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GANG OF FOUR: Solid Gold (LP, EMI 1 C 064-07 460, 1981)

I can never quite get my head around the catalogue numbering systems used by major record labels. Look at the example here: 1 C 064-07 460. What does that mean? There must be some rationale behind the five components that make up that catalogue number, but it’s lost on me. Even comparing numbers from different […]

VARIOUS: Rubble Nine: From The House Of Lords (LP, Bam-Caruso KIRI 065, 1986)

I love these 1960s garage/psychedelia/punk/r’n’b compilations, which is just as well, as there’s a never-ending supply of them. Everything from Nuggets through to Pebbles and Rubble and a billion other (some non-geologically-named) compilations have been part of the microscopic documentation of a relatively brief period of time. A furiously creative and productive time as well, […]

JANE BOND & THE UNDERCOVERMEN: Politically Correct (LP, Dreamworld BIG DREAM 001, 1986)

This was stumbled upon in a charity shop in Reading, at some point in the mid-1990s. Dreamworld Records was run by The Television Personalities, so I figured that this album should be interesting and of quality, or at the very least – being catalogue numbered as ‘001’ and therefore an early release for the label […]

HURRAH!: Tell God I’m Here (LP, Kitchenware 208 201, 1987)

Years and years ago my great old pal Matt (who I unfortunately lost touch with and now haven’t seem for a long time) made me a brilliant mixtape, that I was listening to regularly until very recently. It was a combination of whacked-out drug music (including a ten-minute Timothy Leary trip and some very early […]

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 […]

FRACTION: Moon Blood (LP, Radioactive RRLP054, ?)

Another record bought on the recommendation of Volcanic Tongue’s excited twitterings (in the traditional, non-internet sense of the word…), this is a reissue of some long-lost 1971 album that – according to VT – contains ‘vocals that taste of jugs of PCP and long, almost oppressively intense, guitar-drenched paeans to personal exorcism’. Well I never. […]

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: The Velvet Underground & Nico (LP, Polydor SPELP 20, 1967)

No, no, no, I know that this isn’t the original release from 1967, it’s a Polydor reissue, but there’s no other date mentioned on the sleeve or the record. I’m just not cool enough to own one of the original copies with its peel-off banana and stuff. (Whilst I’d love to say that it’s all […]