That Music List: LIST 250

Hello again,

Another List compiled a bit in advance and published in absentia, as work commitments briefly take me up the M18 and wolds routes to Scarborough today (Saturday).

Whilst I graft, there must be a very strong chance that the rest of the family will while away an hour or so in the very arcade that stars in the Lande Hekt video I've shared this week. What are the chances! Doubt that Lande herself will still be there, but our paths will cross this coming week nevertheless, with a gig at Mary Street Live in Sheffield in the offing on Friday.

Something else for me to enjoy in my adopted home city in the coming days, alongside the snooker.

Mention of the Since Yesterday documentary last week proved more timely than I could ever have imagined, for at practically the same time as I was loading List 249, I learned that another landmark indiepop doc, My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records, has finally been made available to view on YouTube.

As you might expect, me and this documentary go back some way. My wife and I, along with a few Sheffield, London and Bristol-based chums, were all present at its world premiere at the Arnolfini in - where else but - Bristol back in May 2014.

(My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records launch event and exhibition - Arnolfini, Bristol 03/05/2014. All pictures, including a solo performance by Julian Henry of The Hit Parade and Sarah Records' co-founders Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd, are author's own)

Just as expansive as Lucy Dawkins' tremendous film itself was the accompanying exhibition in the Arnolfini's gallery, bursting with Sarah Records exhibits such as posters, ephemera, test pressings, demo tapes and setlists. Oh, and reproductions of some of the shocking, aggressive reviews to which the label's roster was routinely subjected by the worst excesses of a then frequently deeply misogynistic alternative music press.

We've touched on these attitudes a couple of times already since That Music List came back, of course - both in the context of Heavenly's return, and last week's treatment of some of the Scottish girl bands featured in Since Yesterday.

One of the most telling moments for me when watching My Secret World the first time (and I assume it's survived the cut) features The Field Mice mainstay and bassist Michael Hiscock being rendered almost inarticulate with disgust when invited to consider the press. These things can live with the recipients, the victims.

It speaks highly of Secret Shine in particular that they've been able to own the late Steven Wells' indefensible suggestion in the review for their Loveblind single, namely that they finish themselves off with a warm bath and a razorblade, rather than be crushed by it. I'm not sure I could be that strong.

Bright, quick-moving, well put together and accessible, My Secret World is able to work its way chronologically through the 100 Sarah singles releases - occasionally diverting to consider albums, gigs, Bristol, Sarah's place in the context of late 1980s/early 1990s music and politics (and music politics), etc. - with a pleasing lightness of touch, and no small amount of humour.

Watch for the creeping list of band credits every time Harvey Williams appears; and for Leeds' favourite son, the by 2014 Arizona-based Stewart Anderson of Boyracer (I think he's since moved to Oregon) home on the ranch. (You might also spot me in the credits, presumably a thanks for supplying Lucy with some tape recordings of Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd in conversation with the likes of W****y and L****q. Totally and utterly unexpected, but a very kind gesture).

Two of Sarah's very earliest singles find their way on to this week's List - the inclusion of the The Golden Dawn track which gave My Secret World entirely deliberately, the inclusion of a track by The Sea Urchins as part of our occasional Indie Top 20 reminiscence feature (it appeared on Volume 5) pure coincidence.

If three and a half decades ago isn't far enough in the past for some of you, help is at hand, with both the Isn't That...? and Straight In At features taking in the 1970s this week.

In the case of the former, yes, it is that song off of the Easyjet adverts. Yes, Adriano Celentano's lyrics are all made-up gibberish. And yes, that was entirely by design, the celebrated Italian singer effectively pranking his entire fellow citizens by recording something in what sounded like slang American English at a time when Italians would go nuts for anything that was.

That's certainly one interpretation, at least. Adriano has also asserted that the song served primarily to describe a universal inability to communicate. Either way, it hit paydirt in mainland Europe following its original 1972 release, and the extra few quid from the Easyjet usage has probably helped swell the pension coffers of the now 88-year-old Il Molleggiato (the springy one!) and Claudia Mori, the female soloist you can see and hear and Adriano's wife of 62 years and counting. Awwww.

It's generally the intention of Straight In At to include three or four tracks from a chart on this date in history, but as has been hinted at previously, some historic charts from eras of less volatile chart movement would see barely penny numbers of entries from one week to the next.

Hence nothing, as originally intended, from April 18th 1971, a chart whose only two new tracks were Séverine's then newly crowned Eurovision winner for Monaco (already included in one That Music List Eurovision special not long before the hiatus) and The Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar, a track I could never abide even before I - and, eventually, the band themselves - grasped the full problematic extent of its contents.

April 18th 1976 it is instead, then, and the perfect excuse to include one of my two favourite tracks by The Four Seasons, and certainly my favourite of theirs not to feature Frankie Valli, incapacitated at the time by hearing issues.

As a tale of fantasies and dreams tempered by domestic obligations, the lyrics of Silver Star do the job economically whilst the sweeps of the beautiful musical arrangements and shifts in time change take the lead. Drummer and locum lead vocalist Gerry Polci's voice was never a thing of conspicuous power, but it doesn't need to be here, the effort appearing less of a strain than it did at times on the preceding hit December 1963 (Oh, What A Night) - another reason, perhaps, why I much prefer Silver Star to the last-named.

Right back to the present day, the second album from one of 2026's real stories of interest, the enigmatic microtonal duo Angine de Poitrine, landed at the start of the month and is exactly the inventive, impeccably constructed insane genius you'd hope it might be.

I feel honour-bound to remind people, however, that really interesting French-Canadian alternative rock wasn't invented by Khn and Klek de Poitrine; and whilst fellow Quebec residents Malajube may not inhabit precisely similar experimental territory, the four albums and smattering of singles they put out between 2004 and 2012 are well worth your time.

Proggy and psychedelic, but not forbidding; new wave-informed, but not mimicry. It's a shame that the trail has gone cold from them for fourteen years and counting, save for a couple of solo projects.

You might also like - well, hopefully most things, but especially:

Tic Tac Toe, doing j'accuse hip-hop inflected pop a good few years before Daphne & Celeste (though in turn well over a decade after fellow German Susi Klinger - rest assured I'll share a track from Susi on these pages one day),

They Must Be Russians, a band whose location and existence predates They Might Be Giants sufficiently to have not been inspired by their name, with a delightful thrash - recorded a stone's throw from my present place of work well over four decades ago - concerning an itchy problem or two,

Another important northeast England mid-1990s DIY indie punk artefact courtesy of Golden Starlet, later to beget the equally fine International Strike Force,

Something from Ozric Tentacles to which I surrendered far too many braincells and aching limbs on Oldham alternative dancefloors during my A-Level years (je ne regrette much),

Something shiny and new from The Foot And Leg Clinic, who on closer inspection appear to be fronted by Arion Xenos, multi-instrumentalist in List favourites The Just Joans as well as other acts. A gentleman with fingers in many pies, therefore - maybe that's there all the fruit went.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 16/04/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

ISN’T THAT…?

ADRIANO CELENTANO - Prisencolinensinainciusol (1972)