Super Furry Animals - Hermann Loves Pauline CDS

 

Hello everyone.

No posts at all in 2024, busy year. Mostly also forgot, but influenced by a busy year. Anyway, I hope you are all well, and having a happy 2025 so far.

Here is some more music, from a find in a local charity shop the other day. One of my favourite SFA tunes, and a couple of really great b-sides. They obviously really rated Calimero as they played it on some sessions around this period, but the other one is good too.

Classic early SFA period production throughout, sounds like they've recorded the entire band on a single track and then gone nuts with a synth over the top of everything. Very thin.

Should also say that the a-side skips near the end, CD wasn't in great condition, but the b-sides (which is why you're here, right?) are fine. Enjoy.

1. Hermann Loves Pauline

2. Calimero

3. Trons Mr Urdd

Right here!

Eggman - Not Bad Enough

 

Here's the dude from the Boo Radleys on his own, and it's good. The singer, Sice, not the guitarist. Without looking it up I don't know any more, presumably it's off an LP back in the day, but not one I'm aware of.

Anyway, this is a good tune, and the b-side is also enjoyable, so I recommend giving it a spin.

1. Not Bad Enough

2. Identikit

Slice of sice.

Dead links

Say, if you want anything re-uploaded please ask. Just seen that people have been looking at old stuff which doesn't have a link any more, so happy to oblige.

The Mission / Throwing Muses / Pixies / Dinosaur Jr - The Sounds Machine EP1

In case a picture disc wasn't crappy sound-quality enough, here's some proper surface noise. No recollection of when I bought this, but it clearly wasn't loved by the previous owner.

The Mission track is epic, about 10 minutes long, all recorded at the now-dead Astoria in London in May 1988. So that's over 35 years ago... Throwing Muses and Pixies same year, but at the Town & Country in London (also now dead, also thanks to the Elizabeth Line), and Dinosaur Jr clearly asked to provide a song which would fit on an already-full 7". The weirdest drum sound on the Dinosaur Jr one I've heard in ages.

Hope you like them!

1. The Misson - Shelter From The Storm '88
2. Throwing Muses - Mania
3. Pixies - Hey
4. Dinosaur Jr - Throw Down

They're all right here.

 

Tricky - Christiansands 7"

 

Hello everyone, if anyone is still out there. Sorry it's been so long since my last post, just over a year by the looks, but, well... I've been busy.

Anyway, here is something to hopefully make up for it a little. A picture disc, which I normally wouldn't post as they sound so awful, but apparently not too bad on my new turntable - I'll leave it to you to decide.

A-side from Pre-Millennium Tension, my favourite of his LPs by a distance. B-side seems to be a slightly random re-work of bits of Black Steel? Good stuff, anyway, and I hope you like it.

1. Christiansands

2. Flynn

It's right here.

His Name Is Alive - Can't Always Be Loved 7"

I think this must have been a Peel thing, I vaguely remember hearing it on the radio and then going out to buy it the next day. Got the album this is off, too, and it's really great. Hope you like it.

Has a great thing on side A, which is that the single goes straight into the 4-track demo of the same song without any gap. Nice touch, as is having a version of my other favourite of their tunes as the B-side, pleasingly ramshackle, and they clearly didn't know how to end it. The album/single version of this one is worth seeking out too.

Please excuse any pops and crackles, I dropped this down the back of the sofa at one point.

1. Can't Always Be Loved (radio)
2. Can't Wait Forever (4-track)
3. Wish I Had A Wishing Ring (first one)

It's right here for you.

The Posies - Definite Door 7"

Hi. I had a couple of other things to put up, but then listened to this 7" for the first time in ages, and it is just brilliant, so thought I would demonstrate good sharing this month.

Great single, and three excellent covers, the middle one of which I'd never heard before, but very familiar with the other two. Hope you enjoy it!

Also I hope you appreciate that wherever and whenever I bought this, I paid 10p.

1. Definite Door
2. Song Of A Baker
3. Ooh Child
4. I Am The Cosmos

Here you go.

The Pastels - Worlds Of Possibility 12"

 

Hi.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted in nearly a year. No excuse, really, but my resolution this year is to go for one a month. Which I've already missed. But should manage better than one a year like 2021...

This is a great record. The single itself is awesome, and it has a special weird bit on the end which I don't even know what it is; it looks like a separate track on the vinyl, but it's not listed. Anyway, all good. Good b-sides too, track 3 is a cover of a song which I'm sure those of you with a better musical education will immediately recognise.

Hope you enjoy them, and see you again soon.

1. Worlds Of Possibility
2. Photogram
3. Love It's Getting Better
4. Ever Far

It's getting better here.

Sorry, the picture is a CD case nicked off the internet, but it is off a proper 12".

Movietone - Mono Valley 7"

This is possibly another repost... But looks like if I posted it before it was at 160kbps, and like I said, I have a new turntable.

More of the Bristol thing, and the Planet thing. Movietone this time, pretty chilled stuff, but remember I mentioned the saxophone on the Crescent b-side? Well, it's back. If you liked it then, you'll love it now. If you found it unaccountably irritating then you will have to put up with it again. I remember, even at the time, thinking that the sax on some of Movietone's stuff was very annoying. But it's not all the way through.

I'm assuming the saxophone player from Movietone isn't going to read this.

1. Mono Valley

2. Under The 3000 Foot Red Ceiling

Free jazz here.

Spacemen 3 - Hypnotized 12"

I see Jason Pierce started with the American spelling early on, before Spiritualized, based on this title. Really good tune, though! You can hear loads of what was to come on here, just sounds like early Spiritualized, even got some brass going on in there. You can also, I think, hear why he was the one who made it bigger post-Spacemen, although Pete Kember (Sonic Boom) did a lot of production work on stuff I like.

B-sides are OK, way more minimal than Hypnotized. The first is better than the second, which is I guess why it makes the cover. Some slightly painful rhyming-dictionary work to enjoy on track three, too.

1. Hypnotized
2. Just To See You Smile (Honey Pt. 2)
3. The World Is Dying

Dying/crying/sighing/flying here.

Tricky - Ponderosa 12"

More Bristol, naturally. This one I remember buying, the very next morning after hearing it on my little bedside radio on Mark and Lard's Radio 1 show. I used to listen to that show avidly, it's responsible for a decent chunk of my record collection.

There once was a record shop in Bristol (in a really scabby underpass by the bus station) called Replay. I went there weekly, if not more, and it was amazing. I'm sure if you Google it you'll find lots of nostalgia. At one point in the 90s they had four shops, one on a posher hill in Bristol, and three by the bus station; Replay, Replay Dance and Replay T-Shirts.

I only ever went in Replay (indie/metal), but they didn't stock Tricky, so I had to go to Replay Dance in my baggy jumper and DMs, get confused and disorientated by all the cool people and weird noises, and ask at the counter for this. It had blown my mind to the extent that I bought two and gave one to my friend Dave, whose HiFi had such loud bass that the floor shook on one of the b-sides.

Happy memories. I hope you enjoy it.

1. Original Version
2. Dobie's Rub Part 1
3. Ultramagnetic Terrorist's Power Club Mix
4. Original Instrumental
5. Dobie's Rub Part 1 (Tricky's Confusion)

Bristol.

Beatnik Filmstars - Supremer Queener 7"

Another huge gap between posts, but I am going to do better, promise.

More Bristol stuff, but Mobstar not Planet, back to the Beatniks. Remember I said I had one of their 7"s wrapped in wallpaper? Well, this is it. Those were the days, plastic sleeve printed with the band's name, then wallpaper inside, then white vinyl in its own plastic sleeve... It probably cost them as much to make as it cost me to buy.

But they saved on production costs with the music, as ever. Although actually these tracks aren't as unusually produced as most of their songs of this era, and along with this being probably my favourite of their EPs, they sound good too. Supremer Queener is a proper pop song, and should have been a massive hit. Possibly. All the rest are variously noisy and quiet, and genuinely this is a really, really good record. I hope you agree.

1. Supremer Queener
2. I Am A Pioneer
3. Seventies Flick
4. A Crazy Exploding

Wallpaper here.

Crescent - Sun 7"

I think I've posted this before, but I am posting it (possibly) again for two reasons. One is that I have a new turntable, so it should sound better than it did last time. The second is that I've been on a bit of a Bristol 90s nostalgia trip recently, maybe for a simpler time, and this was part of it, Planet Records and all.

The main reason it's here is that it is one of my all-time favourite 7"s. Seriously. There are a lot that I love, but this one is really very high up the list. There's definitely an element of nostalgia in there, but it's just a great, great song, and I hope you like it too. The b-side is also really good, different style, bass mixed super-loud.

Also note the saxophone on the b-side, because it was possibly played by the same person who played saxophone for Movietone (given that everyone seemed to be in most Planet bands, one way or another).

1. Sun
2. They Are Rebuilding The City

Noise lives here.

Constantines & Feist - Islands In The Stream 7"

Weird times, huh? Kenny Rogers dead. And some other stuff going down, but here's not the place for all that. Suffice to say that if you're not allowed out of your house for the next six months I will try to keep you entertained, two tracks at a time.

In honour of Kenny, here's a break from the normal 90s stuff, and a quick jump to 2008. Not available other than on this 7" (I don't think), which my wife bought me as a present, this is a great cover of one of my favourite songs, by one of my favourite bands of the time.

Hope you like it. Apologies for the amount of crackle, but maybe it's a brown vinyl thing.

1. Islands In The Stream
2. Trans Canada

Gibbs bros is here.

Catatonia - Gyda Gwen very limited single-sided 7"

So, there I was, looking through my LPs, and realised I hadn't listened to Way Beyond Blue in ages. So I did, and had forgotten how much I liked it. Also, I had forgotten that my copy has a very limited 7" with it, with this track on one side, and nowt on the other.

It's all in Welsh, and it's really good. I'm sure it's available in other places, but I was excited to find it, so here it is. The "e" of Gwen has an accent on it, but I don't know where this is on the keyboard.

1. Gyda Gwen

Cerys before 6music is here.

Beatnik Filmstars - Lap Dog Kiss 7" EP

More from the alternative alternative alternative Bristol crowd of the mid-90s. This one also comes highly recommended, and not only because it came out on coloured vinyl of a frankly lovely colour, although this might explain its slightly crackly sound.

This EP starts tuneful, then gets noisier and less tuneful, and then takes a turn from there. And then another turn. But in a good way. You'll see.

Somewhere I think I have one of their singles wrapped in wallpaper, and if I can find it I will give it a spin and it might end up here.

1. Charlie Batman
2. Ill Book No. 3
3. Totally Lost Control Completely
4. 8 Sq. Ft. Six

I'm Batman.

Beatnik Filmstars - Apathetic English Swine 7"

One of Bristol's unsung heroes of the 90s, this band. In the era of Massive Attack, Portishead and all that (which I also loved), and the Planet Records crowd with Flying Saucer Attack, Crescent and so on, there was also Beatnik Filmstars. They are loud, abrasive, and on many occasions so poorly recorded they are virtually unlistenable. I have one CD by them which I think must be the lousiest production I have ever heard anywhere, and among some of my collection that is quite a claim.

However, this 7" is not poorly produced, it's awesome. The a-side is killer, one b-side starts with the singer having a go at the drummer (and then ends with what sounds like the drummer fighting back), and it's all well worth listening to. Clarinet. I have a feeling they managed to get themselves signed to Merge records at some point, which is surely enough of a recommendation to check them out.

1. Apathetic English Swine
2. Gum
3. Clothes

In Bristol with a pistol.

Grandaddy - Summer Here Kids 7"

This is just one of those songs for me, the first time I heard it I just thought it was amazing, and all this time later I feel exactly the same. Grandaddy have a lot of great tunes, particularly off that one LP (you know the one), and the main guy had that good solo record too.

Man, my brain is tired.

Anyway, two b-sides on a 7", always a fan of that. Even if the a-side is 45 rpm and the b-side 33 rpm, I can forgive them (once).

Hope you like the two extra tunes too, the first is a noisy kind of thing, which I very much enjoy, and the second a quiet kind of thing which is very lovely.

There is, somewhere, a Grandaddy song which Stuart Maconie played on the radio about 15 years ago and I heard once, which was amazing. It wasn't on an album, and it was before it was easy to find out what had just been on the radio, so it was lost to me forever. Any suggestions very welcome.

1. Summer Here Kids
2. Levitz (Birdless)
3. My Small Love

Summer here.

Tortoise / Stereolab split 7"

So here's something nice. I think I picked this up from a Tortoise show in Bristol a very long time ago, and someone told me it was worth a few bob now. Well, out of sheer generosity of spirit I am making it available for you lucky people to steal for free, right here, right now.

Cool and calming tune from Tortoise, as befits the blue vinyl of the single, and the usual from Stereolab. Hope you like it. My wife hates it.

1. Tortoise - YAUS

2. Stereolab - Speedy Car

Here's lovely.

Sebadoh - Beauty Of The Ride 7"

Yeah, almost two years. You wanna make something of it?

Well look, I'm sorry. To make up for it, here is one of the best singles ever, to celebrate a new Sebadoh LP coming out in the next couple of weeks. If you don't already love this song then you are about to find out what you've been missing all this time.

The b-side is also awesome, a BBC session track, covering a Palace Music song which I've always liked a lot. Good cover, good song, good times. Good old Beeb.

1. Beauty Of The Ride
2. Riding

I'm back. And this time I'm wearing a cap.