20 years on from C86

baby bird?

xpost - naturemorte - it was the Cecil Taylor album he was really commenting on - it was a pretty leftfield Cecil Taylor album and one which I didn't play again for about 10 years. Now, of course, up against, say, Merzbow, sounds a bit tame. Although not as tame as C86...

This weren't on C86, but maybe it shoulda been:
Wolfhounds - Anti-Midas Touch

(Was that 'eastern bloc'? Something tells me no.)

I haven't looked at dissensus in a couple of months, TBH. Am I missing owt?

Ha ha Marcello - no, I think that was later, and what a joy that is...

I've searched high and low for a list of NME cassettes...if anyone comes across one can they post the link here?

There was a hardware store in Afflecks Palace?

the Miaow and Lemon Drops tracks are also personal favourites. the Mighty Mighty track hasn't aged well, makes them sound like dirty old men.

c81 listing: NME/Rough Trade C81 (the irony)
c86 listing: http://www.twee.net/misc/release.htm?key=nmec86
c96 listing: http://www.gracenote.com/music/album.html/genblues/b8c3d30f2e0e0ec8d2c19bc0db04c1ed.html

well this was the implication in my crappy post way up there - as most folks of my ongoing constant plugging to get AOC back on the racks via a reissue campaign (ageofchance.com) - or so i thought.

but yes in case i was being too subtle - the AOC track fucking rules it.

Also I think C86 is the only place you can get that version of Breaking Lines - the version on Truck Train Tractor 12" is different.

sanctuary are to release a 2 cd set to coincide with the 20th annivversary.

the cd86 comp will be released in oct (track lsiting below)

primal scream - velocity girl
the servants - the sun a small star
hurrah - around and around
the loft - why does the rain
east village - vibrato
the sea urchins - pristine christine
the siddeleys - what went wrong this time
another sunny day - anorak city
the clouds - get out of my dream
the boy hairdressers - golden shower
the chesterfields - ask johnny dee
the raw herbs - he's blown in
laugh - paul mccartney
the hit parade - you didn't love me then
the weather prophets - like frankie lymon
the june brides - sunday to saturday
the dentists - i had an excellent dream
mighty mighty - everybodys knows the monkey
bmx bandits - e102
talulah gosh - talulah gosh
the jasmine minks - cut me deep
razorcuts - i'll still be there
the bodines - therese
tv personalities - paradise estate

disc two

the jesus and mary chain - upside down
primitives - really stupid
the groove farm - it always rains on sunday
pop will eat itself - black country chainsaw massacre
14 iced bears - come get me
fizzbombs - sign on the line
the wolfhounds - anti midas touch
the wedding present - this boy can wait
age of chance - bible of the beats
shop assistants - safety net
close lobsters - just too bloody stupid
half man half biscuit - dukla prague away kit
meat whiplash - don't slip up
the flatmates - i could be in heaven
the darling buds - if i said
this poison - poised over the pause button
the bachelor pad - jack and julian
the pooh sticks - on tape
the revolving paint dream - flowers are in the sky
the soup dragons - whole wide world
mccarthy - frans hals
the mighty lemon drops - like an angel
big flame - why popstars can't dance
the pastels - baby honey

(this is not a complaint)

Only sold mine last year.

Yeah I have virtually all of it already (the only bands I don't know are Raw Herbs and Laugh). Add Take The Subway To Your Suburb to your list and you're done.

M Carlin is right: no Bogshed, but Darling Blunts present? How fucking high/stupid would you have to be to dig that?

I have 2 Bogshed records, I'd have rather put them on there than, say, Mighty Lemon Drops, but there you go.

for more AOC insight into the whole C86 groove :

http://ireallylovemusic.co.uk/interviews/irlm_vs_aoc.html

shameless i know, but hey, it is relevant.

In response to a request above, there's full tracklistings of the NME tapes of the 80s, from C81 all the way to Indie City (1988), at the following:

http://bazooka81.livejournal.com/

Includes artwork and commentary on each tape.

That's a great page.

Some illuminations, some opinions you may or may not violently dis/agree with, but it's a useful way of finding out (for me, anyway), which ones I missed.

"I dreamed I was Elvis" is a great title, but boy wha a lousy sleeve. Was "design-generic" the byword for a while?

It's great to have the tracklistings in one place. If only that blog has the actual music as well...

i love the c86 compilation. i really do (i'm into tons of other shit, though). but, yeah, the third post in this thread = otm x 1,000,000.

oh, but wait. i'm talking about shit like shop assistants, though (i like 'em). let's not mess with ron johnson bands here.

The (majority of the) people on C86 were (at least) 5 years younger than those on C81, so is it really so surprising that they "sounded like bands who'd listened almost exclusively to postpunk"? After all, it's what they grew up with...

You had your Right But Repulsive roundheads on one side – the volubly politicised Soul fans (biggest error: their belief that hip-hop was inherently left-wing, rather than, for the most part, brutally and rapaciously capitalist). On the other, you had the Wrong But Romantic cavaliers, who still believed in Rock as profound and redemptive and allied to something like the counter-cultures of previous rock eras (biggest error: thinking that The Long Ryders were the future of anything).

!!

the third post in this thread = otm x 1,000,000.

No, it's a complete load of bollocks actually. Name one band on this album who fits the description of "artists who took the beauty of Young Marble Giants and turned it into insipidness, "noise" bands with little wit, humor or overt intelligence".

I think it's being overlooked that the whole point of the compliation was not principally to let people hear these songs but to introduce people to new bands (at a time when hearing new stuff was not particularly easy). Folks who listened to this went out and bought records like "George Best", "Sonic Flower Groove", "Quirk Out", "I Am A Wallet", "1000 Years of Trouble", "Headache Rhetoric", "Back In The DHSS", "Bright And Guilty", "Up For A Bit With The Pastels" etc - all fine albums. Later on they bought "A Fierce Pancake", "Seamonsters", "Sittin' Pretty", "This Leaden Pall", "Screamadelica" and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" - all brilliant albums produced by bands included here, or their later incarnations.

If there's not some stuff in that lot that floats your boat then I'm afraid you've permanently run aground.

oh, i love that comp., don't get me wrong here. but, eh, it's legacy has just become more than a bit off putting. i think you got a point in that post there, everything. i really never thought about that, and i'm sure you're probably right. just, all the shitheads i know really into c86 and twee are just bumbling, rockist, ironic morons, though.

maybe my disdain should be directed at a lot of the fans of it. it shouldn't matter what you're influenced by as long as you have cool intentions and catchy songs. i might have been wrong. the whole thing is really confusing and i need to think about it more.

though, i probably do have every c86 record ever made. and, at least as far as artists in that non-"scene" at the time, i really know what i'm talking about. i'll only lump bands like the ex and talulah gosh together for the sake of convenience (and what most people understand), i know their both very far apart. it's hard to talk about c86, when really, we're really talking about two "scenes".

they're*

and, i just love the sound of all this junk.

Also more digging into unreleased stuff by the well-known bands. With the difficulty of producing and releasing records back then there's tons of recordings that have never seen the light of day. I know there's mid-80s stuff from the prehistory of Teenage Fanclub, Vaselines, Bachelor Pad, etc or radio sessions and the like that aren't available.

Ah, good point, especially radio sessions. I imagine the legalities are an issue there, but looking at the "Keeping It Peel" site there's TONS of one-off band sessions that I'm sure have a killer cut contained within them.

New book on C86 coming out on 18th August, preceded by a Guardian interview with the author.

Reel lives: how I tracked down the class of NME’s C86 album

The book's a fun read. Cool to read retrospective article of the sort that Mojo etc do for more major artists but obviously would never touch 90% of this lot. He interviews at least one person, usually more, from each band. It's a bit like the tape - some chapters are stand-outs, some are forgettable. The more successful artists tend to be a bit boring while the ones who never went anywhere have their own story to tell. The Stump chapter is very good, Bogshed and Miaow also. I enjoyed the McCarthy, Close Lobsters & Wolfhounds chapters too, since these are the records that stand up nowadays in my opinion, plus the interviewees are interesting. If you have any interest in these bands you have to read this.

The Pastels chapter is a favourite, not because of Stephen Pastel, who's life has the appearance of being completely uneventful and static for three decades. It's because of their former drummer Berniece Simpson effortlessly skewering Pastel (who we find out fired the original band via a lawyer's letter) by having a very successful and happy non-musical career and family, and very pointedly defining her decade as an indie musician as a young person's game.

pricing an Eton Crop record from 1987 (Yes, Please Bob) and in their Discogs bio they call them a "pre-C86" band and lump them in with the Membranes and The Three Johns and it all makes sense i guess but i don't think i'd ever heard of a group of bands being called that. not exactly arbitrary. all people with the Mekons in their veins.

mekons very much relevant to all three - langford played on a couple of membranes ablums and i think did the sleeve to the eton crop record

i think i want to like those kind of bands more than i do. they are missing that langford je nais se quois despite his input. but maybe i just haven't found the right one for me. i never play membranes records when i get them in.

yeah i've never been totally into their stuff tbh. veeing off at a tangent but that eton crop album always make me think of this album by the welsh band fflaps (both covers reference the same long-running uk tv quiz show, blockbusters):
https://www.discogs.com/release/2060127-Fflaps-Malltod

more of a dog-faced hermans vibe though and it totally rules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghiTVUTlDvA

wow love that! that name is totally ringing a bell. totally get the DFH vibe too. i love DFH beyond reason.

not really connected, but THIS is an album i really fell for and played 5 times in a row and i'd never heard it until this week! from 1980. where's it been all my life?? they just didn't make it over here. i only remember the later "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" single.

https://i.discogs.com/wxWgUbhbHJ7Ir7sPRPq-unlMBMR4grvkCaTEHw81KO8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTU3MzIy/MC0xMzUyOTIwODc0/LTg1NDAuanBlZw.jpeg

fantastic band whose records you can still buy for buttons pretty much. the album with 'german film star' is also great

yeah, i need the other LPs.

'Oh No, It's You' is the standout for me. I think I bought this album for about a pound in the early 90s. Isn't Robert Smith on it on somewhere on backing vocals?

boom, just pulled this out to price. there is your "pre-c86" in a nutshell, no?

https://i.discogs.com/ZeyoMktHl2CY6kPBnE4jZEJykj0gKYPQ7SvQz-JLVyg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE3NDE3/MzItMTMwMzczNzM4/NS5qcGVn.jpeg

Love Fflaps!

Trying to get my head around this - so like post-punk or proto-indie/jangle pop? I love a ton of that stuff but sometimes the venn diagram circles are almost perfectly overlapping when trying to mentally categorize...

I've been deep diving a lot of 80s early indiepop kind of stuff, was jamming to The Dentists last night for instance.

xp underrated band on that comp - Rote Kapelle

Did Fflaps have a female singer who was going out with Mark the singer from Dandelion Adventure. I think anyway since they were from Preston and Fflaps somewhere in Wales.
Just remembering hitching tours in the late 80s and meeting them along the way.

Was looking for clarification BTW

They were part of the scene that included the Membranees and the bands John Robb writes about in Death To Trad Rock. The one track by them on Spotify is on the compilation cd that tied in with the book. Or at least one of the 2 instances of the same track is.
So I think they were in the rockier side of indie and probably had direct roots to punk, though I think they may have been a bit late in the decade for the term post-punk which would possibly fit otherwise.
Venn overlap between several different subgenres.