Speedy’s News From Nowhere ~ The best Britpop album you’ve never heard

Back in the Great Britpop Wars of the mid to late ‘90s, I used to
defend my corner when it came to some of the less successful or
popular acts in the genre. I could often be found in an indie boozer, sporting a skinny t-shirt (sigh), providing covering fire for the likes of Rialto, Lodger, Gene, Hurricane#1, Silver Sun, Posh and Speedy. Yes – Speedy. Remember them? No? Shame - you deserve to be beaten to death with my promo copy of Northern Uproar’s first album.

Actually, all is forgiven, as Sheffield’s Speedy were the great lost
Britpop band– their debut album, News From Nowhere, which they
recorded for the Arista-owned Boiler House label, was never actually released. But, fear not, for a copy has found its way to the Pop Junkie offices. I won’t tell you what I had to do to get hold of it, but let’s just say that I won’t be showing my face in any public toilets in Camden for a good while. Ah, what the hell – it was worth it.

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Great Lost Pop Albums ~ XTC’s Drums And Wires

A few weeks back I went the extra mile on Pop Junkie’s behalf by listening to The Police’s Regatta de Blanc, an album I hadn’t played in the best part of a quarter of a century. I found it to be not as onerous a task as I feared, but I don’t imagine I’ll be playing it much over the next 25 years.

Today I’m listening to an album made in the same year (1979) which was not as commercially successful and certainly didn’t earn the band or songwriters as much dosh but which, I am very confident, will have weathered the years in a much healthier state. Whatever happened to XTC, they were bloody great? That was a rhetorical question. They carried on making music for anyone who’d care to listen well into the 1990’s. It was me who lost touch with them. Danny Baker used to play a single called The Disappointed on the radio in 1993. It was a great single, yet still I didn’t follow it up. My loss. In another life I have a feeling that XTC could easily have been my favourite band. I bought a few of their singles but Drums and Wires remains the only album I’ve ever owned. I can’t recall when I last played it all the way through, though it does get an airing now and again. An always enjoyable experience, but it’s been a while since I gave it a spin.

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Thinking of Terry Hall ~ Why is it Impossible to Buy The Colour Field’s Virgins & Philistines?

Continuing our occasional series of albums that remain baffling unavailable, can anyone out there provide good reason why The Colour Field’s 1985 debut Virgins and Philistines will set you back somewhere in the region of £90, that’s providing you can find someone willing to sell you a copy?

A year after the mainstream success of the Fun Boy Three Terry Hall unveiled his latest project with new sidekicks Toby Lyons and Karl Shale. Two singles, The Colour Field and Take, failed to make much of an impression, but early in 1985, they came close to breaking into the Top 10 with the lovely Thinking of You. They played this hit on the Whistle Test just prior to the album’s April release, with the Bunnymen’s Pete De Freitas guesting on drums, following it with the excellent Faint Hearts (see below), both of which were included on Virgins and Philistines.

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Great Lost Classic Albums ~ Matt Deighton’s Villager

Back in the summer of 1995 I interviewed Mother Earth prior to the release of their third album. They had a new single to promote and they talked whilst my pal Ben Anker took some photos which were later used on the album sleeve. Ben had set up the session with Acid Jazz who were themselves trying to kick start a subsidiary label, Focus.

You might remember Mother Earth - perhaps because of Dragster or the rather sublime single Jesse, which should have been a huge hit and propelled them towards stadia, or for their connections to Mr Weller, JTQ and Eddie Piller, but it didn’t quite work out for them.

Focus had sent me the new single (Never Gonna Get) To War, a pretty good slice of Marriottesque funk in the manner of Dragster, and also the label’s first release, Matt Deighton’s Villager.

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Great lost pop albums - Lennon reincarnated - The Orgone Box

John Lennon is alive and well, and before you ask, no, he doesn’t have a monobrow. These days he passes himself off as Rick Corcoran, whose Orgone Box album from 1996 does Beatles-era Revolver better than any of those oh-so-hip US bands you could care to mention. It’s a real contender for the best pop-psych album of the last decade.

Named after a device created by Wilhelm Reich to capture the energy of the universe, The Orgone Box is a moniker for one-man pop-psych genius Rick Corcoran. Actually, Corcoran’s sound is more akin to Across The Universe, as he takes his inspiration directly from Lennon and The Beatles. Just listen to the pleading Find The One – it sounds so like Lennon, it’s scary. Liam Gallagher would give his monobrow to have written it.

“I’ve got a psychedelic mind,” sings Corcoran on the brilliant Anaesthesia – and you’re inclined to believe him. In the mid-‘90s, Corcoran was part of Orange, who had a minor hit with the fantastic Judy Over The Rainbow. This album includes a version of that song as well as plenty of other modern pop-psyche nuggets.

Originally released in Japan in 1996, The Orgone Box’s self-titled debut lay undiscovered until our friends at Minus Zero Records decided to release it. Thank god they did, it’s easily one of the finest British pop albums of the last ten years. Drawing comparisons to Revolver/Sgt Pepper-era Beatles, Corcoran has an ear for an irresistible melody – the album is shot through with instantly memorable tunes.

From the Byrdsy jangle of Hello Central… Give Me Ganymede; to the dreamy Bubble and the sad-eyed Guilt Trip, this is classy stuff, Corcoran’s FX-laden Lennonesque vocals drifting in from another galaxy over a head-spinning mix of chiming guitars, hazy sounds and layered instrumentation. There’s also a temporary diversion into fuzzed-up power-pop (Noddyland) and the Dylan meets Robyn Hitchcock gem Ticket With No Return. If you like this, you’ll also love Cotton Mather’s Kontiki – more of the same Fab Four-friendly, psychedelic earcandy. It’s perfect for Mellotroning out to….

The Orgone Box (Minus Zero) 1996 (issued in UK 2001)

Vote for the most under-rated album ever

Excellent digital music people We7 (you know the ones who stream music for free) have been putting together a list of the most under-rated albums of all time. For some unfathomable reason they asked Sean, who true to form, has suggested the second Gene album.

Vic has also weighed in with a surprise choice in The Divine Comedy’s Fin de Siecle, which IMO is the best of the ten.

Anyhow there’s a list of the ten albums here. So go and get voting.

Britpop’s most underrated album – and why iPod culture is killing the album as we know it

Those nice people over at the free, legal music sharing site www.We7.com are conducting a poll on the most underrated albums of all time.

And they’ve asked us to come up with some suggestions.

Well, it just so happens that here at PopJunkie, we’re experts on great ‘lost’ pop albums. You can read all about ‘em here. Victoria has also got involved and you can see her entry here.

We like We7.com, because you can play whole albums online, on-demand at anytime. And that’s the key – you can listen to whole albums – not just previews of songs.

One of the arguments against some other music sites is that they don’t encourage people to listen to or buy whole albums. Is the MP3/iPod culture killing the album as we know it? I think it is.

I have friends who no longer buy, or listen to albums – they simply download the odd song. OK, so I know that does have its advantages – you can miss out those dodgy filler tracks that blight some releases (Hello The Killers and Coldplay),but it also means that you’re missing out on hearing classic albums as the artist intended them to be heard. You wouldn’t want to just download some tunes off The Beatles’ Revolver, would you? Yes, I know you could miss out Yellow Submarine and replace it with Rain or Paperback Writer by using your iTunes playlist, but that’s a whole different pub argument.

Anyway, what’s my most underrated album of all time? Well, it’s by one of the most underrated bands of all time – the mighty Gene.

When I’m asked about great ‘lost’ albums, I always go back to their 1997 masterpiece, Drawn To The Deep End.

For those of us in the know, Gene were one of the finest bands to emerge from the Britpop scene – suave, sophisticated, moody and with a neat line in intelligent lyrics , poignant ballads, and ballsy indie rock anthems. And singer Martin Rossiter looked great in a suit, smoking a cigarette – as all good bands should.

To those fools who ignored them or completely misunderstood them, Gene were simply Smiths copyists.

Hmmm. Sure, they sounded like The Smiths at times, (where’s the harm in that?), but they also reminded me of some of my other favourite acts, like The Jam, REM and The Faces.

And on Drawn To The Deep End, they even embraced country, trip-hop, glam-rock, folk music, orchestral pop and Depeche Mode-style industrial rock.

From its lavish sleeve design, to the way its track-listing runs, like a film or a concept album, with a powerful intro and a dramatic finale, Drawn To The Deep End was, arguably, one of the finest - and darkest - Britpop releases ever – a proper record, from start to finish. It also addressed issues including shagging, depression, sexuality and suicide.

It was Gene’s finest hour. At the risk of sounding like my dad, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Great lost pop albums - the 90s Libertines - Menswear Nuisance

They were indie’s ultimate pin-ups - NME darlings who wrote great pop-punk songs, enjoyed the druggy delights of London nightlife, shagged groupies senseless and then imploded in dramatic style. No, not The Libertines, you fools, Menswear. And they really couldn’t have picked a more appropriate name for their debut album than Nuisance.

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Great lost pop albums - Frank Sinatra goes psych - Watertown

We are massive Sinatra fans in this house, we play the tunes, watch the DVD and occasionally even sport the kinky boots. Apparently though there was another member of the Sinatra family in the music biz , Nancy’s dad Frank, who had a hit or two in the fifties.

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Great lost pop albums - Essex girls come good - Bad Dream Fancy Dress Choirboys Gas

The late 80s were very dark days for PopJunkies. The Smiths were about to implode, The Stone Roses were mired in their dodgy Goth phase and Stock, Aitken and Waterman dominated the charts. You know it got so bad I almost bought a (gulp) Wedding Present album. Mercifully there was also El Records and gems like Choirboys Gas by Bad Dream Fancy Dress, an album that sounds like nothing else.

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