That Music List: LIST 241

Hello there,

Here's something to tie you over during the half-term holidays - two Lists this weekend rather the one. And in a blog not short of personal indulgences, I fear that today's is probably the biggest yet.

Despite being a format broadly suited to one, That Music List doesn't exist as a radio show. It has never come close to doing so, and I suspect it never will. Those of you reading this (and there won't be many in the middle of this Venn Diagram) who are also familiar with my eight-year tenure (2007-2015) as a horse racing pundit on the radio will be as aware as I am of my limitations as a broadcaster - too quick, quiet and unnecessarily convoluted a delivery when conciseness and clarity better fit the constraints of time.

Given another crack at it in the present day, I suspect that, now in my fifties, I'd find those traits are more baked in than ever. Oh well.

However, in a parallel universe where I didn't carry on like Kafka with concussion behind a microphone, and TML did transfer to the airwaves, two of today's tracks would have appeared in every show.

I've long loved Holland Street by The Field Mice, one of relatively few instrumentals in their published oeuvre (hence its inclusion here in the No Language In Our Lungs feature) and one that evokes thoughts of glistening urban streets at sunrise the morning after the rain in some celebrated small-budget flick.

It's also the one song I've long thought absolutely perfect to play after the opening track of a radio show; the one over which, in appropriately truncated form, I'd do my welcomes and introduce the show's contents. Mark Radcliffe would use Sombre Reptiles by Brian Eno for the same purpose in his mid-1980s Piccadilly Radio show which informed a lot of my then burgeoning musical interests. I guess that first planted the idea.

Although an older track by more than a decade, The Wild Places by Duncan Browne is a somewhat newer discovery for me, only really in the past five years. It's certainly of its time, an example of such late-1970s defiantly adult-oriented pop-rock as continued to rage against punk's fire, and the stagecraft which accompanied the promotion of the track - essentially a leopardskin leotard-clad woman writhing on or around the performing Browne - is perhaps best confined to the annals.

This is a track which plays its best suit late on, however, in the form of a soaring, dramatic coda from around 4 minutes 18 seconds onwards. "My favourite codas" isn't a feature on TML, though if it were, it would rate second only to the wildly playful example at the end of Taco's Europop cover of Puttin' on the Ritz. The Wild Places would serve much the same purpose at the end of show as Holland Street at the start, being the penultimate track or even outro over which to wrap things up.

If you're feeling sufficiently indulgent, try doing your own voiceover on top of either track. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have, though you're free to guess.

As well as No Language In Our Lungs, another feature making its first appearance in a List today is A Tangle Of Jangle, a trio of tracks which broadly fall under the janglepop umbrella. I've surprised myself, and probably those who know me, by including neither a Sarah Records nor a C86 track in this initial selection - next time, maybe.

It is an international trio, at least, taking in Belfast (Language of Flowers), Limoges (Caramel) and Illinois (Star Tropics). Members of the first-named would resurface in 2008 as the driving force behind Help Stamp Out Loneliness whom - and I understand it's sacrilege in some parts to say so - I never managed to warm to quite as much as this earlier incarnation.

None of them were released in 1997, and had they have been, they still wouldn't have been able to dynamite Flutter By Butterfly by Flowchart out of the way as my favourite song of the year. They still wouldn't even now.

There was a brief period in the late 1990s when I could trust the Wurlitzer Jukebox label implicitly, so consistently strong were their singles releases at the time; and this insistent, magical, looping pocket symphony, rather perfectly described by one organ then as "the moment at which Richard Wagner meets Walt Disney", was snapped up despite my having heard only one other Flowchart track previously.

It's clearly a track which others hold dear also, the late Sean O'Neal having admitted in the sleeve notes to a later singles compilation that Flutter By Butterfly was the one track Flowchart always got asked for the most on their very occasional live forays. Now that I would have liked to witness.

Anything else to mark your card about this time? Well, it's all good (I would say that), but some other potential highlights include the world's coolest 72-year-old (Kim Gordon); the vital sound of Mexborough, circa 1979 (Hobbies Of Today); a prime example of Sabadell Sound, a Spanish variant of Italo Disco, replete with all its chief characteristics such as a long intro and a local performer with an English stage name (Alan Cook); the world's most sinister harmonium (Nico); and your favourite whimsical poet with your favourite indiepoppers (Brian Bilston & The Catenary Wires).

J xx

Click on the video to play each tune (links last checked as all working 18/02/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

OMD - Kleptocracy (2024)