releases to date, including a couple from Mighty Mighty alumni The Leaking Machine, speak well of a label so far dedicated entirely to produce from Midlands-based performers.

Answers on a Postcard is self-described on The Sunbathers' Bandcamp presence as "beautiful, moving pop songs". This is no idle boast. That's exactly what it is.

The musical and lyrical influences of yore - The Marine Girls of this world - are still present and correct, but right from the opener Belonging it's evident that the duo's sound has developed into something a bit fuller and more rounded than before. Subtly, mark you, with all twelve tracks still as light, spacious and understated as any from their back catalogue, but perceptibly so nonetheless.

That's perhaps most noticeable in Julie Robinson's vocals. I do love a dual layered vocal when done right, for example to amplify ever so delicately the world-weariness and coping strategies of Make a Deal with the City by East River Pipe. Similarly double layered for this sophomore effort, Julie's delivery nevertheless loses none of its fragility, warmth, pointedness, concern, joy, yearning, or whatever else each song in turn requires, additionally holding its own comfortably set against the expanded instrumentation, from piano to vibraslap.

Rare are the songs which move me to the point of tears despite me having nothing personally invested in their protagonists. Be Selfish by The Montgolfier Brothers, certainly. A number of tracks from the first two Trembling Blue Stars albums, absolutely. Some of Nev Clay's, too, from Demons at the end of last century all the way up to I Flew a Flag this year.

You can add more than one song from Answers on a Postcard to that list. Not necessarily exactly the same songs each time, but always Devotion, which I think I must consider The Sunbathers' career highlight to this point. A powerful piece concerning coercive control in a relationship, given an extra atmosphere of unease and discomfort by the uncommon five-four time signature and a piano accompaniment with just the right measure of jar and fraction of discordance.

Devotion is a startling piece of work, and I have no hesitation in sharing it with you this week. It will not be, you'll doubtless have guessed, the only track from the album that will feature in a List in the immediate to short term, either.

A rumination on the often difficult path from being lovers to friends, and for me another highlight among a strong collection overall, it wouldn't surprise were I to learn that Common Ground resonates personally with many who hear it. Whether that has ever included myself, you'll have to guess.

(The Sunbathers - Indietracks Festival, 28/07/2019. Picture is author's own)

***

With the release yesterday of new long-player Égrégore, this feels like the perfect moment to do a Then and Now feature on Mylène Farmer, for over four decades now the forever reinventing, medium-straddling, restlessly creative and staggeringly successful (as in, 26 number one singles and 18 number one albums levels of successful) queen of French pop music.

Returning to a theme from last week of just not getting an act until many years after first contact with their work (c.f. Cardiacs), I would have heard Mylène for the first time in August 1991, when the Pet Shop Boys played Désenchantée - then only recently deposed from the top spot in the French hit parade, and to this day still the biggest-selling single by a French female artist in France - during a week-long standing in for Simon Bates on BBC Radio 1.

I was... interested up to a point in Désenchantée (a track originally informed by student demonstrations in France against class sizes, etc. - some things never change), but ultimately not won over there and then, finding it too labyrinthine and elongated to be A Pop Single. Fast forward a decade and a few plays of a then girlfriend's copy of it, I was loving it for exactly the same reasons.

Je suis désolé, Mylène - and Neil and Chris, too, for interpreting your love of the single as borne of archness rather than heartfelt enthusiasm, the berk that I am. In actual fact, when Neil would have a top ten hit with Electronic's Disappointed a year later, he freely admitted he derived much of its inspiration from this stunning source material.

Whilst C'est à qui le tour, the latest album's official lead but de facto second single, feels almost conventional by Mylène's standards as a sub-three minute verse-chorus-verse electropop track (the sexually desolate lyrics notwithstanding), much else about Égrégore and its promotion is characteristically ambitious. The tribute to David Lynch. The borrowing from esoteric terminology. A cast of star producers from DJ Snake to Moby. And, not least, a 65-minute video-cum-concert-cum-documentary accompaniment with a small-scale theatre release.

Snatches from that film, and/or compilations of other promotional video highlights lifted from Mylène's extensive career portfolio, accompany some of the available YouTube clips for C'est à qui le tour. You'll forgive me, however, if I've gone instead for plainer alternatives, remaining mindful that the transgressive nature of a number of her videos - from the concentration camp setting of the extended Désenchantée promo to the tribute to Olivier de Sagazan's disturbing clayface art in À l'ombre - has the potential to be triggering.

***

Among this week's other many treats, you may particularly also like:

Other new or at least not ancient material from Dog Unit, The Sewing Club, Moses Boyd ft SHANTÈH and Dexys Midnight Runners. The last named can be added to the list of father-son relationship songs that I reckon are miles better than The Living Years - see also Golden Goal by Pete Green and Come Here My Daddy by XTC.

A brief chance to relive Bette Davis & the Balconettes, who still count as the edgiest, most intimidating proposition I've ever come across in four decades of enjoying indiepop. Fizzy, aggressive, shouty (but unarguably great) tunes performed by a mob with the collective disposition of a buzzsaw, there are probably still a number of late-1990s Mancunian gig-goers who twitch and convulse at the recollection of being practically decapitated by one of Tracey Rees's violently hurled bass guitars.

Dave Stewart. No, not that one. The interesting one, of Hatfield & The North, Egg and It's My Party fame. Although gaining most commercial traction at the start of the 1980s once reinterpreting 1960s classics as leftfield synth tracks, the ability to pen a solid pop song had far from deserted him by then; hence the b-side of What Becomes of the Brokenhearted included here.

Björk, seen here in her role as the visually compromised Selma in Lars von Trier's polarising but ultimately Palme d'Or-winning tragedy musical Dancer in the Dark from 2000. The Thom Yorke duet from the same movie soundtrack is the one that garners the most airplay to this day, but, whisper it, I've always preferred the sheer ambition of Cvalda, a perfect union of the song and dance energy of It's Oh So Quiet and Mark Bell's subtle machine clanks (actual machines this time, too, considering the factory floor upon which Selma and colleagues break into song). Uploading this one returned some bittersweet memories, in truth, Dancer in the Dark being among those I'd have seen at the big screen film nights semi-regularly put on at the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough around the turn of the century. The theatre is no longer there, and neither, no less sadly, are some of my then town library colleagues with whom I'd have watched it.

Still on films, a quite literally electrifying performance from the recently departed Gerrit Graham, taken from his performance as Beef in Phantom of the Paradise, Brian de Palma's 1974 glam-rock retelling of Faust via The Picture of Dorian Gray. Only a year younger than the stage original of The Rocky Horror Show, but therefore also released a year before that one's film version, Phantom of the Paradise feels to me as if it's lived in that cult juggernaut's shadow for much of its existence but is a fine piece of work in its own right. Funny, grisly, parodic, subversive, satirical and camp, do seek it out and give it a try if you haven't already.

The late Victor Lewis-Smith, heard in phone prank call mode at the start of a choice track from ambient figureheads The Orb's 1992 crossover hit album. Ending this List, as Victor did many of his own programmes, with the Associated-Rediffusion adastral star logo and jingle, would have been a nice touch. I'm not quite that good, though.

***

(The only smashing pumpkins you'll ever find in this blog. Pictures taken on 31/10/2020 are author's own)

There's no Halloween special this year, incidentally, despite this List having fallen on the very date. However, do please enjoy the one previous TML Does Halloween in the archive (List #214 dating back to 2016), dusted down and with newly fixed links.

The nearest thing to a concession to the season this week is actually the Trembling Blue Stars track - "These are haunted days / bonfire scented autumn days"... indeed so.

J xx

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DOG UNIT - Tiny Diversions (2026)