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WORLD OF TWIST: Sons Of The Stage (7″, Circa YR 62, 1991)

The band name ‘World Of Twist’ totally takes me back to heady teenage indie-disco days; drinking to excess back when that just meant having more than a couple of pints, and getting down to what then seemed like super-underground music that the ‘norms’ hadn’t discovered yet. Sure, now I realise that I was swept up in the final lurch of ‘indie’ being minced through major label machines into a simple pigeonhole-friendly term, but 1991 was right in the middle of that process. It was before the endless ‘twelve-inch dance remix’ B-sides that ruined many a record for the first third of the nineties, but after the innocent simplicity and joy of many people discovering that music did exist outside of what was in the charts and on the radio. It all seems so quaint and archaic now; eeeeee I remember the old days.

Strange how many of the bands of the late eighties/early nineties ‘Indie Explosion’ (© any number of pointless compilations at the time) have recently reappeared. Over the past couple of years there have been gigs and tours by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Carter, Sultans of Ping FC and who knows what other bands that everybody thought had long disappeared into some floppy-haired, syncopated-beat-under-fuzz-guitar lined coffin of history. Is that how it’s to be, now? Are we on a fifteen-year cycle of repetition, or have people just gotten caught up in this ‘Don’t Look Back’ obsession with digging up the past and attempting to recreate feelings that would be best left as good memories, rather than getting spoilt by their being viewed through a modern, ‘more mature’ lens?

World Of Twist’s singer Tony Ogden died in 2006, which is a shame. They were never a huge and famous band, but they had a small and significant part to play in my music-fandom development (even though I only knew two or three of their songs). Interestingly, Wikipedia tells me that he started out as the drummer in the band before graduating* to lead man in 1989. Well, I never knew that before.

*Do I mean ‘graduating’? I like drums more than singing. Maybe I meant ‘regressing’?

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