Tracks Of My Years

The Divine Comedy's twenty-first century reboot was both bold and brilliant, but not the commercial success Parlophone had hoped for.

'There are no guilty pleasures: only pleasures. Yellow is one of them.'

Tender was the lead single and opening track on Blur's 6th studio album, 13. Co-written and co-sung by Coxon and Albarn with backing vocals from the London Community Gospel Choir, it couldn't have felt much...

The seven-minute instrumental La Femme D'Argent is the first track on Moon Safari. You can't love me ironically, it seems to say, with its funky disco basslines and thoroughly un-modern synthesiser sounds, because I am...

Lazy Line Painter Jane itself is undoubtedly the pick of Belle & Sebastian's 1997 EP output, featuring a glorious guest vocal, swirling organs, guitars turned up, and a noise and energy that the band had...

Picnic By The Motorway is not one of the poppy, "attractive in an obvious sort of way" songs on Coming Up. It's probably the least new-Suede song on the album. And yet it was one...

Tiny Tears is the crowning moment of the orchestral feast that is Tindersticks' second album: strings have seldom wept so sweetly, or contrasted so dramatically as here with Staples' gravel-tones and the warbling organ.

'Supersonic hit the charts three places below PJ & Duncan. It was an inauspicious start to a scarcely believable career.'

Near the end of 1992, The Boo Radleys released a single, Lazarus, that was a world away from the layered obfuscation of Everything’s Alright Forever. 6 minutes long and change, it's eerie, spacey, and builds...

Babe Rainbow was a beautiful creation, but despite the melancholic splendour of The Girl with the Loneliest Eyes, the anthemic Feel, and the collapsing beauty of Yer Eyes, no-one seemed particularly interested.

This is where picking a single song to represent a year starts to get tricky. 1991 wasn’t where everything changed for me, but it’s a time defined by discoveries, some more exciting than others. By...

Sproston Green is the last track on **Some Friendly**, and was said to be lead singer Tim Burgess' favourite Charlatans song at the time. It's the kind of song that sits up and begs to...

She Bangs The Drums became The Stone Roses' first indie chart

'The appeal of Beat Dis lies in its combinations. Samples bounce off one another in endless inventive cycles, and combine with a meaty rhythm section, which results in a track that does a lot more...

How much you'll enjoy listening to Got My Mind Set on You will be determined in no small part by how you feel about the smooth production and distinctive '80s boom and echo of Jim...

In all seriousness, Underground is a glorious pop masterpiece that underperformed, from a film that did likewise.

There's a bit about the song at the end, but today's post is really all about Radiohead, Prince, U2 and giving music away for free.

When people say they don't like Morrissey or The Smiths because they find it so depressing, I just think they're not trying hard enough, frankly. It's not a non-stop Klaus Wunderlich dance party, I know,...

'In a uniquely ‘80s way of navigating through chart waters, What is Love? took seven weeks from its entry at #31 to reach its peak placing at #2. Hard to imagine that path ever being...

Beat Surrender replaces the organ of Town Called Malice with a piano and throws an enormous pile of horns on top. It’s one last hurrah for a band departing, many felt, prematurely.