Audio Journal : 24/05/2011

Once again, it is to BBC4 that I turn to bring you this post, specifically two programmes broadcast back-to-back a few Fridays ago. The first was one of those Classic Album documentaries on Primal Scream's Screamadelica and the other collected Top Of The Pops performances from bands in 1991, particularly those who were part of the fertile rock / dance crossover scene that seemed to flourish that year.

Watching the second programme made me incredibly nostalgic for a year that my music tastes started to develop properly. Just being reminded of 808 State's 'In Yer Face', which I bought (and still have, somewhere) on cassette single made the hairs stand up on my arms. Likewise '3AM Eternal' by The KLF (I have a German 12", bought several years later, and a 7” picked up in Luxembourg last week). Likewise 'Move Any Mountain' by The Shamen, which I had on the album En-Tact (the programme has hastened my need to have KLF's The White Room and En-Tact on CD rather than the over-played tapes sitting in my loft). Incidentally, 'Move Any Mountain' is a classic track, though much maligned because of Mr C's dodgy rap. What's often overlooked is that Mr C was a fantastic techno DJ. He couldn't rap for toffee (see 'Ebeneezer Goode'), but as a DJ he was pretty unequalled. I saw him play once; he gave me a flyer after his set. Anyone who has heard the dodgy hippy stuff The Shamen knocked out before Mr C arrived will also appreciate just how much he improved this otherwise unimpressive band.



What I found, to my surprise, was that I remembered most of the songs that were played, and indeed have most of them now, but hardly any were purchases at the time. I'm not revisionistic enough to try and claim that I had bought every single track at the time: 'Feel Every Beat' by Electronic (the album was borrowed from my friend Steve and my own copy purchased years later); 'X, Y And Zee' by Pop Will Eay Itself (borrowed from my friend Jon and a 7" copy bought years after); 'Human Nature' by Gary Clail (never even heard this at the time and yet bought a 7" of it from a charity shop some five years later); 'Sit Down' by James (I hated this when it came out but have since become enamoured of its oft-overlook lyrical depth, and now own most of the James back catalogue); 'I Wanna Be Adored' by The Stone Roses (ditto 'Sit Down'; hated this band at the time and mostly still do, but I think this track has an understated self-deprecating quality); 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana (I resisted Nirvana actively for years until I met Mrs S; I concede that even when Kurt fucked up his voice deliberately to sabotage the TOTP performance, he still sounded amazing); 'Loose Fit' by Happy Mondays (thanks go to Neil for getting me into the Mondays at University; I hated the entire 'baggy' scene at the time).

Partly this paucity of purchases was logical - I was still living off pocket money and a 2p-per-paper free newspaper round at the time, so disposable income for record purchases was slim. The only other record I actually bought of those played was 'Dizzy' by Vic Reeves and The Wonderstuff. This was again bought on cassette single, but even by the time I left Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon I regretted it. So I gave it to my friend Rob that afternoon; his brother, Chris, who would later influence my love for all things electronica, took offence at Rob having this single in the house and threw it out of a first floor window, whereupon it shattered.

So, happy 20th birthday to Primal Scream's Screamadelica. As with most of the music above, I didn't buy this when it came out. I bought it three years later, by which time I was absorbed in all things dance music and kept reading about how important Screamadelica was, how influential blah blah blah. Up to then I'd considered them a bit too 'rock' and more than a bit druggy. The programme confirmed both those old prejudices, although on the latter front Andrew Innes seems to have weathered pretty well, unlike Robert 'Throb' Young and Bobby Gillespie.

I bought Screamadelica on a date with a girl from school called Claire. I think she was a little bemused when I took her into Our Price in Stratford and started raving about how important this album was, how I was amazed she'd never heard of it etc. Christ, I must have sounded like such a geeky trainspotter, especially as I hadn't heard it myself until later that afternoon. I also bought a shirt from Principles while I was with her. It is no surprise to me that there was no second date.

When I first heard Screamadelica, it was filtered through all the pure dance music that came after, all of which felt more authentic; consequently I felt a little cold toward the hybrid nature of the songs and the whole thing felt a little scattergun. This was explained during the programme - initially, Screamadelica wasn't intended as an album, but a series of singles, mostly produced by Andy 'Sabres Of Paradise' Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson. Finally, Alan McGee, boss of Creation Records, suggested that they couldn't keep churning out hastily-recorded singles and remixes, and that an album proper was required. Accordingly it hangs together with little coherence, despite Weatherall's attempt to sequence it into a uniform trip, from the euphoric 'Moving On Up' to the comedown epic 'Shine Like Stars'.

Don't even get me started on 'Moving On Up' and 'Damaged', two good but straight rock tracks linking the band back to their previous eponymous album and Screamadelica's Stones-esque follow-up Give Out But Don't Give Up. These two tracks sadly reinforce the view that Primal Scream were a rock band first and foremost who happened to dabble fortuitously in dance music to further their otherwise slight reputation; without the guiding hands of Weatherall and Nicholson, the Scream were just a rock-by-numbers band with little going for them.

Don't get me wrong, 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' and the cover of 13th Floor Elevators' 'Slip Inside This House' are superb. The Orb's production of 'Higher Than The Sun' is one of the best (and druggiest) things The Orb ever recorded; the gnomic Alex Patterson from The Orb was one of the talking heads on the programme and spoke glowingly of the track, believing it a worthy successor to their own 'Little Fluffy Clouds'.

Overall, the documentary left me thinking that the trio of Gillespie / Innes / Young don't recall much of the making of Screamadelica, thanks to the E and also because - call me cynical - they don't seem to have been that involved. Screamadelica is, to me, Weatherall's baby and it sounds far better when listened to as a remix album. Bassist Henry Olsen (formerly of Nico's backing band The Faction), later usurped by The Stone Roses's Mani, came across as a thoroughly decent individual, as did 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' vocalist Denise Johnson, mainly because they actually remember what happened; that said, listen to Olsen smugly eulogise his performance of the main riff on 'Damaged' and it again reinforces the notion of a rock band that lucked out with a hip dance producer. (Olsen, incidentally, is the son of my first primary school teacher.)

Perhaps that's one sacred cow too many?

Audio Journal : 27/04/2011

Mrs S confiscated my iPod on the night before we set off for our week-long holiday in Portugal. Therefore there's 'officially' no blog this week since I haven't really listened to anything. Unless you count the chilled-out Parisian house music played by the pool, which, whilst very trendy and absorbing, isn't something I'm terribly equipped to write at length about, though it does make me want to drink cocktails.

We have been listening to The Beatles' 'red' and 'blue' albums in our hire car. Once again, prolonged exposure to the Fab Four reminds me that a) with only a solitary exception of the tracks included ('Back In The USSR'), I don't like the Paul McCartney songs at all and have been making judicious use of the buttons on the steering wheel to move past his tracks; b) the singles the band released are generally irritating thanks to familiarity (even Mrs S, an avowed, long-standing Beatles fan from her teenage years, agrees); and c) 'Yellow Submarine' is a brilliant song for kids.

I knew this already, well before I heard my girls asking for it repeatedly and then singing rapturously along in the back of the hire car. I knew this because I was taught it as a children's song in primary school (this was about 1982; much later I began to suspect that my teachers were all LSD-dropping, pot-smoking ex-hippies made good; we didn't, as far as I can recall, ever learn any Grateful Dead songs). What is it that John Hannah says to Gwyneth Paltrow in Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors? Something about us learning Beatles songs in the womb? Well, in my case, not quite; I was about six, or thereabouts. My parents had a solitary Beatles EP (Magical Mystery Tour), which is probably more responsible than anything else for turning me on to fetishising collecting records, and for making me think that The Beatles were plain weird thanks to the oddball gatefold sleeve. (I used to collect postcards and keep them in that sleeve; my nerdish tendencies began early.)

'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' is another song that I was taught at school, in about 1986 (Christ, what were my teachers on?). We created a mural for the back of that teacher's classroom, with each of us given a phrase in the song to create an image. I had two - 'newspaper taxis' and 'marmalade skies' - and created an oblong car with then-current headlines scribbled on it, as well as orange cloud with thick lines dotted around it; we were a strictly Robinsons, orange peel-in family. It was a literal depcition of a song that made no sense at all to me and my fellow ten-year-old classmates. And why would it?

By way of padding, here are some things I've written for Documentary Evidence lately: a review of Junip's Fields (http://bit.ly/hYN9dr) and an interview with Espen J. Jörgensen on his collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner as SOUNDESCAPES (http://bit.ly/g9s2cx).

Audio Journal : 22/04/2011

This week I've been catching up with the work of David Fleet, aka M075, 75 Surveillance and Laica. For some fairly logical reason, when I saw the various aliases and the reference to 'surveillance', and titles like 'Cosy Funk' and 'Audio Out' I was reminded of the work of Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Richard H. Kirk. Kirk, whose music began as harsh industrial noise with the Cabs slowly and deliberately evolved into something more purist, much more electronic. His solo work alongside the Cabs releases was initially as harsh as his dayjob, a far cry from the multi-cultural dub ambience of his later Nineties work for Warp, or the early rave of Sweet Exorcist. There are many other aliases that Kirk has used, including Electronic Eye, whose LPs were adorned with grainy images of nascent CCTV technology, hellish signals of that word I picked out, 'surveillance'.

Fleet's Bandcamp page contains a number of tracks which I've been enjoying since I downloaded them about a month ago. Apart from making me feel nostalgic about Richard H Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire, I've also found Fleet's music reminding me of many great electronica artists from the Nineties, where artists like Plastikman (Richie Hawtin), Luke Slater, and Photek, as well as the likes of Autechre, dragged me away from listening to electronic pop.

That's not to say that Fleet's music isn't original; far from it. The major boon here is the eclectic restlessness of Fleet's music, with tracks moving from skeletal Hawtin-esque beats ('Riddime' from MO75's Suppress), to post-industrial electronic body music in the vein of Nine Inch Nails or Nitzer Ebb ('Hell Machine' from MO75's Surrender), to frozen ambience (Laica's Kos tracks), to electro that sounds like it's being played through shattered glass ('Anderson's Ground' from 75 Surveillance's Honed), as perfected by Link, Plaid and Aphex Twin.

'Audio Out' (from Surrender) has a pattern of scarce beats that sounds like dropping a pingpong ball on a glass-topped table, while 'Cosy Funk' (from Honed) has a fidgety, ricocheting electronic dub rhythm and deep bassy sounds; it's like an otherworldly electro funk, hence the name. The longform 'Puls (Complete)' by Laica is a 19-minute ambient epic, much like Global Communication soundtracking a Clive Barker movie. Dark industrial sounds evolve out of clouds of noxious ambience while uptight dub beats drift in and out. It's engaging, absorbing and all those sorts of words.

Fleet kindly sent me an instrumental demo version of his take on Depeche Mode's 'See You', highlighting his ability to turn in electronic pop as well as the array of styles mentioned above.

It seems vaguely odd to be writing about downloads in the wake of Record Store Day 2011. That's mainly because I didn't participate in supporting independent record shops on 16 April, though I would have liked to. There were a number of highly limited items from artists that I like being made available, but instead I elected to spend my morning ferrying my two girls to various Saturday activities and parties. In the trade-off between records and my kids, my kids won the day. I couldn't be bothered with the queuing on the day, nor the sixteen mile drive to my nearest record shop, to be honest.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?

Audio Journal : 12/04/2011

This isn't a post about The Strokes' new album, Angles, though it perhaps should be. I bought the album a couple of weeks back, have their previous three, but am not terribly struck on 'Under Cover Of Darkness', the first single from Angles; so I can't bring myself to listen to it properly. I've had it on in the background in the car, Mrs S has digested it properly, says it's okay, but I just can't be bothered.



The Strokes first came into my awareness one Friday evening. Mrs S (then Miss G) and I were eating dinner and watching Top Of The Pops. On came The Strokes with 'New York City Cops', the first single from their début album Is This It. Miss G said 'This is the type of song that my dad would mute when it came on the TV'. At the time the musical diet of our house was a blend of pop and R&B (it's not a period we're proud of) and The Strokes sounded like they came from another time, somewhere deeply unfashionable and clunky.

'Last Night' changed all that for me, and by the sound of things a lot of other people as well. It arrived like an urgent wake-up call from musical staleness, and I loved it. At the time my research into all things punk had been constrained to the UK post-punk duo of Magazine and Wire, and I'd yet to delve into NYC punk. Whether 'Last Night' encouraged that exploration or not, I forget. I know I bought Patti Smith's Horses and Televsion's Marquee Moon around this time, but I don't believe I was inspired to do so by The Strokes.

'Last Night', to me, at the time, was a refreshing slap in the face away from the dreary post-Oasis drudgery sound of Coldplay and Travis. I didn't get the album straight away and only came to own it a few years later and if I'm honest I still couldn't tell you much about the first two albums. The third album, First Impressions Of Earth I'm much more familiar with, and it's a very different proposition to the first two – more polished, cleaner, less angular; more commercial or more experimental with its sounds, or maybe both at the same time.

Having spent the last few years avidly delving into NYC punk and its antecedents, what now is evident to me is that The Strokes weren't original in the slightest, however necessary and fresh they felt at the time. I now see that 'Last Night' shamelessly borrows its uptight guitars from the New York Dolls' lurid pre-punk emission 'Trash'. This realisation only came to me relatively recently thanks to a compilation CD given away with Mojo years ago. I have several CDs that survey the CBGBs / Max's Kansas City scenes of Manhattan in the second half of the Seventies, but the one that came free with that edition of Mojo remains my favourite. So much so that I had to buy it again recently from eBay after getting rid of my original copy by mistake.



I Heart NY Punk is a good survey of the NYC punk scene, and highlights just how much more diverse the Stateside scene was in comparison with the UK scene. You have lewd bar-room blues courtesy of Wayne (aka Jayne) County & The Electric Chairs' 'Fuck Off', a live version of James Chance's 10-minute demonic skronking sax 'n soul desperation epic 'King Heroin', the gritty electronic work of Suicide, Mink Deville's pre-Huey Lewis soul scratchings on 'She's So Tough' and a live rendition of Television's guitar precision on 'See No Evil'. Plus of course the New York Dolls glam-punk stomp mentioned earlier. The point is that punk, US style, was much more diverse than UK punk; where US punk was an uncompromising, alternative, artistic attitude, UK punk was more or less just a sound and a corresponding image. Mohawks and safety pins couldn't be further from David Byrne performing at CBGBs with Talking Heads in tucked-in shirts and a tidy college boy haircut.

The closest the two siblings came was in The Ramones. It may have been the nearest US punk ever came to our Sex Pistols, but The Ramones' sound was more or less just an amplified, fuzzed-up strain of joyous rock 'n roll and teenage rebellion. Phil Spector's later work with them thus makes complete sense. Dee Dee Ramone's heroin opus, 'Chinese Rocks' is included on I Heart NY Punk in the form of a cover by the doomed Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers. The chorus to this song is just about the most perfectly pure punk lyric ever – 'I'm living on Chinese rock / All my friends they are in hock / I'm living on Chinese rock / All my things are in the pawn shop'. As much as anything this acts as an allegory for the commitment-addiction of many of US punksters to the scene they were part of.

I have thus far resisted the bleak notion which I first heard espoused by a drummer school friend who said that there was 'no new music any more'. Yet now when I hear The Strokes and contrast it with punk, NY stylee, I see that they may have felt new and essential at the time, but they were really just shameless plagiarists.

I wonder if we'll feel the same about The Vaccines in a few years. Part of me hopes not. What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? was released the week before Angles and has attracted much hype. I listened to it for the first time a week or so ago and was initially absolutely floored, sufficiently so to post on Facebook and Twitter that it was totally worthy of the hype – and I normally have a real hatred herd following.



Two weeks after buying it, I'd say I still feel an excitement at songs like 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)', 'Blow It Up' and 'Norgaard', but apart from that there is a vague sense of having heard this all before. Vocalist Justin Young sounds like Tom Greenhalgh from Mekons crossed with Tom Hingley from Inspiral Carpets; 'Blow It Up' sounds like Jesus And Mary Chain covering Wreckless Eric; 'Wetsuit' sounds like Vampire Weekend produced by Phil Spector on day release; the NME described 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)' as the exhumed skeleton of Joey Ramone, still in his trademark leather jacket; and so on.

There is also the vaguest sensation of feeling that I'm a little too old for this album, concerned as it is with teenage models ('Norgaard'), adolescent relationship tensions, revenge sex ('Post Break-Up Sex') and the like, feeling 'smart' by dropping in references to F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Times pondered whether the album would be 'a soundtrack for a generation of students').

Last year I raved, along with just about everyone else, about The Drums' début album, and What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? has similarities in its instant-ness ('Norgaard' even has a Beach Boys-style vocal harmony reminiscent of The Drums). Repeated listening starts to make you feel queasy, like eating too many cream cakes. The Drums seemed to have more of an enduring appeal somehow.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great album. It just feels at times like an album of covers, even though I know it isn't.

At least Silicon Teens' Music For Parties from 1980 set out to be (mostly) an album of covers. A collection of synth pop versions of old rock 'n roll hits, like 'Do Wah Diddy', 'Memphis Tennessee', 'Sweet Little Sixteen' and 'You Really Got Me', it punkishly slaughtered some holy cows and somehow bypassed kitsch. My full review of this early synth gem can be found here.

Audio Journal : 07/04/2011

A text conversation from earlier today.

Mrs S : 'Runaround Sue' by Dion is such a great song x

Me : But wouldn't it be better performed by [ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist John Frusciante]? x

Mrs S : No that's 'Runaway'. Have just gone from 'Runaround Sue' to 'Runaway' by [him] and now 'Runaway' by Nuyorican Soul. Taking a tour of my iPod while mopping x

Me : 'Run Run Run' by VU x

Mrs S : Now done Velvets and 'Run For Your Life' by The Beatles. Tired of running and moving on to something else x

Me : 'Walk Like An Egyptian' x

Mrs S : I tell a lie. Quick blast of 'Run Rudolph Run' by Chuck Berry before moving on. Could have had 'Run' by Snow Patrol, New Order, Vampire Weekend and 'Runaway' by The National or Kasabian. Also 'Run With The Boys' by Carl Barat but getting pretty close to 'Rusty The Cowboy' by The Wiggles. PS I will sell you the rights to my sonic adventure as a starting piece for your next blog x

Audio Journal : 23/03/2011

Third time lucky: I have booked tickets to see Interpol three times; the first time was for a huge (for them) concert at Alexandra Palace in 2007; the second time was for a far smaller gig in Birmingham last year. I didn't go either time and both times sold the tickets. This disappoints me no end. I have said many times that Interpol are right up there among my favourite bands, the band that have soundtracked my darkest days like no other, and yet twice I bailed on going to see them after letting life get in the way. Third time lucky, since after being well and truly smitten by this New York band since the release of their second album, 2004's Antics, tonight I finally saw them live, albeit from a lofty perch at Shepherd's Bush Empire, ably supported by electronic punk-funk Brooklynite Matthew Dear and his band.

Mrs S is responsible for getting me into Interpol. It was she who first heard 'Slow Hands' and it was she who bought Antics at the old Fopp in Leamington Spa. I was hooked after one listen and they fast became 'my' band. Belatedly, I bought their debút (Turn On The Bright Lights) from Other Music in New York's Lower East Side; it was somehow important, somehow entirely logical to me, to buy this quintessentially New York album in Manhattan. Two days earlier, 'Obstacle 1' from that album was the song playing when Mrs S discovered we were expecting our first daughter, giving that song a perpetual frozen poignancy in our lives. When Our Love To Admire (ordered from Other Music instead of nipping down to my local HMV, natch) came out in 2007 it would come to fuel, drive, encourage – whatever – the most subdued period of anxiety, depression, misery – whatever – that I've ever experienced. Even now I sometimes shudder when I put that album on. I think I wrote here a while back that I'd started to hear levity in that album; after hearing the band perform that album's 'Rest My Chemistry' tonight, in all its devastating melancholy glory, I think I was probably tricking myself.

2010's Interpol marked the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler and a conscious decision by the band to move away from the big venue / stadium aspirations that seemed to be being foisted upon them. An NME review of a gig in a tiny NYC venue last year painted a picture of a band suddenly freed from record company pressures of conformity to the 'scale' befitting a band approaching their fourth album, much more at ease in their surroundings. Live, they are undoubtedly a weird proposition, shrouded in barely-there lighting and near-darkness. Singer Paul Banks barely moves; drummer Sam Fogarino – the only member of the band not to wear black – effortlessly replicates the tight yet complex drum patterns of their recorded work; guitarist Daniel Kessler has legs that seem to operate independently of his upper body, all elastic moves and spontaneous angularity, a bit like a court jester with a six-string. The stand-in bassist spent most of the set with his legs just about as far apart as is possible without falling over, Peter Hook stylee. They don't do reinterpretations of their songs, just play faithful versions of the album tracks. Only 'Evil' and 'C'mere' (both from Antics) were subtly changed, both delivered with a greater speed and urgency than on record. The epic 'Lights' from Interpol was, unfeasibly, more towering in its slow-building grandeur than on the LP and the textural 'NYC' (a song plagued by disenchantment and consequently one of my favourite songs from Turn On The Bright Lights) seemed to be rendered with heightened emotions, even if the ruminative backing vocal of 'Got to be some more change in my life', delivered by either Kessler or the keyboard player, was sadly lost somewhere in the mix.

So, third time lucky, as I said. I don't quite know how to feel in many ways – elated that I've finally gotten to see one of my favourite bands or miserable as fuck after the songs they played and the effect they continue to have on me. If nothing else, tonight reinforced that I have a very real dependency on this band and that doesn't show signs of abating any time soon.

Audio Journal : 16/03/2011

Mrs S and I spent most of Friday night and the early hours of Saturday morning watching music TV, which is something that we don't do very often.

The selections were remarkably parochial in focus, given how many more channels there were available than the last time we found ourselves channel hopping. Most of the 'rock' channels appeared to be showing endless Foo Fighters videos, while Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' seemed to pop up with alarming regularity. It also seems that whenever we flick on music TV, we always seem to come upon the video for Deniece William's 'Let's Hear It For The Boy', always appearing to be some worn-out, grainy, sub-YouTube quality copy of the video. Then there's the other channels showing endless Beyonce videos. Remarkably, Beyonce's Destiny's Child bandmate Kelly Rowlands with her dubious duet with Nelly – a song I thought I'd managed to forget about, at last – kept cropping up inescapably as well. Plus ça change and all that.

We came upon a few gems. Weezer's still-timeless video for 'Buddy Holly' being one, some early Green Day (which reminded that before they went all rock-opera on American Idiot they could still knock out quality punk-pop) and Offspring's 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)'. We also chanced upon Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box', which, as an avowed non-Nirvana fan, is the only song of theirs – harrowing and maudlin though it is – that I really like. I was listening to electronic music while everyone around me fell in love with Kurt and co, though I did think their performances on the 1991 - The Year That Punk Broke video were inspiringly raw.

And then, as the divided attention disorder of flicking rapidly between channels in order to find something to watch became plain boring, we found the video for The Vapors' 'Turning Japanese'. This is a song I've always thought of as being fundamentally 'novelty', and there is a definite whiff of that, but hearing it that night made me realise it's a good song; sort of art-rock in the vein of The Cars. Sufficiently enthused, I dug out a compilation of tracks by the likes of Tom Robinson, Ian Dury, The Jam and the aforementioned track by The Vapors and listened to it as I was ferrying my girls around in the car the next day. Yeah, I think we all know what this song's title refers to, and that litle riff that heralds the chorus may enforce the novelty angle, but it's good all the same. Here's the video. Email readers should click here.



At some point during that same evening, I don't especially know why, I decided I really wanted to listen to De La Soul's De La Soul Is Dead. Hip hop is a style of music that is fairly alien to this blog, and my enthusiasm for the genre pretty much started and ended with this album. (Okay, I also had Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme; I'm not ashamed, and besides that was more of a 'pop' album than purist rap.) De La Soul Is Dead was released in 1991 and arrived at a point where I'd still broadly been consuming a pop diet, and I got on board with this album because of the hit single 'Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)' with its ripped-off Curiosity Killed The Cat chorus. Me and a bunch of classmates (I was 14) used to know every word to this song and we'd occasionally break out into renditions of this at breaktime. Yep, very Glee.



No-one else from my class bought the album, though. I picked it up on cassette and initially found it confusing as hell, mostly because I wasn't au fait with hip hop's vernacular, but also because it was just so damn weird. Not hippyish, as was the label applied to De La Soul after their flower-power debut, but just odd; the series of playground 'skits' which attempt to humorously bookend the album I didn't understand. I also didn't understand some of the wackier Burger King / donut references. All that, and the fact that the album version of 'Ring Ring Ring' wasn't anywhere near as good as the single. After a few listens I began to 'get' the album and for that reason I've never binned it, unlike some of the other things I listened to back then.

Have I listened to this since, I don't know, 1992? Probably not. I haven't had an accessible cassette deck for years, so that night I bought a second hand CD copy from Oxfam via Amazon Marketplace and was amazed at how much I remembered nearly twenty years on. I love the memory aspect of music; those musical memories lay in your subconscious, undisturbed and unused for years yet come back instantly and vividly as soon as you hit play. I really enjoyed listening to this again, and even found myself smiling at the 'skits'. 'Let Me In', with its samples from a recording of The Three Little Pigs, and 'Fanatic Of The B-Word' (with one of the heaviest beats here; the 'B' word is baseball) are two of my favourite tracks.

Meanwhile, over at Documentary Evidence you can read reviews of German rock band Can's seminal Ege Bamyasi from 1972 and Josh T. Pearson's Last Of The Country Gentlemen, released in the UK on Monday.