That Music List: LIST 278

(Gourock Outdoor Pool, as *not* featured in Lido, Darren Hayman's album dedicated to outdoor swimming pools. Maybe in a future sequel? It does have at least one music connection already, being the setting for the video of F.O. Machete's cover of Olivia Newton-John's Physical, q.v. List #77. Picture taken on 28/05/2026 is the author's own)

Hello again,

"Shouldn't Darren Hayman have won some sort of award by now?", Stewart Lee mused in The Sunday Times back in 2012, further dubbing him "the thinking person's indie-pop legend and unaccredited national treasure". Both true.

An extraordinarily wide, rich, thoughtful, intelligent back catalogue added to over the course of more than three decades now has certainly garnered fewer gongs than the critical acclaim afforded to most of it would seemingly justify, with only a Hardest Working Musician award conferred by the Association of Independent Music in 2016 immediately springing to mind.

It would be an act of some hubris on my part to suggest that getting the A Session of Sorts treatment in this week's List goes any way at all towards redressing the balance; more still to claim that the four tracks I've selected here come remotely close to covering every musical or thematic angle of Darren's work. Nevertheless, it's been a pleasure to revisit a number of his albums and singles to finalise a choice of three to go with something from the newly released I'm Your Team long-player.

Note "newly released" as opposed to "new", I'm Your Team having been recorded in its entirety back in 2022 and only now seeing the light. It's easy to imagine there'd been little free time in his schedule to have put it out before now.

Just like the TV Themes EP released only a month prior as The French (thus temporarily reactivating one of Darren's longer standing post-Hefner projects), the new album is largely a vintage synthesizer-led affair - the once ubiquitous Yamaha DX7 predominates.

That's probably about as much of a concept as can be found in I'm Your Team, but it would be remiss to go this entire feature without referencing any of Darren's well-researched yet precisely and economically executed subject-driven collections.

The aforementioned AIM award acknowledged the work undertaken for his Thankful Villages project - not just writing a song about each of the 55 villages to suffer zero losses in World War I and releasing them across three albums, but making a film for each also. Either side of that, it's possible to find albums each dedicated to one of The English Civil War, the works of William Morris, every man to have walked on the moon, the Essex Witch Trials and more besides. He'd dot up in the specialist round of Mastermind.

I couldn't not include something from my favourite Darren Hayman themed album of them all, 2012's delightful and evocative instrumental collection Lido. Fourteen songs, each inspired by one of Britain's open-air swimming pools, replete with field recordings where practicable.

Living as close as I do to (and a user of) one pool not covered, namely Hathersage Pool in the Peak District, I'd like to assume the way to a sequel to Lido some day isn't permanently closed. How Darren would represent by instrumentation only the smell of the village's heavenly chippy, located conveniently few minutes' walk from the pool, might be an interesting challenge.

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(The Sunbathers - Indietracks Festival, 28/07/2019. Pictures are author's own)

From swimmers to sunbathers, regular readers will remember that the A Loved Album on List #262 from mid July was The Sunbathers' 2018 debut, A Weekend Away With... To this day it remains the newest album to receive such treatment.

The suggestions back in the summer that a long-awaited follow-up may almost be upon us have proven well founded, Answers on a Postcard appearing as September became October on Jenny's Feather Factory, a newish Birmingham imprint run by TV and radio presenter, journalist and consumer champion Adrian Goldberg. Poignantly, the label takes its name from the factory the eponymous Jenny, Adrian's great-aunt and a Holocaust victim, had run in Berlin in happier times.

I'm sure Adrian must find releasing gorgeous indiepop a nice diversion from the day job of exposing sharp practices on the high street or bemoaning football teams' financial impropriety; and releases to date, including a couple from Mighty Mighty alumni The Leaking Machine, speak well of a label so far dedicated entirely to produce from Midlands-based performers.

Answers on a Postcard is self-described on The Sunbathers' Bandcamp presence as "beautiful, moving pop songs". This is no idle boast. That's exactly what it is.

The musical and lyrical influences of yore - The Marine Girls of this world - are still present and correct, but right from the opener Belonging it's evident that the duo's sound has developed into something a bit fuller and more rounded than before. Subtly, mark you, with all twelve tracks still as light, spacious and understated as any from their back catalogue, but perceptibly so nonetheless.

That's perhaps most noticeable in Julie Robinson's vocals. I do love a dual layered vocal when done right, for example to amplify ever so delicately the world-weariness and coping strategies of Make a Deal with the City by East River Pipe. Similarly double layered for this sophomore effort, Julie's delivery nevertheless loses none of its fragility, warmth, pointedness, concern, joy, yearning, or whatever else each song in turn requires, additionally holding its own comfortably set against the expanded instrumentation, from piano to vibraslap.

Rare are the songs which move me to the point of tears despite me having nothing personally invested in their protagonists. Be Selfish by The Montgolfier Brothers, certainly. A number of tracks from the first two Trembling Blue Stars albums, absolutely. Some of Nev Clay's, too, from Demons at the end of last century all the way up to I Flew a Flag this year.

You can add more than one song from Answers on a Postcard to that list. Not necessarily exactly the same songs each time, but always Devotion, which I think I must consider The Sunbathers' career highlight to this point. A powerful piece concerning coercive control in a relationship, given an extra atmosphere of unease and discomfort by the uncommon five-four time signature and a piano accompaniment with just the right measure of jar and fraction of discordance.

Devotion is a startling piece of work, and I have no hesitation in sharing it with you this week. It will not be, you'll doubtless have guessed, the only track from the album that will feature in a List in the immediate to short term, either.

A rumination on the often difficult path from being lovers to friends, and for me another highlight among a strong collection overall, it wouldn't surprise were I to learn that Common Ground resonates personally with many who hear it. Whether that has ever included myself, you'll have to guess.

(The Sunbathers - Indietracks Festival, 28/07/2019. Picture is author's own)

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With the release yesterday of new long-player Égrégore, this feels like the perfect moment to do a Then and Now feature on Mylène Farmer, for over four decades now the forever reinventing, medium-straddling, restlessly creative and staggeringly successful (as in, 26 number one singles and 18 number one albums levels of successful) queen of French pop music.

Returning to a theme from last week of just not getting an act until many years after first contact with their work (c.f. Cardiacs), I would have heard Mylène for the first time in August 1991, when the Pet Shop Boys played Désenchantée - then only recently deposed from the top spot in the French hit parade, and to this day still the biggest-selling single by a French female artist in France - during a week-long standing in for Simon Bates on BBC Radio 1.

I was... interested up to a point in Désenchantée (a track originally informed by student demonstrations in France against class sizes, etc. - some things never change), but ultimately not won over there and then, finding it too labyrinthine and elongated to be A Pop Single. Fast forward a decade and a few plays of a then girlfriend's copy of it, I was loving it for exactly the same reasons. Je suis désolé, Mylène - and Neil and Chris, too, for interpreting your love of the single as borne of archness rather than heartfelt enthusiasm. Berk.

Whilst C'est à qui le tour, the latest album's official lead but de facto second single, feels almost conventional by Mylène's standards as a sub-three minute verse-chorus-verse electropop track (the sexually desolate lyrics notwithstanding), much else about Égrégore and its promotion is characteristically ambitious. The tribute to David Lynch. The borrowing from esoteric terminology. A cast of star producers from DJ Snake to Moby. And, not least, a 65-minute video-cum-concert-cum-documentary accompaniment with a small-scale theatre release.

Snatches from that film, and/or compilations of other promotional video highlights lifted from Mylène's extensive career portfolio, accompany some of the available YouTube clips for C'est à qui le tour. You'll forgive me, however, if I've gone instead for plainer alternatives, remaining mindful that the transgressive nature of a number of her videos - from the concentration camp setting of the extended Désenchantée promo to the tribute to Olivier de Sagazan's disturbing clayface art in À l'ombre - has the potential to be triggering.

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Among this week's other many treats, you may particularly also like:

Other new or at least not ancient material from Dog Unit, The Sewing Club, Moses Boyd ft SHANTÈH and Dexys Midnight Runners. The last named can be added to the list of father-son relationship songs that I reckon are miles better than The Living Years - see also Golden Goal by Pete Green and Come Here My Daddy by XTC.

A brief chance to relive Bette Davis & the Balconettes, who still count as the edgiest, most intimidating proposition I've ever come across in four decades of enjoying indiepop. Fizzy, aggressive, shouty (but unarguably great) tunes performed by a mob with the collective disposition of a buzzsaw, there are probably still a number of late-1990s Mancunian gig-goers who twitch and convulse at the recollection of being practically decapitated by one of Tracey Rees's violently hurled bass guitars.

Dave Stewart. No, not that one. The interesting one, of Hatfield & The North, Egg and It's My Party fame. Although gaining most commercial traction at the start of the 1980s once reinterpreting 1960s classics as leftfield synth tracks, the ability to pen a solid pop song had far from deserted him by then; hence the b-side of What Becomes of the Brokenhearted included here.

Björk, seen here in her role as the visually compromised Selma in Lars von Trier's polarising but ultimately Palme d'Or-winning tragedy musical Dancer in the Dark from 2000. The Thom Yorke duet from the same movie soundtrack is the one that garners the most airplay to this day, but, whisper it, I've always preferred the sheer ambition of Cvalda, a perfect union of the song and dance energy of It's Oh So Quiet and Mark Bell's subtle machine clanks (actual machines this time, too, considering the factory floor upon which Selma and colleagues break into song). Uploading this one returned some bittersweet memories, in truth, Dancer in the Dark being among those I'd have seen at the big screen film nights semi-regularly put on at the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough around the turn of the century. The theatre is no longer there, and neither, no less sadly, are some of my then town library colleagues with whom I'd have watched it.

Still on films, a quite literally electrifying performance from the recently departed Gerrit Graham, taken from his performance as Beef in Phantom of the Paradise, Brian de Palma's 1974 glam-rock retelling of Faust via The Picture of Dorian Gray. Only a year younger than the stage original of The Rocky Horror Show, but therefore also released a year before that one's film version, Phantom of the Paradise feels to me as if it's lived in that cult juggernaut's shadow for much of its existence but is a fine piece of work in its own right. Funny, grisly, parodic, subversive, satirical and camp, do seek it out and give it a try if you haven't already.

The late Victor Lewis-Smith, heard in phone prank call mode at the start of a choice track from ambient figureheads The Orb's 1992 crossover hit album. Ending this List, as Victor did many of his own programmes, with the Associated-Rediffusion adastral star logo and jingle, would have been a nice touch. I'm not quite that good, though.

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(The only smashing pumpkins you'll ever find in this blog. Pictures taken on 31/10/2020 are author's own)

There's no Halloween special this year, incidentally, despite this List having fallen on the very date. However, do please enjoy the one previous TML Does Halloween in the archive (List #214 dating back to 2016), dusted down and with newly fixed links.

The nearest thing to a concession to the season this week is actually the Trembling Blue Stars track - "These are haunted days / bonfire scented autumn days"... indeed so.

J xx

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DOG UNIT - Tiny Diversions (2026)