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THE FOREVER PEOPLE: Invisible (7″, Sarah SARAH 54, 1991)

Sarah was one of the first labels that I got truly fanatical and collectorish about, diligently buying up all of their releases and doing my utmost to plug gaps in my collection of their earlier releases. I liked the fact that they were so consistent and principled about their business – releasing music that they […]

WOODEN SHJIPS: Shrinking Moon For You (10″, no label WS-001, 2006)

I love this kind of thing: I read in an issue of Wire some time back that this band, who sounded great from the all-too brief description that was given, were giving away free 10″ records to anybody who took the time to e-mail them. The word free is enough to pique my interest at […]

THE WALKER BROTHERS: Take It Easy With The Walker Brothers (LP, Philips BL7691, 1965)

I bought this in a charity shop very recently (Oxfam, in Oxford’s Summertown area if I remember rightly) as it was pretty cheap and I’ve long been intrigued by how much devotion and column inches the Walker Brothers seem to have gotten since they were an active outfit. I’m still not entirely convinced, based on […]

MOONSHAKE: Eva Luna (LP, Too Pure PURE 16, 1992)

I’d been after this record for ages and couldn’t track it down anywhere – nothing on eBay, nothing from any mail-order outlets, nothing in any second-hand record shops – and then who would have thought it, I came across a copy in one of the many fine charity shops in the Headington area of Oxford. […]

HOOD: Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys (LP, Domino WIGLP42, 1998)

To my recollection this was Hood’s first ‘big time’ release, marking their shift from sporadic flurries of records coming out of tiny microlabels in bagged, hand-folded sleeves to a proper, ‘real’ label. (Bear in mind that in the spectrum of labels releasing Hood’s work, Domino were and remain independent yet Geffenesque in scale compared to […]

STEREOLAB & BRIGITTE FONTAINE/MONADE: Caliméro/Cache Cache (7″, Duophonic Super 45s DS45-25, ?)

Not sure what year it was when this record came out, but I’d hazard a guess that it was something like ’97 or ’98 perhaps. Who knows. Does it matter? Is it important to place records in some kind of grand chronological schema? To me it is, dammit, I love the chronology. This followed that […]

SPACEMEN 3: Walking With Jesus (7″, Earworm EGS01, 2003)

I was going to say how this record was part of the short-lived ‘Earworm Gold’ series, launched after the demise of the Earworm label proper, but a bit of internet research points out to me that the series was made up in fact of a whole ten releases, all of which I own. My memory […]

THE EDMUND FITZGERALD/BILGE PUMP: Noisestar Sessions #05/#06 (12″, Noisestar NOISESTAR-003, 2004)

Ah, 2004, just a few short years ago. The Edmund Fitzgerald were putting out records on little labels like this one and Vacuous Pop. Who’d have thought at the time that some of them would go on to form Foals, who stormed the world of music through 2008 to become proper famous music stars? Oxford […]

CHA-CHA COHEN: Spook On The High Lawn (12″, Chemikal Underground CHEM014, 1997)

Back in the early-to-mid nineties I used to write a fanzine called Circle Sky, named after the marvellous, wonderful Monkees song featured on their Head soundtrack. The Head soundtrack as mentioned in the Pooh Sticks’ ‘On Tape’. A variety of record labels and PR companies used to send me records, tapes and CDs to review. […]