That Music List: LIST 246

Hello again,

After the reams and reams of previous weeks, there's a bit less to say ahead of this week's List.

A good opportunity, therefore, to make mention of the fact that I've been back to the very first List, originally published on February 15th 2009, and given it - for want of a better expression - a complete service. As is only to be expected seventeen years on, plenty of the links needed replacing; but rather than just do that, I embedded all of the videos within the blog post in the same way I've done since the start of this year.

Feel free to click here and take a look. List #1 has never looked better, as far as I'm concerned, and there's not a single choice in that initial selection that I don't still stand by today. Winners all, if some of them don't get played by me these days as often as they still deserve. I've let things slip with Circulus and Alela Diane in particular. Oops.

I expect I'll give some more old Lists a revamp as time and resource permits. But what of this week's assortment, though?

By the time many of you will read this, I'll have been back to Sidney & Matilda to watch the Sheffield leg of the resurgent Heavenly's multinational tour, supported on this occasion by their Skep Wax signees Tulpa.

The band's return was meditated upon sufficiently back in List #240, so it's perhaps enough for now to say I'll be curious to see whether the gig packs the same emotional charge for me as Cardiacs did last week. Both, ultimately, are bands originally chopped off in their prime by tragedy and now making a live and recorded reappearance which seemed unlikely for most of the intervening period.

Either way, from a gig-going perspective this represents the final piece of the Amelia-fronted indiepop act jigsaw for me. I've seen Marine Research, Tender Trap and The Catenary Wires, and I'm totally counting Amelia Fletcher and Eithne Farry's impromptu set in the merchandise tent of the 2009 Indietracks festival as a live sighting of Talulah Gosh. Everybody else there at the time evidently does.

(NB My photo of said performance, from as close to the front as I could get, i.e. not very).

Although the same acts were not generally permitted to appear in the main Indietracks line-up two years running, Amelia - who'd been there in 2009 with Tender Trap as well as Talulah Gosh - managed to make an appearance in 2010 as well, performing extensive vocal and placard-waving duties during The Pooh Sticks' comeback gig. The working relationship with chief Stick Huw Williams endures to the present day in the guise of Swansea Sound, of course.

Elsewhere on that year's line-up could be found Veronica Falls, whose magnificently doomy, foreboding take on indiepop hasn't been represented as often on my Lists as it deserves. In common with the Gabrielles Wish track of the other week, Beachy Head is one I'm astonished I've let go without inclusion up until now.

Ditto, if not all the more so, the clanking DIY indietronica of the superb C-C by Tom Vek, a track disqualified from the Favourite Song feature solely on the technicality of me not having heard it for the first time until a year after its 2005 release. If only, if only. It must be my most played track of that year.

As always, everything else in this week's selection is entirely worthy of your attention also. If I can draw your attention to a few of them in particular, they'd be:

The antidote to banal, we're-gonna-win-the-cup football songs, in the form of Cha Cha 2000's bagpipe drones, strangled samples and cardboard box drum machine. A side project of Prolapse's Mick Derrick and Pat Marsden, this is a long way from the last we'll be hearing from these particular gentlemen in the short term.

A selection from Jean Leloup, picked up at the time and enthused over by BBC2's much-loved Snub TV strand. Whether the primary appeal was the notion of Francophone baggy, or rather the relative edginess of Leloup's lyrical comparison of his sex life to Operation Desert Storm, is nothing to which I've found a definitive answer.

As tucked away as one of the b-sides of the singles compilation-plugging new track Glam Rock Cops, a cover of one of Carter's earlier singles by Sultans of Ping (the FC was officially omitted from sleeves at the time, but that didn't necessarily prevent its use). Both bands were slowly declining commercial forces by the time of this track's early 1994 release, but that doesn't make the Sultans' barnstorming run-through any less compelling.

The contribution of Red Monkey (two thirds of whom now comprise two thirds of Knitting Circle, q.v. List #242) to a 2000 split single with Canadian DIY punks Submission Hold, the other half of which really ought to be included on here some day also.

A song by New Bad Things which isn't 1993 era Peel favourite (and Festive Fifty entry) I Suck.

An early reminder that BMX Bandits will be performing at the valedictory Pop at the Lock Festival in Middlewich, Cheshire, this coming July. See you there?

A slow, engaging reveal over more than nine minutes from Yo La Tengo, taken from the Electr-O-Pura album which just about remains my favourite of theirs, even three decades on.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 20/03/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

HEAVENLY - Excuse Me (2026)