Tracks - page 26

Before I opted to go with one of my pointless playlists jokes and start the month the same artist who finished the last playlist, this was going to be the first track on this month’s...

Ah, continuity… As one month ends, another begins, and as we were at the end of one, so we are at the start of the next.

It seems appropriate to close off a month of tracks by those who have fallen by the wayside with perhaps the ultimate lost artist, someone about whom it was once said that he barely existed...

No Kim no deal, 1/10, 2/10, trampling all over their legacy: if you’re even vaguely a fan of the Pixies you’ll be familiar with the kind of spoiled stuck-up comments, pointlessly bitter reviews, and level...

At a time when most people were discovering James through Sit Down, I was not the exception to the rule. There they were, Easter holidays 1991, on Top of the Pops, looking and sounding like...

The Charlatans (or Charlatans UK if you’re reading this in the United States) are one of indie rock’s great survival stories. Formed in the late 80s, they started out pretty baggy, and have constantly re-invented...

I’m sorry, Bluetones, I really am. From barely controlled excitement at best ever debut album by a British band in my lifetime Expecting to Fly via a confused relationship with its successor Return to the...

What is it with advertisers and their ability to take a perfectly decent song and ram it down your earholes continually for months, years on end, until you get to the point where you just...

We all have songs that we can relate to very specific events, moods or people. Who among us can think of D:Ream without being reminded of the optimism of 1997? But of so much more...

As word gets round that The Stone Roses are to split again, it takes me back to when The Stone Roses was regularly topping bestest album of all time polls in the NME and elsewhere,...

First thing to say about The Cure: I’m not really a fan.

I have Giles Smith to thank for my appreciation of Stevie Wonder; specifically the Stevie Wonder of Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life - a four-album run of...

Not everyone was bringing back the camp-fire vibe in 2001. (See yesterday’s track from Kings of Convenience) At the same time a New York band were...

I remember the Y2K bug. I wrote about it, and its possible ills. In my defence, I was paid to, but I know - what sort of defence is that?

First as a member of The Soft Boys, then Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians and most recently with Venus 3, Robyn Hitchcock has been making various degrees of sense or otherwise for four decades. A...

After The Pixies stole Bob Mould’s Hüsker Dü blueprints and created their own somewhat softer version, and after Mould stole their version of his blueprint back for his new band Sugar on Copper Blue, he...

Unlike Supergrass (see yesterday’s track) Dodgy were never quite able to discard the off-the-wall approach of The Dodgy Album and move into more serious territory with later albums. That said,...

With their cheeky kids n escapades debut I Should Coco, and the success of Alright (a number 2 hit in the summer of 1995), Supergrass have since been often unfairly painted as both one-hit wonders...

Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets were one of those classic 80s/90s indie bands who came out of the North-West. Along with Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and others, they fused the original brit-rock and indie-pop influences that created...

I think it was my general, though not universally applied, early 90s rule of looking to the near future rather than the near past that was responsible for my missing out on Cocteau Twins. I...