That Music List: October 2026

Saturday, 24 October 2026

LIST 277 – 24/10/2026

(Sing to Bernard. Photo is author's own).

Hello again,

A bit of agile reprogramming required this week, for I was all set to feature Prolapse in the A Loved Album strand, only for them to release a brand new single in more immediate need of sharing. I'll give you a few weeks to guess which of the triumphantly reformed Leicester septet's longplayers would have featured, until it does.

Off the subs' bench, therefore, but always likely to have figured on here before the end of 2026 anyway, comes Sing to God, not just my favourite Cardiacs album of them all but my second favourite album of all time, runner-up to Skywriting and Skywriting only.

I'd have given you astronomically long odds on me ever taking Tim Smith and company so much to heart the first time I ever heard them, however.

That would have been when borrowing Beechwood Music's CD88 - as the name might suggest, a CD-based accompaniment to their hitherto largely cassette- and LP-driven Indie Top 20 compilation series - from my local music library a couple of years after its release.

I've spoken before since TML came back about my deep love of those compilations, or music show programming, which provide variety; but in the case of Cardiacs' 1988 indie chart smash and proper chart almost-hit Is This the Life, the proximity to other things - none of which it sounded very much anything like - on the same piece of plastic proved curse rather than blessing.

Next to CD88's smattering of the sort of jangly indiepop of the present and recent past which I was consuming voraciously by then (The Wedding Present, Chesterf!elds), the electronic/rock crossovers of PWEI and The Shamen, the relative humour of Half Man Half Biscuit and Ciccone Youth, and even the haunting African-American a cappella of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Is This the Life just seemed... lumpen. A piece of competent but ultimately pedestrian work with some of the stylings of The Chameleons (a band I took even longer to warm to) but a dollop of rock excess on top in the form of that bloody guitar solo.

There was probably a small element of peer influence at play from one or two school contemporaries who were no more impressed by the track and said as much, along with that pre-internet era staple of Misinformation By Some Kid Who Heard Something Somewhere, in this case one perpetuating the myth that Cardiacs was a vanity project of the same Tim Smith who presented the pre-breakfast show on BBC Radio 1 at the time (so was to be derided accordingly).

With airplay of Cardiacs somewhere between limited and nonexistent on the stations I was listening to at the start of the 1990s (for one, Peel producer John Walters' dislike of them is a matter of record), I neither gave nor had cause to give them much more thought thereafter until serendipitously catching Day is Gone, the first fruits of Cardiacs' move from the "classic" line-up to the power quartet, on a Radio 1 evening programme - almost certainly one of Mark Radcliffe's, probably early in 1992.

If not an epiphany as such, the restlessly inventive five-four time signature and that swallow-dive of what passes for a chorus (television organ ripples and all) caused Day is Gone to land with me far more effectively than Is This the Life. This is actually good. Is there anything else new on the way?

There should have been, of course, but Rough Trade's imminent collapse, taking Day is Gone's parent album Heaven Born and Ever Bright with it for a while, essentially cost myself and radio much chance to enjoy it. Again, Cardiacs left my consciousness for a while with nothing further to show for it.

...Until April 24th 1995. A Cardiacs session for Mark Radcliffe, happened across less serendipitously as his Radio 1 night show was prescribed listening for me by then, but at the same time not the session I was looking for the most even that week, if memory serves.

Then they opened with Day is Gone b-side Ideal.

From my bedroom in a house in Saddleworth, the clang of scales falling from eyes was probably audible across the other side of the Pennines.

Fast, agile, inventive, manic. The rises in the chorus. More ideas in a single song than some bands conceive in a lifetime. Oh, this will do.

Mark announces it's Is This the Life next up. I deflate slightly, but decide that Ideal has bought Cardiacs five minutes or so during which I'll sit sweetly and tolerate it.

Ha ha. Bob Leith crashes on the drums, that enormous guitar motif kicks in for the first time, and I'm strapped to the front of the tank. It's a rendition structurally unchanged from the studio version I'd first sniffed at on CD88, but in its live, visceral incarnation, it's completely and utterly convincing. I don't want the thing to stop. Not even the guitar solo. Especially not the guitar solo. A track rehabilitated in my thinking like none before and few since.

And then A Horses Tail. Good God. A genuine thunderclap moment. All of the creativity, excitement and clench-teethed mania of Ideal, ramped up exponentially by the barrage of time and key signature handbrake turns which couldn't work, shouldn't work, yet without exception do.

Heck, this is attention deficiency in musical form. My attention deficiency. I've zero idea whether Tim Smith had any neurodiverse traits, or identified as having such. Regardless, he and the band had created a music which made be feel seen.

Thirty-one years on, A Horses Tail remains one of the most exciting and personally resonant pieces of music I've ever come across; and for when I came across it, and how it turned me 100% on to the music of its performers, I doubt I'll ever not regard it as my favourite Cardiacs track. Needless to say, there followed some immediate admonishing of myself for not taping that session version (for taping it was back then).

The closer Joining the Plankton almost felt a little anticlimactic after that, as anything would, but on its own terms I still enjoyed it, the stomp of The Troggs' Wild Thing essentially reimagined as fairground punk.

(Representing in my Little House... design long-sleeved t-shirt, which I must have owned for about a quarter of a century now. It's certainly got a lot more thin and worn in the meantime, as has the wearer. Selfie taken on 14/09/2015, the date of that year's Band T-Shirt Day on BBC Radio 6 Music).

Ever heard a radio session which affected you so profoundly? I expect most of us have. This was certainly mine. The enthusiasm for indiepop, good chart pop and everything else remained. The burgeoning interest in stuff like darkwave and gabba was not derailed. But alongside all of those categories, there was now this harder to categorise music to enthuse over simultaneously.

Cut to summer 1996. Newly back in the country after a year working in Germany, a copy of Cardiacs' Sampler found in a CD bin in a Karstadt partway through and played almost to the point of wearing out. I don't believe I was back in the country a week before shelling out for Sing to God, released in mid-June with all well in Cardiacs' world from a marketing and distro perspective once more.

Such reviews as the then Britpop-crazed music press had deigned to perform I roundly dismissed. Zero out of ten from Vox was obviously just silly, an affirmation of the reviewer's prejudices more than anything else.

All that said, the opening few minutes of listening to Sing to God for the first time were not wholly enjoyable and re-raised historic doubts - the tentative hymnal opener Eden on the Air rather dribbled out of the speakers, and Eat It Up Worms Hero sounded like the abrupt turns of A Horses Tail done all wrong, the constituent parts just not gelling in the same way.

That, though, was as bad as it got. I maintain to the hilt even now that Sing to God's two weakest tracks are the first two, but third track Dog-Like Sparky hauled, and still hauls, me back every time. Irreverent, confident, stompy, quite possibly blasphemous and super exciting.

For my money, the section from around 2:23 to 2:53 is one of the single most invigorating moments in music I've ever engaged with, the aural equivalent of being fired around a pinball machine (and just for good measure, there's what comes over as the front line of a musical number waiting to serenade you for about 23 seconds right after, just because).

Thereafter, the intensity and thrills of Dog-Like Sparky don't let up again immediately, following track Fiery Gun Hand being as insatiable and pounding as Cardiacs get. Sing to God does, however, give way periodically to better directed moments of beauty and tenderness than the opener and better aimed manic moments than Eat It Up... An album with a run time of 88 minutes, I'd regard at least 70 as indispensable.

It might make you wonder how on earth I've got to 277 editions of That Music List without doing a deeper dive of Sing to God before now, let alone included just two tracks from it - Fiery Gun Hand and Angleworm Angel - on any previous List. Extreme self-discipline, I'd have to say!

The A Loved Album feature doesn't usually include more than four tracks from a work, and nor will this, for all that I could happily include almost anything of what remains.

In the event, I've had to go for A Horses Tail and Dog-Like Sparky, for their place in the story of me and Cardiacs; Bell Clinks, as an acknowledgement of Ad Nauseum/Panixphere recruit Jon Poole's appreciable contribution to the sound and direction of the band at the time; and the beautiful shanty-cum-orchestral piece Wireless, as the only one of Sing to God's trio of most extended pieces still not quite long enough to qualify for The Long Goodbye in a future List (hopefully that will save me a lynching from those fans wondering how I couldn't possibly include regular best ever Cardiacs track poll winner, the nine-minute Dirty Boy - it'll be included in that feature on here some day, promise).

The final motivation for including Sing to God in A Loved Album now lies in the fact that it is, give or take a few days, 30 years since I first experienced Cardiacs live.

Manchester Roadhouse would of course count as a far smaller scale venue than the Albert Hall a stone's throw away, into which the faithful crammed back in March of this year for a chance to see the band which few of us honestly thought we'd get not too long ago. For where the band was at the time, however, profile not all that significantly raised by the tough experience at Blur's Mile End brouhaha sixteen months prior, it felt about right.

And seeing Tim up close and personal for the first time, demanding we make hissing noises instead of cheering, join him in berating Jim and checking a birthday boy in the audience for evidence of squirrel feet (poor Alistair), was as unforgettable as the music. A night I'll treasure always.

(What four quid got you in the mid-1990s. Cardiacs ticket, replete with surplus "The", from author's own collection).

***

I've not got anywhere near as much to say on the rest of this week's choices, you'll be relieved to learn.

However, following the piece the other week concerning Carter USM's rather clumsy dig at Terence Trent D'Arby on a career-compromising single, I was motivated to check whether the latter's extraordinary one-off as The Incredible E.G. O'Reilly had ever featured on That Music List - it hadn't.

I'm not unsympathetic to the suggestions (some of them Sananda's own) that he never wore his ability - genius, even? - too lightly, and there's an overriding sense when listening to The Birth of Maudie that he's trying to show off every musical genre trick he knows, all set to the waltz time signature that barely anybody uses in pop anymore.

The thing is, though, the cocky sod absolutely nailed it here, a track not included on the sophomore Trent D'Arby album Neither Fish Nor Flesh released just a few weeks later in October 1989, but one I enjoy more than anything on there.

Other highlights among many this week include:

Further new or recent stuff from Fujiya & Miyagi, Gentle Hen, Olivia Rodrigo, Mia Joy ft Peel Dream Magazine, Hibbett & Christopher (a hook-up with its roots in such tracks as Literature Search from MJ Hibbett's undeservedly underappreciated indiepop concept album Dinosaur Planet) and Eli Wewentxu & Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė (the last pair a stirring yet delicate continent-straddling collaboration between artists from Mexico and Lithuania respectively).

A trip back to 1975 for some peak Caravan, I suppose one of the two real survivors to the present day from the Canterbury Scene alumni, along with Gong.

The first blast of The Pipettes since this blog returned. It's actually nice to see and hear Gwenno Saunders still talk relatively fondly of this formative stage of her career, however markedly different stylistically and conceptually it might be to her less straightforwardly poppy and occasionally haunting Welsh/Cornish solo output. Me? I like it all.

A reminder of the gifts of New Fast Automatic Daffodils, to my mind more interesting than practically any of the other contemporaneous Manchester bands to gain greater commercial traction as the 1980s became the 1990s. More funky, more edgy, more cryptic, more intelligent.

A few weeks on now from the sad passing of Catherine Ringer, here's a chance to enjoy another helping of her and Fred Chichin's exemplary art pop as Les Rita Mitsouko. Increasingly as I get older, I find myself enjoying more and more French pop music for the very reason I didn't forty years ago, more prepared as I am to let something reveal its charms and intricacies instead gradually over repeated listens. This silly kid would likely have loathed Andy on its original release, along with so much else I now hold dear such as... oh, plucking a name from the clouds, Cardiacs....

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 23/10/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

FUJIYA & MIYAGI - No Green Light (2026)

DUBSTAR – Anywhere (1995)

GITHEAD - Wallpaper (2005)

TODD TERJE – Inspector Norse (2012)

EUROTASTIC
TWENTY 4 SEVEN - I Can't Stand It (original) (1990)

A LOVED ALBUM: Cardiacs - Sing to God (1996)
CARDIACS - Dog-Like Sparky
CARDIACS - Bell Clinks

ST CHRISTOPHER - Dark (1991)

PROLAPSE - A Place for Lyres (2026)

JAMES YUILL - No Surprise (2007)

CARAVAN - The Show of Our Lives (1975)

A TANGLE OF JANGLE
GENTLE HEN - Comfort Zone (2026)
TIP TOP PLANETS - Go Go Pepper (1995)
BRIGHTER - Half-Hearted (1992)

I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU
OLIVIA RODRIGO - Expectations (2026)

HEINOUS ORCA - Wishing Well (2019)

EMPRESS - I Am Not Cut Out for This (1998)

THE PIPETTES - Who Made You the Doctor? (2010)

MIA JOY ft PEEL DREAM MAGAZINE - Comet (2026)

COMPILED BY CHET & BEE (AND SOMETIMES TIM)
NEW FAST AUTOMATIC DAFFODILS - Get Better (Version I) (1991)

A LOVED ALBUM: Cardiacs - Sing to God (1996)
CARDIACS - A Horses Tail
CARDIACS - Wireless

HIBBETT & CHRISTOPHER - When You Hear a Bird (2026)

SUEP - Misery (2021)

THE INCREDIBLE E.G. O’REILLY - The Birth of Maudie (1989)

ELI WEWENTXU & INDRĖ JURGELEVIČIŪTĖ - Cuerpos de agua (lyja) (2026)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Catherine Ringer
LES RITA MITSOUKO - Andy (1986)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
CARS CAN BE BLUE - Lie (2013)

Saturday, 17 October 2026

LIST 276 - 17/10/2026

Hello again,

One of the many, many lovely things about indiepop is how it reminds one that not all performers of a pensionable age are libidinous, seedy gits or embittered racists (or both) cynically trotting out exactly the same sets of decades-old fodder year after year.

Hence Would-Be-Goods and Railcard's matinee gig in Sheffield last Saturday afternoon. Every member of each band older than this fiftysomething, yet still creating new, beautiful art as vital as anything from their various storied careers.

Indeed, Railcard has only existed since 2025, so all of their imaginative, sometimes motorik take on indiepop (elevated further by Allison Thomson's swirling brass) is by definition new product. 2026 will not pass without Unstable Neighbour featuring somewhere in my top ten songs of the year. Maybe even top five.

Forty-six years on from debut single Baby It's You, and nearly as many since their days of larking about with Captain Sensible on videos and TOTP, what a fine thing it is to have seen two-thirds of Dolly Mixture - Debsey Wykes with Saint Etienne, Rachel Love fronting Railcard - in active service at gigs in the past four months. Over to you, Hester Smith.

Would-Be-Goods have always been one of the more elegant, literate and often darkly humourous indiepop acts of their respective, successive eras, and a choice selection of Jessica Griffin's delicious bon mots was served up on this, the band's first ever gig in Sheffield.

And served up in Jessica's "BBC accent", as they have evidently taken to calling it on their own Facebook presence; though as more regional twangs have worked their way in amongst those heard on Radio 4 latterly, perhaps the Received Pronuciation description of yore remains the more accurate. Either way, there is nothing remotely affectated, incongruous or jarring about it. Jessica's voice suits her words handsomely, and always has.

It was impossible not to note Jessica's knowing smiles during a perfect rendition of 2004 quickie Too Old, nor to hear the chuckles back from that portion of the audience of a comparable vintage to the band, perhaps recognising something about themselves in there.

Not that those of us present had come solely to respond to Would-Be-Goods' back catalogue; I doubt I'm alone in having loved the likes of Madame X, Dr Love and The Gallopers as much as any of the Él Records era cuts given an airing this afternoon.

Road closures and queues associated with Sheffield Utd's match virtually next door ensured I failed to get to Sidney and Matilda in time to see opening act Mudguard, Ivy and Dora Pursey by any other name.

A shame, but as demonstrated by the rest of the afternoon (and indeed the example of Ivy and Dora's none more famous parents), the precedent is there for an indiepop career of such longevity that I look forward to watching them also still doing this four decades hence. I'll likely be a head in a jar by then, but still a nodding away tastefully to indiepop in that jar sort of head.

***

Would-Be-Goods and Railcard both deservedly earn themselves another run-out in this week's List, alongside other new or at least halfway recent material from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Freak Slug, Caroline Rose, MAQUINA. and The Sweetest Ache.

File the first-named as yet another act whose first appearance here would not have been left as late as this week had TML not gone on hiatus for nearly eight years. Gordon Chapman-Fox's restlessly prolific output as Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan has taken in seven albums since 2021 already, with number eight Industrial Growth due out at the end of this month.

Still unmistakably, recognisably Warrington-Runcorn, if This Machine suggests a perceptible change of direction to long-term fans of the project, it's definitely by design. Gordon notes on the Bandcamp write-up for the forthcoming album listening party that this is a heavier work, a visceral response to darker times in the world right now.

Formerly a veteran of rock and grindcore bands in and around the Wigan area, Gordon's switch to ambient, synthwave, sometimes experimental electronic music was influenced in part by listening to the output of such as Warp Records and noting its capacity to be at least as brutal and extreme as anything pounded out of a loud guitar.

I wouldn't have to look far into my own collection to find other material which backs that assertion to the hilt (from Felix Kubin to many of the releases by the Tigerbeat6 label); and if the lead single is any indicator, Industrial Growth stands an excellent chance of proving Gordon right yet further.

Without giving too much away, the promotional video ultimately finds Gordon in a predicament that even calling Eileen Bilton on 39591 won't help with. If you know, you know...

(Seen in Liverpool on 20/03/2018, a trip back home to Runcorn - not via Warrington, alas - awaits for YX12 GGO, an AlexanderDennis Enviro200 integral single decker. Halton Transport was one of the last surviving municipal bus companies in Britain, serving Runcorn and Widnes before going into liquidation at the start of 2020. Of the few remaining examples, the nearest to Runcorn now is... Warrington. Picture is the author's own)

Based many hundreds of miles away from Warrington or Runcorn, but seen in the north west of England not so many weeks ago, Lisbon three-piece MAQUINA. were the finds of this year's Manchester Psych Fest, according to the very lovely Joel, Steve and Izabela of Sheffield Live's The Breakdown weekly new music feast.

They certainly sold them to me in a chat a few weeks ago now. Guitars treated to sound as much like anything other than guitars has long worked for me, to the extent of maintaining a personal measuring system of Quiques, named after the 1993 Seefeel album which bent guitar sounds at least as far out of shape as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, if not more so.

On a scale of one to ten Quiques, where 1 is acoustic guitar fragility and 10 is Imperial off of Quique itself (qv. List #274), it sounds as if MAQUINA. can manage about a high 8 live. Whether or not the studio equivalents manage the feat so effectively, the Body Transmission album is nevertheless still a tremendous slab of pounding, motorik, rocky noise, wholly deserving of your time.

If MAQUINA. remind me of anything, it would be dance-metal pioneers Cubanate, an act whom the rock circles they frequented didn't always appear to know what to make of. Kerrang! would award them Single of the Week garlands. Interactions with Bruce Dickinson in his then Radio One Rock Show hosting capacity would be strained or antagonistic. Carcass fans would just want to kick confrontational, extrovert singer Marc Heal's head in.

Either way, feel free to perform your own compare and contrast between Agony and Oxyacetylene, the latter additionally another staple of my mid-1990s German darkwave/industrial club-going days. Nobody there seemed to mind it being played.

***

One of the joys of compiling That Music List is permitting myself complete stylistic about-turns from one track to the next if I so choose. Believe it or not, however, it's something I agonised over doing for years when younger.

Which actually makes for the better experience - keeping stylistically broadly similar tracks together to achieve the smooth flow of many compilations, from Now That's What I Call Music through to Indie Top 20; or the switches (carefully curated and chosen switches, nonetheless) from one genre to another to another that one might have expected of a typical John Peel show or a 1981 episode of Top of the Pops (the best, most anything-goes year of chart pop ever, and I won't hear otherwise)?

I think somewhere along the line I decided that neither approach was necessarily wrong, but that a gradual flow suits a physical compilation best and a genre-hopping approach is better for radio or online. I am certainly happy for you all to discuss that in the comments either here or on That Music List's Facebook presence (newly reactivated after an even longer hiatus than the blog itself).

All of which is a possibly unnecessarily long way of saying that the rock-metal of Cubanate is followed this week by the none gentler sound of The Sweetest Ache, with impunity.

If this indiepop act from Swansea (an actual Swansea Sound, you could say) could never quite find a way to command a place at the top table of my absolute favourite Sarah Records bands first time around, that speaks more about the incredible competition for my attention offered up by that label's many-tentacled roster as 1990 became 1991.

The first two The Sweetest Ache singles - Sarahs 36 and 39 - were flanked numerically, and roughly chronologically also, on one side by The Sea Urchins, St Christopher and Another Sunny Day, on the other side by The Springfields, Heavenly and The Orchids, and in between by Even As We Speak and So Said Kay by The Field Mice.

It was hard to be heard, or more accurately heard enough, among all of those; and that's before factoring in any albums and compilations released around then, too.

The passing of time has given their Sarah output space to breathe and find the higher level of appreciation it deserves (from me and others), a process given further momentum by the release of a retrospective collection on Daydream Records last year and a gradual return to the live sphere.

Hence, ultimately, Reframed, a first album in 33 years slated for release on November 9th (the weekend after an appearance at the Malaga Popfest) and - as if to reinforce the points about collaborative label releases made last week - put out simultaneously in different territories by Shelflife, Old Bad Habits, Fastcut and Windmill Records, the last-named being the imprint of Chris Mabbs and Neil Shumsky (variously All Ashore!, Velodrome 2000, Plouf!, Bouquet, etc.) and itself inactive for 34 years until last year.

Expect Sarah era tracks repurposed acoustically. Expect also the likes of the gorgeous brand new track Speak to Me, delivered with all of the born-again joy and freedom of a band palpably delighted to have once again found its audience, and acquired some more, after so long away.

I look forward to reading up about their current and future plans when edition #4 of Jane Duffus's Zine Things Happen hits the doormat in the coming days, and to seeing them in action (for what would be my first time) should the present whispers of a Sheffield date in January be proved correct.

Not to labour a point, but the assertion of a few years back that Sarah Records is over is seeming wider of the mark with every passing month of 2026, isn't it?

***

That feels like quite enough of my blether and prattle for one week, I think. Suffice it to say, other highlights of this week's selection include, but are no means limited to, the following:

Four choices from Dystopia by Midnight Juggernauts (2007), this week's A Loved Album. There was a time in the 2000s and into the start of the 2010 when it felt as if Midnight Juggernauts and The Presets were taking it in turns to try to win the vote as my favourite Australian electronic act. The more inclined of the two to drop in a bit of guitar, the Melbourne trio appear to have ground to a halt a decade or so ago (Andrew Szekeres instead keeping himself busy occasionally working with The Avalanches), but their thumping good set in the woods at Latitude in 2008 won't be leaving my memory any time soon.

A track from an imprecise date some time between 1979 and 1981 by experimental Sheffield duo Mein Glasfabrik. I wonder how many people would take your word for it if you'd told them it was a Boards of Canada outtake; the way it anticipates the enigmatic Scottish duo's sound and atmosphere by a generation is really quite something.

Altogether less mysterious and far poppier, My Forgotten 80s this week comprises a track from the late Robert Allen, better known to fellow Basildon Set scenesters as Robert Marlow. Seemingly positioned to become the next breakout star from that social stratum after Alison Moyet, Vince Clarke and Martin L. Gore (all of whom he was in bands with previously), the Clarke co-produced I Just Want to Dance was the second of four ultimately non-hit singles but the one I seem to remember Radio One briefly getting behind the most. Copies of his sole album The Peter Pan Effect, unreleased until 1999 (sixteen years after this single), are still findable, for those keenest to discover whether Robert was a should have been star largely lost to time.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 16/10/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN - This Machine (2026)

STRANGELOVE - Sand (1994)

WOULD-BE-GOODS - Dr Love (2026)

HOR - Topless Political Statement (1998)

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER - You Won’t Be Missing That Part of Me (2012)

RAPPING SONGS
THE DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY - Television (The Drug of the Nation) (1991)

A LOVED ALBUM: Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia (2007)
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Into the Galaxy
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - So Many Frequencies

MEIN GLASFABRIK – Track No. 5 (~1979-1981; unreleased)

AMSTERDAM - Nostalgia (2005)

SOURPATCH - You Knew (2013)

SMOG - Ex-Con (1997)

MAQUINA. - Agony (2026)

WIR SIND DIE NEUEN GÖTTER
CUBANATE - Oxyacetylene (1994)

THEN AND NOW: The Sweetest Ache
THE SWEETEST ACHE - Speak to Me (2026)
THE SWEETEST ACHE - If I Could Shine (1990)

FREAK SLUG - Wishing Bone (2026)

A C ACOUSTICS - Stunt Girl (1996)

LAWRENCE ARABIA – Eye A (2008)

DO MAKE SAY THINK - I Love You (La La La) (1999)

ANNA BURCH - Party’s Over (2020)

A LOVED ALBUM: Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia (2007)
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Ending of an Era
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Shadows

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
BIG JOANIE - Way Out (2018)

CAROLINE ROSE - Hello Again, Jim (2026)

SOLARSCAPE - After the Flood (2000)

ALEX AND THE CHRISTOPHER HALE BAND - O, Cowardly King of the Canary Islands! (2015/2022)

BIKINI KILL – Feels Blind (1991)

RAILCARD - When You Say You Love Me Something’s Wrong (2026)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s
ROBERT MARLOW - I Just Want to Dance (1983)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Tim Curry
TIM CURRY - I Can Make You a Man (1974)

Saturday, 10 October 2026

LIST 275 - 10/10/2026 (a sixth cover versions special)

Hello again,

"Sunday in Sheffield, people. DID YOU GO TO CHURCH? Don't worry, this is Tchurch!"

And the gospel according to Tchotchke at Sidney & Matilda last Sunday night was very, very good indeed.

The Playin' Dumb single from last year's album of the same name was my belated way into this New York three-piece, so inevitably a pristine rendition of that was always going to number among my highlights of the evening.

However, I also loved how much they also draw from a wider palette than just the '60s bubblegum girl groups that are the usual starting points of reference. I've seen Todd Rundgren's poppier output mentioned before now, and I got that entirely.

Tonight offered hints of other early '70s US power pop such as The Raspberries, too, plus a cover of the Bo Diddley-penned Mickey & Sylvia standard Love Is Strange which sounded for all the world like Mink DeVille until the vocals kicked in.

The last-named wasn't the only cover on the night, given other tasteful and appropriate selections from Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons and The Shangri-Las, the latter a rip-roaring run through Bulldog by way of an encore.

A tremendous set overall, even with singer/drummer Anastasia Sanchez demonstrably full of the lurge to have hit the trio on their travels, yet still nailing song after song. It's frightening to imagine how awesome they'd be at 100% full power.

I wonder whether they had any takers for the guitar on the merch stall for which they were asking £1,200. That's a bit of a change from the usual seven inch single and pin badge fare.

It was nice also to come across the work of support act Doe (not the 2010s trio of the same name) for the first time.

A front line of singer-guitarists who could pass for a young Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi from Lush, but a sound which couldn't quite - some 90s shoegaze inflections, yes, but the psychedelic blues description I'd seen online was more accurate.

Early days, I'm assuming, and if so a promising start, all the more so on the night with a stand-in bassist deployed.

***

Talk of Tchotchke isn't entirely irrelevant to this week's List theme, given their aforementioned propensity for a well-chosen cover version. Here are another thirty-three covers - some of them personal favourites of the recording artists doing the covering, some less so, some better executed than others, but all interesting to me one way or another.

From Phil Ochs to Cerrone, from The Raspberries to Lightnin' Hopkins, from Young Marble Giants to Lady Gaga, there's a bit of everything in here.

(I can be persuaded either way, incidentally, as to whether DJ Kaos counts as a cover version, a remix, or just pilfering. Let's go with the first-named today).

You'll find a few examples of cover subject and cover object adjacent to each other, all quite deliberately so. Specifically: Stevie Wonder covering The Beatles next to a Stevie Wonder cover by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (the latter not all that regular visitors to this parish otherwise); a Magnetic Fields cover by analogue synthpop supergroup Doublespeak next to Stephin Merritt (in his Future Bible Heroes incarnation) having a crack at Vicky Leandros's 1967 Eurovision entry (and wasn't her rendition of that one of the less painful guest spots at the 2026 Contest, by the way?); and Carter USM's run through Rent by the Pet Shop Boys next to Blade's hip-hop reinterpretation of Lenny and Terrence by Carter USM.

It's worth spending a moment or two considering the original of Lenny and Terrence, released in October 1993 as the second single from the previous month's Post Historic Monsters and possible to regard as the precise moment that some of the music weeklies and monthlies started to go after Carter (get Carter, even).

At least one singles reviewer lazered in on the fact that, given a bountiful array of contemporaenous stars whose music Jim Bob and Fruitbat could have slagged off in song, they namechecked two black performers and nobody else.

No objective reading of the lyrics sheet can conclude that this was a racist act, but it was an extraordinarily clumsy one, inviting bad faith agents to think or presume the worst of them. Were social media around in 1993, its more pernicious elements would have enjoyed a feeding frenzy.

A rant at two artists who between them racked up two top five albums (one a number one) and seven top 30 singles that calendar year wasn't the flex the south London duo might have thought it was anyway. Moreover, for all of Lenny Kravitz's affectations of Hendrix and whoever else on Are You Gonna Go My Way, Symphony or Damn by the artist still known at the time as Terence Trent D'Arby was conversely a strong, varied and more authentic-feeling collection blessed with at least one genuinely excellent single.

Maybe not surprisingly, therefore, Blade's more extended tirade lands its blows more successfully in the verse on Lenny than on Terence. See what you think.

If the inkies went after Carter USM in the mid-1990s, they weren't any less sparing of Fischerspooner in and around the time of their #1 debut album at the start of this century, the music press's ire drawn by anything from the band's apparent style over substance to the eye-watering sum paid by Ministry of Sound for their signature.

I suspect there was also something unspoken and a bit nastier at play, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner's flamboyant music and personae largely at odds with the determinedly earnest (and mostly heterosexual male) guitar band image and music which certain papers strove to promote instead to the near-exclusion of much else. (See also the odium directed towards the similarly stylish Romo scene and acts five years prior, at the height of Britpop, by all bar perhaps a couple of Melody Maker scribes).

Fischerspooner only actually split up seven years ago after what might be considered a broadly unfulfilled career (certainly from the perspective of racking up any smash hits), but for my money I'd still take the deceptively measured, serene cover of Wire's The 15th from that debut album over a hundred of the Starsailors they were shunned for any day of the week.

A cover of a 2001 song rather than a 2001 cover of something older, Alien Chicks' glorious tear through Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from the new EP released only eight days ago makes them - I think - the first act to appear in consecutive Lists since we came back at the start of the year. Right place, right time.

The year 2000, meanwhile, bore witness to the arrival in the charts of Sugababes, at once the coolest, smartest British girlpop band of them all; and including Pink Opaque's recent - and appropriately reverential yet characteristically sparkly - cover of Overload is the very least I can do after failing to get to Pete and Danielle's first ever headline performance (back at Sidney and Matilda) this Wednesday just gone. Trust you knocked it out of the park, both.

Finally, there's an indiepop cover of Bizarre Love Triangle... because you're never far away from an indiepop cover of Bizarre Love Triangle. The New Order staple is one of those songs, along with Emma's House by The Field Mice, which seems to get covered disproportionately often by indiepop acts, almost by way of a rite of passage.

The Frente! interpretation bundled on to volume #20 of Indie Top 20 gets the nod this time, but I could just have easily included Even As We Speak's. Or Echosmith's. Or Ishan's. Or Glaiza De Castro's. Or Whirl's (the last-named at least adding a bit of late-'80s lo-fi fuzz to proceedings).

Kids - it's a classic song and all that, but you don't need to knock any more of these out. We won't think any less of you. We promise.

J xx

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