That Music List: LIST 239

Hello again,

Hope you're all keeping well and, if reading this from anywhere in the UK at the moment, somehow managing to stay dry.

This week's List starts with almost a minute of tape loading and screeching from a ZX Spectrum home computer of over four decades ago. Odd, perhaps, but hopefully not too taxing on your ears (you're welcome to suggest some of my actual musical choices are more disagreeable!), and the context is important.

Chris Sievey, ex-Freshie and soon to be Frank Sidebottom, had computer programming as well as musical chops, and applied both to create a video to 1983 single Camouflage which could be played on your Speccy at the same time as the record spun round.

Only trouble was, the computer file from which to upload the Camouflage video was on the b-side of the single itself, rather than a separate cassette; and the success rate of cutting computer files onto vinyl in the first place, let alone the end user loading them from said vinyl, was rather poor.

Starting around the same time, a smattering of software houses would sometimes pursue a more conventional means to broadly the same end, adding music to the flip side of some of their computer game releases on cassette. That was usually an unrelated song from an act new to or low down the Virgin Records roster in the case of Virgin Games releases (no bundling of a dodgy, generic platform game or Pengo clone with a new track from peak era Culture Club here); but Incentive's Confuzion and Melbourne House's Dodgy Geezers, to name but two, came with their own theme tunes on side B.

Comparatively impractical and doomed as it was, Chris's idea was nevertheless more inventive, more novel, somehow more him. And he got at least a bit of telly coverage from the whole endeavour. We don't get the likes of him too often anymore, which seems a shame.

What ought not get lost in all of this is that Camouflage is an absolutely belting track. Powerpop on a likely very modest budget, swelling and booming in all the right places under the stewardship of Martin Hannett and Chris Nagle (both spelled incorrectly in the video credits). The poor bugger was a far better songsmith than perhaps some people thought at the time, though the Being Frank documentary and exhibitions of Sievey's many artefacts (Frank Sidebottom or otherwise) are hopefully burnishing his reputation sufficiently, if belatedly.

(Major props at this juncture to YouTube poster soundhog09, who succeeded where others both at the time and since failed and managed to get a technically sound, clear recording of Camouflage aligned to the accompanying video. It reads as if it were quite the struggle).

Also dating from 1983, this week's Eurotastic choice comes from Righeira, probably best known in Britain for their track L'estate sta finendo, as repurposed by Liverpool FC fans into their Allez Allez Allez chant. That one isn't my favourite of theirs, however - this is, to the extent that it's found its way onto our holiday driving playlists and the kids sing along having learned snatches of it phonetically.

Produced, as with a number of their tracks, by another crack Italian disco duo La Bionda (of whom we'll hear more many weeks from now), No Tengo Dinero is one of plenty that Righeira sung in Spanish in preference to Italian for distinctiveness sake. It worked.

I dunno. Just three weeks into the relaunch of That Music List, and the two songs I'm writing about first are both 43 years old. Just as well I don't promote this as an exclusively new music feed.

There is more recent fare to digest also, however, including last year's farewell single from the splendid Shopping, whose joyous Indietracks set from 2019 will continue to live long in the memory. An amicable split as far as I can make out (and I'm not naturally of a mind to attempt to probe further to prove these sort of things either way), it's reassuring to remember the inventive, prolific Shopping frontperson R Aggs won't be lost to the business, their other projects such as Sacred Paws surviving still.

As far as I can tell the departure of Reuben Wu from Ladytron since their previous album in 2023 is a cordial one also, the band's co-founder simply finding music too much to juggle alongside a parallel career in art and photography that's now very much in the ascendency. I wish him well, all the more so upon learning recently he's a Sheffield Hallam alumnus (I really hope my wife's former longstanding place of work has celebrated that fact at some point since Ladytron's career took off).

What I've heard of the forthcoming eighth studio album Paradises augurs well for the prospects of the band remaining a vital, interesting going concern as a three-piece, not least Kingdom Undersea, its stately, serene beauty, piano-house era adornments and all.

You'll notice that Acid House Kings is badged as my song of the year for 2011, the second song of the year to appear in the revamped That Music List following on from Cardiacs' 2025 winner a fortnight ago. Just to reiterate: I originally heard Would You Say Stop? when it came out in 2011; I made it my favourite song of the year at the end of 2011; and no song from 2011 which I've heard since has displaced it from top spot in my reckoning. All of the songs I include as songs of the year have to meet all three criteria for the year in question, which will explain the gaps the further back in time we go.

Don't worry overly about all that, though. Just enjoy this singularly charming piece of indiepop from an act who would surely feature in an Only Connect group of four acts who sound nothing like the genre namechecked in their band name. Kings of actual Acid House they are clearly not. I suppose Eagles of Death Metal could count as another example - can you think of some more?

Other highlights this week include, but are by no means limited to:

some classic Jeff Mills techno as endorsed by Peely (Underground Resistance),
my nautically influenced lovely Sheffield friends (All Ashore!),
a far earlier era of Sheffield indie-pop from what would later move up the A1(M)/A64 and become St Christopher (Vena Cava),
one of the defining statements from the briefly ubiquitous but now largely overlooked Bootleg/Bastard Pop/Plunderphonics (delete as applicable) phenomenon of the early 2000s (Kurtis Rush),
something which even conspicuous support from Saturday Superstore and Timmy Mallett (to the extent of recording radio show jingles for the latter) couldn't quite turn into a breakthrough hit (This Island Earth),
a first introduction for many of you to the concept of Polkapunk (accordion through a guitar amp and the rest of it) from Austrian duo Attwenger,
a farewell to the recently passed Joseph Byrd (The United States of America), courtesy of a 1968 single which would be covered by Northern Picture Library a quarter of a century later (yes, yes, another Field Mice reference on the fly. I know...),
to conclude, the first appearance of the A Long Goodbye feature, this time around comprising almost ten minutes from Mush, a Leeds post-punk act some of you will have seen supporting Stereolab a few years back.