Moose - Suzanne

An underrated band sort of loosely connected to the shoegaze scene. Well, maybe "loosely connected" is the wrong way to put it. They were considered a shoegaze band but I don't really remember them ever gigging with the other shoegaze bands, plus they were on Hut which wasn't a very shoegazey label. Actually, listening to them now they don't really sound very shoegazey at all. Maybe I'm making the whole thing up.

They were very good, anyway. This is from an early EP.

The Puddle - Rat Park

I haven't posted any Flying Nun in a while so here's a particularly obscure one. Most of the Puddle's sole studio album (prior to their recent reunion) is really lo-fi and not terribly indiepop; it's good but certainly wouldn't be in my top ten. I like this one track a lot though.

Technical difficulty

Blogger isn't letting me upload today, so we'll have to take a break. See you tomorrow (hopefully!).

Oasis - She's Electric

In the great Blur v Oasis debate I came down firmly on the side of Blur, but Oasis did get their hooks into me every once in awhile. Most of Morning Glory is great, even if it was so overplayed I was sick to death of it within a few months.

Dunno why this was never a single, I would have had it out ahead of the somewhat inferior "Some Might Say" and vastly inferior "Roll With It".

Thompson Twins - All Fall Out

I know what you're thinking. "The Thompson Twins? WTF?" But for a mainstream early 80s synth-pop band, they were really quite good, at least for the first few records.

This song in particular, from their breakthrough album Quick Step and Side Kick, has an aggravating tendency to get stuck in my head and stay there for days. You'll see.

Wah! Heat - Seven Minutes to Midnight

Here's something by the one-third of the Crucial Three I haven't yet posted anything by. Wah! Heat or Wah! or The Mighty Wah! or Scraping Foetus Off The Wah! or whatever they were called at one point or another never enjoyed the success of the bands formed by the other Crucial Two - that's the Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen, in case anyone doesn't know that (and these days I'm never sure what anyone knows) - and I don't think that's entirely unfair, because they really weren't as good. But they were still pretty good nonetheless.

This is an early single.

Aztec Camera - We Could Send Letters

Aztec Camera's debut is well up the list of my favourite albums ever, and has been for about two-thirds of my life at this point (eep). I loved them so much as a teenager that I did silly things, like turning in essays a day late because I decided instead to go see them a second night in a row, in a city 50 miles away. Well OK, I only did that once.

It was all a bit of a letdown after that, of course, but the measure of how much I adored High Land, Hard Rain is that I still picked up everything Roddy did afterwards no matter how desperate it was (and the later stuff, it has to be said, was really pretty desperate). Actually, maybe that was just the measure of how much I adored him. Could you blame me, though, really?


This is an early version of my favourite song of theirs, released on a 1981 NME cassette called - wait for it - C81. Roddy was 17 when this was released. Can you imagine anyone being this talented at 17? And so utterly bloody beautiful as well? Imagine.