That Music List: 2026

Saturday, 22 August 2026

LIST 268 – 22/08/2026

(Helen McCookerybook - Going Up the Country, Church House Inn, Congleton 14/06/2015. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

First up, a very big thank you to everyone who has continued to support That Music List with your patronage right through high summer.

This is actually the first time since 2012 (season four) that I've kept the blog going throughout August, instead often opting to end a season right after the Indietracks festival in July; and the comparatively low number of visits for the last two Lists in particular presumably speak to people's competing priorities at this time of year (outside activities, holidays, etc.).

Your interest in the music I like to share on here is nothing which I take for granted, and it's a pleasure to serve you. Thanks again.

In terms of listening pleasure this week, the return of Teenage Fanclub rates an inevitable personal highlight, if one virtually impossible to condense into just the four songs - including the brand new Day in the Sun - for A Session of Sorts.

As well as that one, plus a favourite from 2023 and a splendid Thirteen era out-take, the irony of including a b-side by departed bassist and co-founder Gerard Love entitled Please Stay is not lost on me.

Comments left with practically each and every one of the band's videos on YouTube, Facebook posts, etc. suggest that some fans are taking longer than others to forgive the nature of Love's departure all of eight years ago now (predicated on an aversion to regular global air travel, if memory serves); and a musical shift, subtle but tangible nevertheless, has indeed come upon the band since.

I'm more inclined to give thanks for the almost two decades of Love's work with Teenage Fanclub than lament what has followed, especially as what has followed is still exceptionally good by most standards.

Yes, the power-pop hooks and greater immediacy of a lot of Love's work are missed, and I'm not sure a Sparky's Dream or Star Sign would or could ever come from one of his erstwhile colleagues. Nevertheless, Norman Love's killer ear for classic '70s American songwriting and Ray McGinley's often more cerebral wordplay and structures are still two tricks executed expertly when many bands barely manage one.

Long may they prosper. Incidentally, A Session of Sorts is already the second of our raft of new features to have included Teenage Fanclub since TML returned (the occasional series of instrumentals featured them back in List #246) and, spoiler alert, they'll be back again in another before the year's out.

Going even further back to That Music List's earliest possible history, I was reminded when fixing its links the other week that TML #1 included the characteristically smart, quirky, catchy Knickerbocker by Brighton electronic / nu-disco favourites Fujiya & Miyagi. Lo and behold, what should turn up within days of that but the lead track from the tenth - count them - studio album New Shiny Object, due out during autumn half term week.

Very much business as usual here, but that usual business is of course usually very good, David Best's familiar repeated, almost whispered vocal style, the Krautrock tinged keys and all. The well is in no danger of running dry 26 years into the band's existence on this admittedly limited evidence.

(An aside of I suspect limited interest, but still; of all of the acts to feature on that very first List back in February 2009, I've realised that every one of them has made further appearances in these pages over the ensuing years bar two - Circulus and Robotnik. I'm sure that can probably be put right, and probably ought to have long before now).

Among the myriad (or slightly fewer) other highlights this week, you might also like:

New, or at least not ancient, releases from Hollow Hand, Tony Bontana and Robber Robber.

Among the best-known tracks by former Chef and very much present-day academic and writer Helen McCookerybook (Dr Helen Reddington). She's at the Controls, Helen's 2021 work on female producers and engineers (feel free to follow this Bookshop.org link), grows ever nearer the top of my to-read pile.

Following on from an old-but-new theme of last week, November 89 is a newly reissued piece from Wolfgang Voigt, perhaps best known whenever featured on these pages for his dark techno/ambient vehicle Gas. It is perhaps less bucolic or hallucinogenic and more harsh than what was to come in seminal Gas releases such as Pop and Königsforst, and if anything gives off a horror soundtrack vibe, but that makes it no less fascinating an historical artefact.

Also old-but-new, The Offs meet WrongTom sees the south London DJ/producer give some tracks from the 1970s/1980s San Franciscan punk-reggae pioneers his particular band of dub treatment. The route to getting these to see the light of day has been tortuous, The Offs' initial momentum four decades ago chopped at the legs by lead singer Don Vinil's unexpected passing, and WrongTom's The Offs in Dub project subsequently left album-less for a long while by label boss David Ferguson's own demise. Here at last on Bandcamp, however, are at least some of the fruits of their labours.

The one top 40 hit - eventually; it required some reissuing - by Latin Quarter, whose Modern Times debut album from 1985 remains a favourite in this household. For the life of me I can't find the Bluesky post repeated not so long ago when the relevant 1986 edition of Top of the Pops was last repeated. The gist of it, however, was that nothing summarised the eighties more perfectly than Steve Skaith observing there are more tanks than food in the Ogaden one minute, followed by a pink woollens-clad Su Pollard singing a TV wedding show theme the next. Yep.

A terrific, empowering number by radical San Franciscan industrial hip-hoppers Consolidated, this time in league with self-styled vaginacore slam poets The Yeastie Girlz. It was always fascinating to watch this getting a spin at Oldham's alt. nightclubs of the early-mid 1990s - and many spins it got - and see the colour drain out of the faces of certain lads when they realised what they'd just sung along to. YouTube footage suggests vocalist Adam Sherburne performs this one himself at Consolidated gigs to the present day.

J xx

KILLING JOKE – Eighties (1984)

HOLLOW HAND - Heavy Metal T-Shirt (2026)

THE KITCHEN - Blind Tease (2003)

DJANGO DJANGO - In Your Beat (2017)

THEN AND NOW: Fujiya & Miyagi
FUJIYA & MIYAGI - Lowest Common Denominator (2026)
FUJIYA & MIYAGI - Pussyfooting (2008)

A SESSION OF SORTS: Teenage Fanclub
TEENAGE FANCLUB - Foreign Land (2023)

TONY BONTANA ft LEO SIERRA - Recoup (2026)

AIRIEL - Shirley Temple Tidal Wave (demo version) (1997)

JANE WEAVER - Stages of Phases (2021)

THE SHOCKER – Smoke Rings (2003)

HELEN AND THE HORNS – Freight Train (1984)

DANCE HALL AT PEEL ACRES
GANG RELATED & MASK - Not Not (1996)

A SESSION OF SORTS: Teenage Fanclub
TEENAGE FANCLUB - Day in the Sun (2026)
TEENAGE FANCLUB - Mad Dog 20/20 (1993/1994)

LIGHTNING IN A TWILIGHT HOUR – The Pattern Room (2015)

LATIN QUARTER - Radio Africa (1985)

HELEN LOVE – Calm Down Dad (2009)

THE LOVELY EGGS - I Nearly Saw a Stabbing Last Night (2015)

THE OFFS MEET WRONGTOM - Cool Dub (198n/2026)

(No video available - please click on this Bandcamp link)

BULLETPROOF
CONSOLIDATED and the YEASTIE GIRLS - You Suck (1993)

A SESSION OF SORTS: Teenage Fanclub
TEENAGE FANCLUB - Please Stay (2005)

ROBBER ROBBER - Again (2026)

MARK HOLLIS - The Colour of Spring (1998)

MILES HUNT - These Things Remembered (Not At All) (2007)

GUI & ADHI - Turiya (2024)

IN LOVING MEMORY: John Douglas
THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS - Obscurity Knocks (1990)

THE LONG GOODBYE
WOLFGANG VOIGT - November 89 (1989/2026)

Saturday, 15 August 2026

LIST 267 - 15/08/2026

(Liechtenstein - Indietracks Festival, 26/07/2008. Pictures are author's own)

Hello again,

Trust you have all survived another abnormally hot week in most of Britain without melting, and remembered not to stare too long into the eclipse.

The Nev Clay session on 6 Music this week was predictably, reassuringly lovely, was it not? It'll be free to listed to in the expected places for a while longer, and I can't recommend you doing so enough if you missed it.

Since we spoke last week, I've accelerated the process of updating the older Lists from 2009-2018. Exactly thirty have now been so treated which means, added to this year's 31 editions (and counting), just shy of a quarter of all Lists have fully working embedded links and are otherwise as user-friendly as I can get them.

What brought on this spurt of action? Not a desperate attempt to wring further clicks out of ancient copy. Absolutely not, your honour. Rather, until going back through them all again the other week I hadn't realised just how many were in need of significant repair.

It wasn't surprising that many links from the 2009 era had broken in the intervening seventeen years. It was more surprising, however, how much the formatting of many more recent Lists had appeared to have gone awry - tiny fonts, texts in (or even highlighted in) inappropriately stinging colours, etc. At this remove, I couldn't possibly begin to identify a cause.

There's no particular logic to the order in which I'm updating stuff - it's more fun just dipping into the archive and enjoying songs for (in many cases) the first time in absolute years whilst I perform my repairs.

If I were to draw your attention to any of the latest updated Lists, however, they would be #156 (a Tim Smith tribute), #222 and #224 (a two-part 1996 special containing not actually very many of the choices in Tom Ewing's current World Cup of 1996 competition elsewhere in Cyberspace) and #231 (a Mark E Smith tribute).

***

As regards this week's additions to the TML annals? You may or may not be pleased to learn I don't have extended pieces on any of the selections this time around, but I do feel moved to recommend the following nevertheless;

New or at least not ancient stuff from Lael Neale, Arun Sood & Angeline Morrison, Kavus Torabi, Kwamé Bâ and Castle Dragon, the last-named doing a neat line in fantasy costumed metal.

An old-but-new release of a track from the vaults of the Wellington, New Zealand-based World Resources, a label given to putting out noise pop and drone tracks (think an Aotearoan take on Flying Saucer Attack's rural psychedelia) on home-recorded tapes and lathe-cut vinyl in tiny, hard to find batches. A new compilation, Fully Nowhere, attempts to bring some of the label highlights - including some previously unreleased - together at last, and my choice from it of a track by Surface of the Earth is quite deliberate, all of the songs on the compilation featuring between one or more of that pivotal act's three members.

Two tracks twenty years apart from Frànçois Marry, someone whose career has been followed enthusiastically in this household ever since the days of his self-published Frànçois et Luc releases at the start of the century. Frànçois's ongoing Atlas Mountains project has been a constant source of delight across ten varied, wide-eyed albums now, only the third of which - 2009's Plaine Inondable - I've ever had the pleasure to see done live, in a rightly captivated Betsey Trotwood in London. More fool me.

A quick highlight from Dawn Landes's 2009 Sweetheart Rodeo long-player as a heads-up that she plays a collector's item British gig at the Golden Hinde in London this coming Monday (the 17th). I understand I missed her play in Dresden by no more than a couple of days when I was out that way recently. Nnnnkkk.

Liechtenstein, one of the real finds of the first Indietracks I attended back in 2008, and pictured at the top of this List on that festival's very short-lived outdoor truck stage. I can't remember whether I've ever added photos of this arrangement previously, but how on earth the massed ranks of the likes of The Deirdres or Red Pony Clock squeezed onto it without any toppling off the front is something I'll live to a hundred and never not ponder. A proper stage would replace it for 2009.

The standout from the 1993 debut LP of future She Wants Revenge frontperson Justin Warfield. There's a more impressive cast list supporting this than I'd ever realised at the time - Beastie Boys and Prince Paul for starters.

A personal favourite from one-time Sub Pop act The Grifters, whose namechecking of The Colorblind James Experience in Last Man Alive came back to mind when the latter featured on last week's List.

A Long Goodbye from downtempo duo The Woodleigh Research Facility which could have counted as a belated In Loving Memory, featuring as it does the late Andrew Weatherall alongside fellow Sabres of Paradise and Sabrettes co-founder Nina Walsh.

This week's actual In Loving Memory, a John Peel-released, note-perfect pastiche of Joe Cocker that serves as a perfect reminder of the extraordinary and frequently underestimated musical talents of the recently departed Bill Oddie. Not a gibbon or black pudding to be seen.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 12/08/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

HEARTWORMS - Jacked (2025)

AIR - Kelly Watch the Stars (1998)

DAWN LANDES - Clown (2009)

LAEL NEALE - Slip Away (2026)

EUROTASTIC
BABYS GANG - Challenger (1984)

THEN AND NOW: Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains
FRÀNÇOIS & THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS – Slow Steps in the Snow (2025)
FRÀNÇOIS & THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS – I’m So Glad I Met You (2005)

SETH FAERGOLZIA – Doubting Won’t Do (2014)

THE CLEARS - Rock ‘N Roll Band (1997)

ARUN SOOD & ANGELINE MORRISON - A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn' Agad (2026)

GRIZZLY BEAR – Ready, Able (2009)

NINA NASTASIA - Stormy Weather (2000)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
LIECHTENSTEIN - Stalking Skills (2007)

SCIENTISTROCK
SURFACE OF THE EARTH - Commandcom (199n/2026)

DEERHUNTER – All the Same (2015)

THE FATIMA MANSIONS – Go Home Bible Mike (1992)

RITON PRESENTS GUCCI SOUNDSYSTEM ft JARVIS COCKER - Let’s Stick Around (2021)

THE GRIFTERS - Last Man Alive (1996)

KAVUS TORABI - Water into Wine (2026)

RAPPING SONGS
JUSTIN WARFIELD - Fisherman’s Grotto (1993)

I WAS AN ARMCHAIR RAVER
ENERGISE – Report to the Dance Floor (Full Alert Mix) (1990)

KWAMÉ BA - Lévé (2026)

THE FRUMPIES – Eunuch Nights (1998)

CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG – Anna (2011)

CASTLE RAT - Dragon (2026)

GRAM RABBIT – Dirty Horse (2004)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Bill Oddie
BILL ODDIE - On Ilkla Moor Baht'at (1970)

THE LONG GOODBYE
THE WOODLEIGH RESEARCH FACILITY - Heat to Meat Ratio (2026)

Saturday, 8 August 2026

LIST 266 – 08/08/2026

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

Hello again,

This List comes to you live from my own attic study for the first time in four weeks, following the recent extended jaunt to see friends and family in Germany. It's nice to be home, certainly; though as the only linguist in the house, I suddenly find myself a bit less needed and valuable once more. Everyone here is quite good at ordering food, buying museum tickets and following instructions in English, y'see. Ah well, roll on the next foreign jaunt.

I haven't returned from overseas with armfuls of (or indeed, any) vinyl and CDs, as it's not all about me these days in the same way as it might have been three decades ago. I'm not sure they'd all have survived the trip back in the car, anyway, given the prevailing ferocious heat - not all of the chocolate gifts did.

I did, however, pick up a few leads as to where to look online for the present-day equivalents of all of those wonderful German language alternative/indiepop/DIY/everything else compilations that had so fired my enthusiasm for Germany's non-mainstream acts twenty to thirty years ago (the likes of Tapeta's five volumes of Müssen alle mit, Trikont's ...Mama series and Mermer's all female-fronted sampler Bleib gold, Mädchen).

If those leads take me to anything new and wonderful, I'll be certain to share them on here in the fulness of time.

More immediately, an afternoon spent waiting for successive loads of holiday washing to complete granted me a few unexpectedly free-ish hours, which I spent updating another trio of the older Lists in the back catalogue.

Thus newly reformatted and with all of the (at least) 17-year-old links repaired are Lists #05, #06 and #07, all from spring 2009.

#05 is most noteworthy to me for featuring a pre-fame, pre-full band, pre-everything else performance by Elizabeth Morris of List #253 stars Allo Darlin' on the roof of her flat. What an adventure both the band and its fans enjoyed subsequently. #06 and #07, meanwhile, are the two halves of an Annie Nightingale Request Show special, as the name suggests featuring some well-loved - and in some cases pretty frequently played - tracks from the since deceased godmother of Radio 1's cult Sunday evening show of the 1980s and early 1990s. Yes, Fish Heads is in there somewhere...

***

Be all that as it may. What of this week's actual selection?

It's a joy to be able to include something from the forthcoming first bona fide album by The Yummy Fur this century, interest in the band in most recent times having been upheld - bolstered, even - by Rock Action's release of the Piggy Wings career retrospective in 2019 and a gradual increase in live activity since.

Unity Over Europe sounds like one would hope a new Yummy Fur track would, in the way that the new Prolapse album of last year similarly met expectations - revisiting familiar fertile ground without ultimately offering only a pale facsimile of previous glories.

It's a muscular, abrasive, addictive number with as much of a nod to early (say, circa Warm Jets era) Eno as post-punk musically and some suitably surreal, recondite art and literature references in the lyrics over which to chew.

The set lists of this year's gigs to date suggest that this new material can sit cosily alongside some of the 90- to 120-second bursts of art/cinema/nightclub-themed punk-pop of yore - the likes of Kirsty Cooper and Plastic Cowboy happily survive. I'd certainly like to see them again, John McKeown having generally made for a sarcastic but winning frontperson whenever our paths crossed back in the day ("I have a cold tonight, so you'll have to forgive me for sounding like sexy Tom Waits" is one particular remembered favourite from a Manchester gig).

It's amazing how things come full circle. My first encounter of The Yummy Fur was at the Slampt Underground Organisation 540-Minute Festival in Newcastle almost exactly 29 years ago - August 23rd, 1997, to be precise. I can't remember the precise order of the later acts, but as far as anyone was designated the headliner among the thirteen playing that day, it was probably them.

Many hours prior to that, however, the Cumberland Arms venue had been hushed into enraptured silence by the achingly beautiful, lovely, sad, funny, poignant tales of one Nev Clay, at the time operating under his alias of Brenda System (a reference to the psychosocial intervention framework one assumes he may have used to treat substance and alcohol abusers during his time as a mental health nurse).

That, too, was my first experience of Nev's work; but as those of you who have been following That Music List since its reactivation in January may remember, Nev's solo gig in York last summer helped light the touchpaper under my return to seeing, writing about and generally falling hard in love with music again. Whether he realises it or not, I've a lot for which to thank him.

Hence the inclusion of Leaving Do in the first List back (q.v. #237), and hence also the flagging up of two things this week. First, a new Riley and Coe session by Nev this coming Wednesday (August 12th). Second, a new mini-LP, Until I Forget, limited to 200 vinyl copies and featuring the previous BBC session from autumn 2024 plus three revisited tracks and a new one.

That newie, a track evidently conceived and realised almost in its entirety at 4.30am one day last year, I find just as heart-rending and affecting as I did the likes of Demons and IDST in that initial live encounter all those years ago. A gifted, humble, lovely man, a fine storyteller and a gregarious stage presence, Nev is a national treasure hidden from view more than many, which is a pity.

***

Among the many other nice things this week, you might also like:

Stealing Sheep, for me one of the absolute highlights of what turned out to be the final in-person Indietracks festival just over seven years ago now (sob). A riot of gold capes, funky tunes and winsome choreography, I could easily have seen them being invited back repeatedly judged solely on the crowd's reaction, had circumstances permitted. My quest to find a full version of the plinky electropop reboot of early track Shut Eye with which they concluded their set goes on.

The latest rummage around in the Scrabble bag of indiepop royalty, from which have been pulled out two Heavenlys, a Dolly Mixture and a Trashcan Sinatra to form Railcard. Unstable Neighbour is a thing of joy, beguiling harmonies, propulsive two-chord chugging, echoey brass and all. That all augurs well for the forthcoming album.

More new, or at least not ancient, stuff from Phoebe Bridgers, Test Card, This Is Lorelei, Argonaut and Vanishing Twin (in the case of the last-named, those echoes of peak Broadcast are very much still tangible, even without former Broadcast alumnus Phil MFU among their number these days).

As with Hubert Kah in List #240, an act in Inker & Hamilton to have benefited significantly for a small part of the 1980s from a collaboration with crack producer and musician Michael Cretu, he later of Enigma fame. We'll be seeing Michael performing in his own right on these pages before the month's out, too.

Another fascinating artefact from Sheffield's indie/pop/punk/etc. prehistory. B Troop would have been around at the same sort of time as Chris Sievey's pre-Frank Sidebottom combo The Freshies across the Pennines, and with my eyes closed I could almost imagine Junior passing as one of Chris's mini masterpieces, allowing for Kevin Donoghue's less adenoidal vocals.

A song by The Colorblind James Experience which doesn't concern a relocation to a city in Tennessee.

Something from Black Uhuru briefly but heavily played on the likes of Piccadilly Radio in the mid-1980s. I had always assumed that this fine single, plus the parent album Brutal, was a Sly & Robbie production, but a re-read of the sleeve notes credits no less significant a figure in Arthur Baker. Major international hits eluded them still, but from a critical perspective this was the band's imperial phase nonetheless, Brutal joining 1984's Anthem in being Grammy nominated, if not quite matching that one's award victory.

A tribute to the recently departed Jennifer Finch of L7, and a track very deliberately chosen for the fact she created, wrote and performed lead vocals on it. And for the other fact that it absolutely spanks.

To finish, my favourite track from the whole of 2019, a decision not due solely to having seen Bilge Pump performing it live at Delicious Clam in Sheffield earlier that year, but at the same time done no harm by that either. It's probably not hard to imagine how those guitar and bass riffs, pounding over and over for north of eight minutes, gradually commanded that small venue.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 07/08/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

ARETHA FRANKLIN - (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone (1968)

PHOEBE BRIDGERS - Lost Boys (2026)

MINOR THREAT - Straight Edge (1981)

CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY & BOLIS PUPUL - Blenda (2021)

THEN AND NOW: The Yummy Fur
THE YUMMY FUR - Unity over Europe (2026)
THE YUMMY FUR - Stereo Girls (1997)

EUROTASTIC
INKER & HAMILTON - Dancing into Danger (1987)

TEST CARD - Telnet to Telex (2026)

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER - Up Up (2009)

B.TROOP – Junior (1980)

CASIOTONE FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE – Goodbye Parthenon (2011)

YES, THEY DID OTHER SONGS AS WELL
THE COLORBLIND JAMES EXPERIENCE - A Different Bob (1987)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s
BLACK UHURU - Great Train Robbery (1986)

NEV CLAY - I Flew a Flag (2026)

THE AMPS – Pacer (1995)

AUGUST ACTUALLY – Another Fucking Love Song (2015)
(No video available - please click on this Bandcamp link)

COSEY FANNI TUTTI - Curæ (2025)

NEKO CASE – I’m from Nowhere (2013)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
STEALING SHEEP - Jokin’ Me (2019)

NO LANGUAGE IN OUR LUNGS
THE SMITHS - Oscillate Wildly (1985)

THIS IS LORELEI - Oh No Now My (2026)

BRATMOBILE – Girl Germs (1991)

BEACH HOUSE - All The Years (2008)

ARGONAUT - Hats Off (2026)

SCIENTISTROCK
FLYING SAUCER ATTACK – Instrumental 2 (2015)

DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT
BRITTA - Ich würde Flyer drucken lassen (1998)

VANISHING TWIN - Sugar Stone (2026)

EAST RIVER PIPE - We’re Going to Nowhere (1996)

BLECTUM FROM BLECHDOM – Mummys Secret Storage (2002)

RAILCARD - Unstable Neighbour (2026)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Jennifer Finch
L7 - Everglade (1992)

FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2019
BILGE PUMP - The Passion of the Kid

Saturday, 1 August 2026

LIST 265 – 01/08/2026

(In the absence of any more relevant a picture this week, here is Reginald Grayson taking a brief few moments off being a trip hazard made flesh to pose with my CD of Sort Of by Schwermut Forest. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

"Do you know Mysterious Art?", my German exchange partner Steffen asked me early on my second exchange visit to him and his family, over the autumn 1989 half term.

Despite the Carl Orff-sampling, Goethe-quoting Das Omen (Teil 1) by Mysterious Art having spent nine weeks atop the German charts earlier that year, I did not know them. That situation didn't last long.

A purchase of the cassette version of the Omen - The Story parent album from the Giessen branch of Karstadt was duly completed before the return home. It's seen a heck of a lot of use ever since.

I wouldn't have had the wisdom to know at the time, and it would be pretentious to suggest otherwise at this remove, but Omen - The Story was a probably a more significant piece of work in the scheme of things than many (and certainly I) would have realised; a synthpop album so heavily, yet accessibly, inflected with darkwave leanings as to count as a crossover album.

It certainly did big numbers at home, and garnered Mysterious Art the support slot on the German leg of Madonna's Blond Ambition tour.

UK pop pickers will have likely missed the career of Mysterious Art under that name in its entirety, but not that of subsequent incarnation Magic Affair, who netted three top 40 hits with a paler imitation of the original - one that basically cashed in on the early-mid 1990s commercial apex of Eurodance.

In nominating four tracks from Omen - The Story for this week's A Loved Album, I'm not going to include Das Omen (Teil 1) again, as both the album version and its vastly superior, Alfred Hitchcock-prologued 12" darkwave dancefloor remix have featured on Lists previously.

There's still plenty to love about the choices I have made, however. In particular, listen to Requiem and try to tell me that Rollo and Ayalah from Faithless don't owe it an enormous debt.

And as for Steffen? I was round his place with our respective families only this last week just gone. Effectively four decades' worth of friendship, laughter and growing (old) in unison, with music seldom if ever absent from the background (especially during Eurovision week).

***

If you've noticed an upturn in the quantity of German or German language material in this and the past couple of Lists, I can confirm that there is no coincidence about that.

My listening habits generally slant towards (re)familiarisation with such music ahead of any trip over there, by way of practice of and exposure to German's timbres and structures. By the time you read this preamble, I will have just returned from spending some time variously in bits of Hesse and Saxony visiting family and friends respectively, assuming this isn't the trip on which I finally inadvertently overdose on the varieties of Ritter Sport you can't get in Britain.

Apart from Mysterious Art, I'm happy to introduce you to Schwermut Forest for, I suspect in most cases, the first time. As punning band names go, that's a corker - Schwermut translates as melancholy, but obviously sounds like a certain verdant, lush and historically famous part of the Midlands.

It also offers a hint as to this 1990s Munich band's seeming fixation upon many things British, and British alternative music of the time in particular. Opening album Pilot could easily have passed as a German reading of New Fast Automatic Daffodils' deadpan alt.funk in places, whilst Guten Tag - included here - from sophomore effort Sort Of is pure Gorkys Zygotic Mynci pastoral pleasure.

Twenty-seven years since that last album, the chances of a third from Schwermut Forest must rate as slim. Never say never, though, as the latest reactivation of this week's Then and Now subject Pink Turns Blue goes to show.

A staple of those Rough Trade Music for the 90s compilations ubiquitous in the CD racks of any German alternative music shop for what felt like eternity, the skittish genre hopping of yore (post-baggy felt a particularly awkward fit) appears to have calmed down somewhat these days, with sole remaining founder member and frontperson Mic Jogwer mining a more conventional indie rock seam, albeit one with more nods to post-punk and darkwave than that otherwise dread term can and will usually accommodate.

Finally on all things German, our occasional Isn't That...? feature catches up with the early-1990s work of one Jens Müller, then more simply known as J, and a rap-rock crossover in Born on the Wrong Side of Town which feels very much of its time stylistically and attitudinally. It's the guest star in the promo that's of no less interest here, however - recognise the diner?

Saturday, 25 July 2026

LIST 264 – 25/07/2026

(In the absence of any more relevant a picture this week, here is Bernard Grayson taking a brief few moments off from decimating the local squirrel population to pose with my CD of Fjorden by Barbara Morgenstern. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

A hypothesis with which to start this week.

The Hamburger Schule - a pivotal movement in German music, developing a new intellectual and cultural aesthetic, and exclusively Germanophone (at least initially).

That's one take, at any rate.

Another would be that the Hamburger Schule ultimately coalesced around too many places outside Hamburg to be as geographically definable a movement as, say, Madchester; that those at its original Hamburg epicentre had their tongues firmly in cheek throughout (Tocotronic's sarcastic Ich bin neu an der Hamburger Schule; in L'Age D'Or a Germanophone "scene" label with a French name); and that the musical influences of the movement's notional roster far, far exceeded the commonly cited touchstones such as Pavement and The Fall.

Whatever. What's not in dispute is that Tocotronic proved among the Schule's penny number of breakout acts and commercial winners. Twenty years on, the withering analysis of civil disquiet at home shared in this week's List feels no less relevant.

Active for broadly as long as Tocotronic, but operating in a different musical orbit, A Loved Album this week shines a light on Fjorden, the third album (second full-length) by Hagen-born electronica artist and latter day contemporary classical composer Barbara Morgenstern.

A definite developmental step on from previous outings, Barbara's then beloved 1970s issue East German Vermona ET 6-1 (which gave her second album its name) still features prominently on Fjorden, but there are sumptuous, wide-screen instrumentals, agitated beats, record player needle crackles and woozy sound manipulations to enjoy alongside the organ-driven pop. It's the sound of an artist increasing her repertoire, gradually and comfortably.

We touched briefly last week on the seemingly inextricable relationship between an artist and a label, and for the thick end of seventeen years Morgenstern was as much synonymous with (if not solely a recording artist for) Monika Enterprise of Berlin as List #265 guests Wolfsheim were with Strange Ways Records.

An outlet for former Malaria! and Einstürzende Neubauten alumnus Gudrun Gut's releases of music by and for people tired of mainstream club-driven sounds (be they dance or indie), Monika numbers among that small handful of labels whose output I have been able to trust implicitly for at least part of their existence - pretty much all of the first decade of this century in this instance. See also Pickled Egg Records, Wurlitzter Jukebox and - inevitably - Sarah Records thence Shinkansen.

There is a German element to the inclusion from excellent Irish shoegaze/dreampopper Keeley, too, in as much as Seeing Things, like much of her past few year's output, concerns the disappearance and murder in 1988 of teenage German backpacker Inga Maria Hauser.

It remains one of Northern Ireland's highest profile cold cases; and whilst some may wonder whether a forensic examination of Inga the person, Inga the tourist and ultimately Inga the blameless victim is appropriate material for an album (let alone multiple albums), nothing about Keeley Moss's interviews in such as the Irish World over the years would have you worrying that the interest is anything other than utterly sincere and respectful.