That Music List: LIST 252

Hello again,

What a pleasant few days it was for team TML last weekend.

More through luck than skill, considering the tickets had been bought 51 weeks earlier, the two of us drew the middle session of the O'Sullivan/Higgins match on our more or less annual pilgrimage to the World Snooker Championships last Sunday. Our O'Sullivan curse struck again, however, as he's ultimately lost the match on all three occasions we've seen him now. Sorry, Ronnie fans. Our fault.

The search for anything snooker-oriented to open this week's List didn't appear to be going anywhere fast, with The Len Ganley Stance by Half Man Half Biscuit and V/VM's dismantling of the BBC snooker theme having already been used in the past.

Luckily, I then remembered that a Peel Session track by The Male Nurse had made copious mentions of snooker, and of taking pills of some description to aid the protagonist's cueing action. A quick bit of further digging, and here we have it, in the process also giving this Country Teasers spin-off a belated (and sadly in the case of the late Alan Kenneth Crichton, posthumous) first List appearance.

Two days before that, it was the previously oft-mentioned Lande Hekt gig at 95 Mary Street in Sheffield. A first time for me at this venue, it was, and a very favourable impression was given. The bands evidently appreciated it also; Lande remains wide-eyed with wonder at each discovery of small, cool gig venues at least the equal of those closer to home in Bristol and Exeter.

The headliners, already played on here twice in the run-up to last Friday, were as tight and confident as you'd expect off the back of so many recent outings, and dedicating a song to one's cat is always going to win points with me.

The new discovery on the night for me was support act Mumble Tide (at least, that portion of Mumble Tide not either otherwise engaged or stricken with hand, foot and mouth disease), purveyors of most pleasing electronic folk with occasional shades of anything from 1980s singer-songwriter Annabel Lamb to The Middles Ones' electronic DIY pop side project EXPENSIVE.

That was the live offer this time, at least, whilst some of this Bristol act's recorded output adds downbeat, downtempo inflections almost as a nod - deliberately or not? - to their home city's musical heritage. See what you think below.

The identity of this List's A Loved Album was teased, maybe not all that well, during the Boards Of Canada write-up last week. From present-day Warp Records output it's back to one of their earliest recording artists we go, and an album in Frequencies by LFO originally released just two years into that enduring Sheffield-born label's existence at the end of July 1991.

Very simply put, this was the first electronic album I bought which felt like a cohesive set of fully-formed, memorable songs, rather than a handful of extended dance tracks or crossover-hit-plus-interminable-filler. None of which is to diminish its power as something which can be danced to, albeit that's easier to achieve with some tracks than others in the same way as, say, a Kraftwerk long-player might be.

It's intelligent, without being the copybook definition of Intelligent Dance Music, a term first coined contemporaneously but perhaps more applicable to the likes of labelmates Autechre.

It's respectful of its musical antecedents, naming many of them in the album's opener What is House? (I've seen it posited online that this was an act of hubris by Gez Varley and the late Mark Bell, inferring that LFO's place was among them on the pantheon of electronic greats; but that seems a reach to me).

It's playful, clanking and squelching whenever clanks and squelches feel like the right thing to unleash.

It's the whole chocolate box of genres within electronic music up to that point in time, from the early 1970s pioneers floaty cloud synths of Simon from Sydney to the Wells/Newman-esque abrasions of We Are Back via the female vocal snatches of You Have to Understand.

One of the greatest compliments I can accord Frequencies is that, despite having already plundered it for all of the singles and better-known tracks in pre-hiatus Lists (the aforementioned Simon from Sydney would be used to flog VW Golfs in the early 2000s), I wasn't in the least bit hard pushed to find another four songs I love sufficiently for this week's feature.

Meanwhile, the deeper dives into the other recesses of my music collection since I reactivated That Music List continues to surface historical omissions which simply cannot stand any longer. The Male Nurse aside, there's three more of them this week alone. Astonishingly, today marks the first ever appearance in the blog for all of Rachel's, Chapterhouse and - most surprising of all - Gnac.

Rachel's were a delight when I saw them at the Shellac-curated renewal of All Tomorrow's Parties at Camber Sands in 2002. Precise, stirring, beautiful pieces for which the oft-bandied about term modern classical has never struck me as wholly adequate. Nor, however, has chamber music. Rachel's were simultaneously both, and more.

Gnac aren't cut from a completely different cloth to Rachel's, though here the instrumentals are more impressionistic, magical-realist and often quite playful (Eighteenth Century Quiz Show, which I will definitely share on here one day, really does in places sound like a version of the Countdown theme rendered two centuries too soon).

Reminder to self that checking out sole Gnac operator Mark Tranmer's work as Vetchinsky Settings with James Hackett of The Orchids remains on the to-do list.

The inclusion of Chapterhouse is apposite, my Facebook timeline currently awash with pictures and video grabs from this last week's UK tour to commemorate 35 years of their Whirlpool album (you know, the one with the curled-up fluffy cat on the front cover).

Getting to any of those gigs - even Leeds or Manchester - was never really in the offing for me given this past week's work and personal itineraries. However, as with the other bands covered on here in recent Lists whose every output back in the day inspired the most venomous of attacks from the merciless music weeklies, I'm delighted they've had the fortitude to come back, put themselves out there once more and find their way (back) to the people who genuinely love them. Rachel Goswell's guest appearances will have counted as a nice surprise also.

Other highlights to note this week may, depending on your tastes, include:

an appearance by Angelica, the pre-Lovely Eggs vehicle of Holly Ross. It was briefly tempting to place this under the very occasionally seen Yes, They Did Other Songs As Well feature, but it's probably just me who knew them exclusively on account of Why Did You Let My Kitten Die? until alighting upon this other track on a Ladyfest UK compilation. Projection, dear boy, projection.

a tour de force new track from Raye, whose This Music May Contain Hope album is vying with Hemlocke Springs as provider of the biggest and brightest pop statements of the year so far. Joy could not be a better named song.

the first sighting of The School since TML returned. Another reminder to self to contact them to make sure they'll be playing That Boy Is Mine within their Pop at the Lock set in July; the happiness of my kids, whose first music festival it will be, might well hinge on it.

from my 1990s days in German darkwave/EBM/industrial clubs, a contribution from longstanding scene staple And One. As with fellow displaced countryman Kavus Torabi, a penny for the thoughts of Iranian-born And One mainstay and frontperson Steve Naghavi these days.

a single by mid-1980s to early-1990s Liverpool four-piece Kit, vehicle for the charismatic Campbell Sangster and brought back to life through the wonders of Bandcamp and a physical reissue of the single shared here.

to finish, the near ten minutes’ worth of total, unadulterated joy (that word again) which rounds off Stevie Wonder's 1982 singles compilation Original Musiquarium, Dizzy Gillespie cameo and knowingly bobbins rap outro and all. The music equivalent of a plus sign, its length qualifies it for the Long Goodbye feature, and additionally frees up a berth for when the week of its chart entry gets covered in Straight In At later on this month. I don't just throw this thing together, y'know...

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 30/04/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

THE MALE NURSE - Back on the Pills (Peel Session) (1998)