20 years on from C86

(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.

Wait, what do the Ex have to do with C86?

They were on Ron Johnson records, along with Stump, BigFlame? etc..

Apart from that, no.

Really, I didn't know they were on Ron Johnson. Which records?

I have the Spanish Civil war double single with book, that certainly was.

Too Many Cowboys was as well

two scenes for one. one's ice cream, one's shit-pie.

That Ex single with the book was apparently one of the reasons Ron Johnson went under. Losing money on every copy ala "Blue Monday".

I can see why: It's a thing of beauty.

Found the quote from Dave Parsons, the man behind the label:

"The Ex double-single was a fiasco of Rough Trade's making - they sold it at a price that was lower than the manufacturing cost and because it was reviewed as such amazing product for such amazing price felt that they couldn't put the price up - it sold 15000 copies and RJ lost £15000! Fantastic. The only band who ever made a profit in RJ were A Witness and they have a right to feel slightly aggreived. I gave 24 hours of my life for 7 years to RJ, lost my house, never made a penny and was eventually bankrupted because I loved the music."

That's from sometime ILM poster Rhodri Marsden's Ron Johnson page by the way.

that'll be 24 hours per day, rather than 24 hours over 7 years, right?

Either one seems unrealistic really.

ok, 24 hours a week.

...7 weeks a year.

that's why i say don't fuck with ron johnson.

28 years...

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19423-c86/

mine arrived today. someone really needs to add the 72 titles / bandnames into cddb.

"C87 imagines what the NME compilers might have chosen, had they revisited the idea one year later, choosing music from mid-1986 through 1987."

http://louderthanwar.com/cherry-red-announce-line-up-for-c87-box-set-c86-imagined-one-year-later/

could have sworn that in 87 the NME was covering a lot of hip hop ...

a lot of those i have on those melody maker indie top 20 tapes, especially vol2 - http://www.bandplanet.co.uk/Oldsite/indietop20s.htm

OK, so it's Cherry Red so you don't expect much care but anyway, at first glance that is a pretty half-assed compilation. I mean yeah, it doesn't cover what the NME was going on about in '87 in any kind of comprehensive way. They literally never covered some of those bands EVER. One of them appeared on the cover and the editor got sacked. If it was a genuine attempt to do an NME thing from '87 then they'd need things like Trouble Funk, Colourfield, Def Jam, Salt'n'Pepa, That Petrol Emotion, Michel Shocked, Coldcut etc.

But let's put that aside and accept that "C86" has nothing to do with NME or even the C86 cassette anymore.

There was the CD86 from a year or two ago that more or less did the same thing. If this is supposed to supplement that by reviewing the situation from a year later, then they haven't put much thought into it. Some of them ("Poised Over The Pause Button", "Pristine Christine", "I Could Be in Heaven", "Franz Hals", "Ask Johnny Dee", "Golden Shower" others) already appeared on CD86. Others, eg. The Bachelor Pad song are b-sides of songs from CD86 so where is the supposed progression.

I don't have any problem with endless genre comps but c'mon, you have to find new tracks and preferably stuff that fits the concept of the comp.

it doesn't cover what the NME was going on about in '87 in any kind of comprehensive way.

exactly my point.

as proven by :

http://www.nme.com/bestalbumsandtracksoftheyear/1987

in 1987 the nme was my fucking bible for music with beats and noise, and this compilation is the worst kind of revisionism.

Revisionism is right. It's telling that they have picked more retro songs from bands that were moving from indie to beats that year. ie. "Sweet Sweet Pie" instead of something from "Box Frenzy", or "Young Till Yesterday" rather than "Christopher Mayhew Says". Even "Hang Ten!" (1986) rather than the more sophisticated "Head Gone Astray". Or the Mackenzies "New Breed" rather than the much more futuristic "Mealy Mouths" from the same year (1986 btw so fuck this concept we invented for the comp).

Fact is the likes of the Shamen or PWEI would have gone nowhere if they had continued doing indie/60s/punk influenced stuff and they had few fans till they switched that up. Everyone, especially the NME, knew that style was moribund.

You could pick holes in this all day.

Still a great jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37TO9Dmaoz0

"C87 imagines what the NME compilers might have chosen, had they revisited the idea one year later, choosing music from mid-1986 through 1987."

Jesus Christ Almighty, wtf?!?!?

By the way, re-reading this thread:

it was an artificial attempt to mimic the 1981 NME/Rough Trade cassette - which was borne out of a real movement

What movement were Robert Wyatt, Linx and Cabaret Voltaire (to name but three) a part of?

Don't agree with that post in any way but think it's refering to DIY cassette culture - the C81 cassette as a product, rather than it's contents?

now, if they had included the baby amphetamine 12", then maybe, just maybe i would have been interested.

nme vs 1987 summed up here :

http://www.creation-records.com/classic-interviews1-baby-amphetamine/

Don't agree with that post in any way but think it's refering to DIY cassette culture - the C81 cassette as a product, rather than it's contents?

Oh right, well in that case maybe the Door and the Window or 49 Americans (or whoever) should have taken preference over James Blood Ulmer. As far as I can see, the movement in question seemed to be the movement of artists involved with Rough Trade in some capacity or other.