Tracks - page 49

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Some Candy Talking

From a band torn apart by drugs to songs about drugs, starting with a 1986 EP from The Jesus And Mary Chain, featuring Bobby Gillespie in his final appearance with the band before hotfooting it...

The House of Love - I Don't Know Why I Love You

So much music, so little time. So without further ado, I present The House of Love guide to blowing it:

The Sundays - Can't Be Sure

Sublime took the day off yesterday, but it’s back. Just about sneaking in by virtue of having released this, their debut single, in 1989, The Sundays recorded only three albums. The last of these, “Static...

Dire Straits - Private Investigations

Right, can’t sit here in the corner all night. I need to start work on MY INVESTIGATION. Blinds on the window. And by the window. And a pain behind the eyes. Perhaps staring for a...

Suzanne Vega - Knight Moves

While casting around the murkier waters of youtube for 80s tracks, I received a message from the numbskulls that simply said: “Knight Moves”.

The Cure - In Between Days

Today’s video is brought to you by Goths Against Motion Sickness (GAMS). Goths just can’t stand motion sickness (I think it’s the motion aspect that they find troubling), abhorring it almost as much as they...

Kajagoogoo - Too Shy

Never say I can’t be topical. As you watch this video, Limahl (real name Chris Hamill, anagram fans), the man, the hair, is over in the Australian jungle raising awareness of the dangers of wrong-headed...

Orange Juice - Rip It Up

2nd April 1983, and “Don’t Talk To Me About Love” reaches its highest chart position at number 7. One place below, also reaching its peak is “Rip It Up”, by Orange Juice.

Altered Images - Don't Talk To Me About Love

Next year’s Let’s Rock The Moor promises a stellar lineup: Tony Hadley, Howard Jones, Bananarama, Midge Ure, Five Star, Rozalla, Imagination, and Brother Beyond are already all confirmed. Brother Beyond! I had assumed they disappeared...

Modern Romance - Good Friday

This is more like it - disco lights! Fancy transition effects! Roller dancing! Glittery confetti raining down on coiffured hair!

The Specials - Ghost Town

Practically defining bleakness, in the summer of 1981 “Ghost Town” catalogued a disaffected and angry youth amid depressing and thoroughly depressed surrounds (in the words of Michael Bracewell: “the doomed youth of a doomed town”)....

Eddy Grant - I Don't Wanna Dance

As it’s the 60th birthday of the charts today, here’s a super-special bonus post. The singles chart was invented by the NME in 1962 when they rang around a few shops to ask what was...

The Jam - Town Called Malice

Somewhere on the line from the straightforward three-piece of earlier-days Jam taking on the Eton Rifles to the soul gloss of The Style Council, messing about on the river Cam (if you can’t beat ‘em,...

Bruce Hornsby & The Range - The Way It Is

The same week that Paul Simon’s album Graceland, partly recorded in Apartheid-era South Africa and featuring South African musicians, entered the album charts, another new entry would include a title track dealing with the US...

Paul Simon - You Can Call Me Al

While this piece of lyrical wonder was settling into its top 10 berth, Nick Berry was number 1 with “Every Loser Wins”, a song not even written for a real band (but a band called...

Pet Shop Boys - Always On My Mind

There’s a brilliance and a genius at the heart of the Pet Shop Boys that for whatever reason some people didn’t like to acknowledge. In the music, the art and artifice, the act (or apparent...

Kirsty MacColl - There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis

So there I was, trying to figure out how to segue from The King of Rock n Roll, and at the same time thinking it was about time we had some female vocals. I was...

Prefab Sprout - The King of Rock 'n' Roll

Another mondegreen for a name, or so some sources would have you believe, with singer-songrwiter Paddy McAloon supposedly mishearing a line from the song “Jackson” (“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper...

Lightning Seeds - Pure

August 1989: Shakespear’s Sister are breaking into the top 10 with their debut single “You’re History”. At the same time, a man better known for his production work has overcome his shy reluctance to pen...

The Smiths - Shakespeare's Sister

It’s too easy, really, to connect Joy Division to The Smiths. You could start in Salford, home of Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and the Salford Lads Club, which The Smiths posed rather iconically in front...