NME's 'C86 Compilation'.... C&D, S&D, Say Something Interesting About, etc etc etc...

Let's just say that, much like the equally-badly-chosen YES NEW YORK compilation that I'm listening to right now, it's nowhere near as good as it could have been.

We Have A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It = Best C86 band name EVAH

yeah, could've sworn it was available on cd but cddb has no mention of it... um... i could be wrong.

NME C86 is an album its virtually impossible to like all the tunes on (its actually very varied) but a lot are still great. hence my email.

When people talk about "c86" they mean indie-pop deriv from 85-87 and most of that is better summed up by the 1986 compilation "Indie top 20 vol 1"...

my second tape copy (bought in a shop about a year after nme offer) has RT catno on the spine (Rough C100) and no NME. and is missing the .022 from the front. have also found images of the LP sleeve but no mention of CD anywhere on the web.

'Doing It For The Kids' is also worth having.

The Ammonites were great, Zappi!

okay, back to indie-pop. Loved the Shop Assistants by the way. Or at least I loved the album when it came out. Same with Fuzzbox.

also, a big influence on us anglophiliac yank kidz with the funny hair were those debut ten inches/magazines. oh boy were they! now if i could just remember the name of that group who had that duet that went "from make up to break up...I beat myself up inside". I loved that one. It was mighty twee.

only great when compared to, say, Screaming Custard or Cellophane or Thee George Squares (ha).

Marvellous stuff! (Zappi, I'll do you a tape if you want, to thankyou for those Deerhoof beauties you sent me the other week).

the rest is pretty much what i enjoyed prior to my wake up call @ end of 86 when i discovered Run DMC.

prior to that though i loved mighty lemon drops and shop assistants for several hours.

http://66.40.206.13/wolfhounds/ICA-press.gif

bad sound.

not to mention that the band had 'issues' with the soundboard that day which messed up the gig somewhat - according to well established sources.

but fun stuff nonetheless, includes power cut !

.. and i dont mean the Noel Watson (the bands DJ later on)

Peter Hurst New Brighton Through The Binoculars Of The People
One Last Fight Catch Candy
Ryan Like Men Possessed
Two's A Crowd Goodnight Angel
Crikey It's The Cromptons Food For Feet
Gone To Earth No Work Today
Innocents Abroad Time Was
Fairground In Fear Of You
Jacktars Tadpole
The Decemberists Gift Horse
Magic Carpets Trick Of Fate
Da Vincis The Book
Peter Hurst/Brian N. Smithers The End

9 Steps to Ugly - Eddie Lopez lives in Slough
Very cool, proto-Sundays. Makes me wonder if that is actually Harriet Wheeler singing.

Ammonites - All We Had
Slightly better than average Britpopesque Garage Rock with a singer doing a mediocre Morrissey/Mick Hucknall impersonation.

Apple Moths - Kymri
Gag-inducingly cheesy knockoff of...I dunno...General Public or sumthin. The opening 3 seconds sounds like a jingle for Minty Kleen ass-freshener.

Baby Lemonade - Jiffy Neckwear Creation
Very, very, very badly encoded. The song sounds like an inept Fall cover band doing a version of a bad Wire b-side. And the mp3 sounds like a Victrola at the bottom of a well. (Yes, I know that this is a "The food is so terrible, and whats worse the portions are so small" kind of argument, but it is the truth.)

Baby Lemonade - Real World
Ahhhh. This is much better. Its like what would happen if Stereolab and Lush had a baby.

Balloon Farm - A Question of Temperature
Weird ass retro shit. Like a 60s garage band basing their 80s comeback on a mix of Fretblanket and TMBG's "Twisting"; though the faux soul chorus is so cheesy as to be unintentionally cool.

Jamie Wednesday - I Think I'll Throw a Party for Myself.
Yick. No wonder nobody shows up for your shindigs, you John Wesley Harding wannabe.

Jazz Butcher - Shirley MacLaine
Coulda been cool, like an upbeat version of...I dunno...Nick Cave fronting the Hoodoo Gurus. Shame the mp3 sounds like crap being squirted through a very thin tube.

Look Blue Go Purple - Hiawatha
The only thing cooler than the weird retro organ is the thickly accented brit girl pretending to be both Kim Gordon and Kristin Hersh.

Love Parade - Wounded
Whiny maudlin drivel. Starts out with yet another lame Morrissey impersonation. (and another track with tinny...no, scratch that... 'styrofoamy' sound. a 160 bitrate and it sounds like your listening to it through a door.)

Primitives - Crash (Demo)
I always loved this song. The vibe is much rawer, but the singers vocal sounds unrehearsed and slightly bored.

Wild Flowers - A Kind of Kingdom
Derivative, yet...catchy. I can't explain it, but the music sounds...aussie. The vocal tries to hard to be Bono Vox, though.

Jamie Wednesday were a previous incarnation Carter USM weren't they?

"All we had" was the Ammonites song i remembered as ok.

I liked what I heard of 9 Steps to Ugly. (And the Sainsburys were on a similar tape I once had - they were good)

Most of the rest mentioned in Custos' post a bit rubbish. (But NOT baby lemonade!)

"Doing it for the kids" is way more floppy fringed and whiney than C86. When you think of C86 you must never forget it housed bands as brilliant as A Witness and Big Flame.

Oh and the Jactars were pretty good of all those scouse bands upthread. Hellfire sermons were the best liverpool band of all though (well, second best behind HMHB)

yeah, Carter formed when the other three blokes quit but they still had a gig booked; Jim and Les did the show with a drum machine and thought "well this was easy and we don't have to split the money so much" sorta thing. "let's name this one after you instead of me."

Various Artists - An Hour Of Eloquent Sounds
Pleasantly Surprised 001 / Klark 02
a Speak in Volumes / Sunset Gun Enterprises colaboration 1982

Side 1
Side 2
1. The Birthday Party - The Hairshirt
2. Dante and the Lobster - Murder Followed By
Suicide
3. The French Impressionists - Summertime
4. A Pair Of Blue Eyes - Giovanis Room
5. Eric Random and the Nosebleeds - Bedlam a
Go-Go
6. Ludus - Rosa Luxemburg
7. Primal Scream - Thought
8. Marine Girls - Take A Chance
9. A.P.B. - Love To Learn
10. 22 Beaches - Zoo
11. Essential Bop - Monkey Glands
12. Cocteau Twins - Perhaps Some Other Aeon
13. The Wake - The Drill
14. Sunset Gun - Gotta Have Me Go With You
15. Billy Makenzie Sings Orbidoig - Helicopter
Helicopter

twas called "shambling bands" not "jangling bands" at the time iirc; a jaggedness that might be clumsy and/or willed was one of the hallmarks at least as much as velvets/shangrilas indiepop template, or something.

Stump were magnificent.

"It's apples and oranges innit. C86 was a compilation of brand-new artists while the others are retrospective genre compilations."

Well the Cherry Red C86 box is both. But the songs it includes that were not on the tape include (esp CD2) stuff that's like what's on the tape. It's not that everything not on the original tape is a different aesthetic.

"The connection is the use of "C86" for marketing purposes."

But ... given that the original C86 was a particular thing (some pop, some noise, some Fall, etc), why did it become potent for marketing something else? That's the puzzle maybe.

For me the whole thing is to some extent a case study of how culture is reimagined, re-streamlined, etc, retrospectively for the needs of a later time. Though it's not entirely that, as some of what came to be casually thought of as C86 is present in the original.

There's a great Stump thread on here

... and why did the later time have those needs?

And what time was it?

I'm inclined to pin it on the www-driven indiepop revival of c.2008-. I feel like it was around that time and subsequent years that I especially heard a lot of 'C86' as a category for indie discos, influences, etc, not particularly meaning the actual 'C86'. I feel like that was the time that the reinvention / relabelling process really took place. A clear-cut example is the idea (c.2008-) that The Pains of Being Pure at Heart drew on C86, though it would be harder really to point to a Pains record that sounds like what's on C86.

But maybe it was earlier too. Maybe all this was around by eg: the early days of Camera Obscura.

And maybe, even, by say the end of the 1980s, once some kind of idea of indie pop had been more streamlined and solidified (cf. the 87 and 88 compilations which draw on this), it was already tempting to look back and think of this in terms of C86? I can remember reviews of The Primitives in maybe 1989 putting them in this sort of context (ie: saying they were successors to Shop Assistants & Talulah Gosh, who at the time were exotic mysterious bands I had never heard).

I'm sure I don't need to remind you all that the first BMX Bandits album, released in '89 or '90(?), was called 'C86'! This seemed kind of hilarious at the time because C86 was like the uncoolest thing imaginable by 1989. I don't know why the BMX Bandits called the album that but it seemed to me they were saying, "Yeah yeah, we know you think it's crap but we still like it".

... they might have just thought it was funny though.

Yes, I did need you to remind me of that.

BMX Bandits are on CD2 of the Cherry Red version with a song from 1986 itself.

I agree that releasing a record called C86 in 1990 is odd.

I don't think I have ever really heard a song by that band that I liked, but I might not have heard enough.

I bought the C86 tape in a second hand shop in 1997, and I was surprised by all the Fall-influenced bands because I was expecting it all to be jangly indiepop, because that's what C86 meant at the time.

C86 became a millstone for bands included on the album and also for some bands that weren't. BMX Bandits' C86 album is because they were one of the bands cast as and archetypal C86 band yet having nothing to do with it. And possibly because it had taken them almost 5 years to get an album out and some of the songs were from the C86 period. The cover has their skeleton mascot rising from the dead with associated iconography - just like Iron Maiden's Live After Death.

But maybe Duglas will show up on this thread to sort it out.

Stevie T pointed out to me that MIAOW was CATH CARROLL so I listened to this with new ears.

Previously I had heard or misheard it as some kind of Scritti Politti pastiche.

I also keep playing THE SERVANTS.

Despite my doubts, there is something about this compilation that responds to a lot of listening.

The Servants is Luke Haines's original band iirc?

It was but he hadn’t joined by the time of C86.

Stevie T pointed out to me that MIAOW was CATH CARROLL so I listened to this with new ears.

Check out the Miaow compilation When It All Comes Down that LTM put out; great stuff!

Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

I have just started on the Cherry Red C87 compilation. It's very good! Better than C86!

CD2 of C87 is even better than CD1.

One song on it that I never really knew is LAUGH's 'Paul McCartney'. I find this tune quite compelling. Does anyone else remember and like this band?

They are on the Video comp "Gimme Shelter" put out by the NME.

I know and like Laugh - our friend Dan Pantry was a big fan, PF. My favourite of their material is when they went a little dancier on SubAqua ("Good To Feel Good" off their only LP is tremendous, though I think a little less up your street.

They evolved into Intastella, who you may also remember?

Thanks TH! Somehow I associated you with Laugh but could not find any specific evidence of this.

I do remember the name Intastella but not, just now, the music.

The song 'Paul McCartney' - apart from its perhaps appealing title - has a kind of rhetorical and emotional urgency that I find fits well with its melody and music.

Bad news update: CD3 seems to be where the bad, gurning, wacky, tuneless sub-Fall would-be-avant-garde bands have been stowed in this compilation. I had hoped that it might be almost free of them. It's quite a disappointment after the heights of CD2.

I'd keep going, the first 8 or so bands might be along those lines but I'd be surprised if you view e.g. Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes or the Siddeleys as tuneless sub-Fall (of course I like all the supposedly bad bands at the beginning of disc 3, especially the Dog Faced Hermans and A Witness)

Yes, A Witness in particular has some great moments.

The next box, "C89", is coming out in a couple of weeks!

I agree, Jesse Garon and (even more) Siddeleys are definitely not in that bad genre. (Though there is a Jesse Garon track somewhere that seems to have some kind of Mark E. Smith pastiche on it?) So yes I will keep going, thanks.

As a friend says, it's good that they put all that stuff together and maybe I can skip past it in future.

I like the idea of C89 but I will need to get to C88 first.

So C89 came out and it was solid if starting to drift into territory that I never liked, and I just listened to C90 and I'm definitely out - never was a fan of the baggy sound and there's way too many weak indie rock bands with poor singers. I was chatting with a mate about it and he said, "The action in the US was much better than the UK at the time." Which made me wonder if there's any US equivalent compilations of the 86-90 period. You'd have to have Guided By Voices, Yo La Tengo, Superchunk, Camper Van Beethoven, Sebadoh, Throwing Muses... who else?

There were scene-specific comps like NY Eye & Ear Control, and random things like Magic Ribbons (Sebadoh, Unrest, others) — but nothing else I can think of, that early, which would have brought together a bunch of disparate bands like those you mention.

feels like there were a lot of major label samplers with a real mixed bag that weren't memorable as compilations (I remember a Capitol sampler cassette that had the Cocteau Twins and Motorhead on it)

This Shimmy Disc comp is another (very) rough analogue.

It was all very scene/city/label–specific.

Yes, in the United States compilations are going to be mostly label-specific in this era. Sub Pop 200 and The Wailing Ultimate capture a good segment of it.

So why not a slight backtrack?

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/c85-3cd-clamshell-box-set/

They should give the C86-era stuff a rest and do C81

Not that I'm not grateful, mind, I'll buy this eventually. I think I've gone off box sets for a while because I've found going through Grapefruit's psych/prog-pop boxes exhausting and I just want things to arrive in smaller chunks :(

They definitely have a model they follow it's true.

I put on C96 the other day, some good stuff on there, also some not so good stuff.

Thought the revive would be about this new book by some bloke who's tracked down all the members of the C86 bands and what they're doing now:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/08/reel-lives-how-i-tracked-down-the-class-of-nmes-c86-album

There appear to be two current C86 threads. Unlikely as that must seem.

Giving C85 a spin, a LOT of this got airplay at my college radio station at the time. As with all of these comps, some I still rate, some I've moved on from, and hopefully some I passed over grab me now. I'll settle for one revelation, really.

I've been listening to C87 (3CD), CD3, a lot. The first 8 tracks on the disc are experimental / noisy garbage that I have to skip. But then there's a quite strong run of tracks including Jesse Garon & the Desperadoes, the always good Siddeleys, and others.

The thought that strikes me and I wish to relay is: we all know of an association between 'C86' and 'twee', implying things like androgyny that have been talked to death already. What I hear in most of these bands, especially the ones with male singers, is something else. Defiance. A shaky swagger. A precarious pomp. There's a note of almost macho, certainly male, confidence, but one that's also undercut by the smallness of the whole enterprise.

> The first 8 tracks on the disc are experimental / noisy garbage

1. DOG FACED HERMANS – Catbrain Walk
2. STUMP – Tupperware Stripper
3. GAYE BYKERS ON ACID – Everything’s Groovy
4. BOG-SHED – Tried And Tested Public Speaker
5. A WITNESS – Red Snake
6. MACKENZIES – New Breed
7. THE SHRUBS – Edith
8. STITCHED-BACK FOOT AIRMAN – Tears In The Gutter

there's a great compilation that focuses on this kind of stuff (and a book) - Death to Trad Rock (although oddly it also includes the wedding present).

i'd also like the ron jonson stuff to be more wildly availably (maybe it is, but last time i looked there was one compilation, lp only, not re-pressed)

It does seem like a neglected area of music but then I suppose it wasn't exactly popular!