A flexible slice of indie-pop history, this – the Sha-La-La label was the precursor to Sarah Records; they released a number of flexidiscs that were generally sold with fanzines. They all had fantastically evocative, two-colour wraparound sleeves, which tended to use imagery that was much the style of the time (and the genre): 1960s/1970s-esque pictures […]
Category: Indie-pop
ALLEN CLAPP: A Change In The Weather (7″, Four Letter Words 004, ?)
This record – as a package – is a little thing of beauty. Some aspects of it that appeal to me are: The sleeve: it’s a type of standard seven inch single inner sleeve, elevated to the status of The Cover by way of some really nice, what look to be hand-stamped (or perhaps screen-printed) […]
EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL: I Don’t Want To Talk About It (12″, Blanco Y Negro NEG 34T, 1988)
The concept of ‘perfect pop’ is a long-standing one amongst indie kids. It’s a term often thrown back at critics of songs, almost a defense mechanism: ‘yes, it’s very badly-recorded, but it’s perfect pop!’, ‘I know it’s Girls Aloud, and they’re completely manufactured, but it’s just a perfect pop song!’, and so forth. It’s a […]
THE GO-BETWEENS: Before Hollywood (LP, Rough Trade ROUGH 54, 1982)
Item number one, inspired by the selection of this record 2345. As I fired up the random number generator to select a record for this post, I noticed that the number of records in the list of possibilities now stands at 2,345. That number must surely have some kind of numerological, Kabbalistic meaning? I bet […]
LOIS: The Trouble With Me (7″, K IPU 40, ?)
No release date is given on this record, but I think it came out in the very early 1990s. Lois Maffeo was an intrinsic part of the more indie-pop end of the nascent American Riot Grrl scene of that time, and part of the excellently-named Courtney Love, who for ever after would need to be […]
ANOTHER SUNNY DAY: You Should All Be Murdered (Three Songs) (7″, Sarah SARAH 22, ?)
Another Sunny Day. Another Sarah record! Right after the previous post about a Blueboy record, the random number machine points me at this single. It’s got no release date (or copyright date) mentioned anywhere, but the catalogue number would suggest that this came out in around 1990 or so. Another Sunny Day not only have […]
BLUEBOY: Clearer (7″, Sarah SARAH 55, 1991)
This is only the second Sarah Records release so far that’s come up as a candidate for my witterings on here. That’s quite a surprise to me. As I’ve said before, Sarah was one of the first record labels that I pointed my fevered collector attentions at, and as such there are a lot of […]
BOUQUET: Elderberry Place (7″, Caramel CARAMEL ONE, ?)
Ah, records don’t get much more archetypally cute indie-pop than this! This was a self-released record that came out in the early nineties. Bouquet were something of a big player in the letter/fanzine-based indie-pop scene of those times; they contributed to a lot of compilation tapes, flexis and fanzines, including some that I put out […]
STRAWBERRY STORY: All For You (7″, Daisy Chain SRT8KS1422, 1988)
Strawberry Story were a very, very twee band who epitomised the late eighties/early nineties anorak/cutesy scene. Floral print dresses, high speed buzzsaw guitars, dinky female vocals and rat-a-tat biscuit tin drums were the order of the day. In hindsight this whole ‘scene’ (disparate though it may have been) was somewhat cloying and, in its own […]
MAXTON GRAINGER: Samosas! (7″, Kabukikore Special Editions KKSE02, 2003)
If you look very closely at the dog image on this record’s cover, you will notice that it bears the all-too-familiar pixellated look created by one of two situations: A JPEG that’s been saved at too low a quality A low-resolution image that’s been blown up in size. I suspect the first as the image […]