SHINE: 20 Brilliant Indie Hits

this is almost the same tracklist as the naked chef compilation which is real

This was the first compilation I ever bought! on tape. don't think I'd heard Suede before that point and Animal Nitrate just blew most of the rest away, but I have overwhelming fondness for nearly all other tracks on here purely for nostalgic reasons. except Cigarettes and Alcohol.

and Sit Down, which I hate obviously, but probably didn't mind the first 3 or 4 times i heard it

hang on, when was Now 26? that had Laid on it, maybe that was my first comp.

If there is only one vote for Jesus Jones Zombie, it me.

I think Now 26 was about 1993... is that the one with Creep on it?

Is the "How soon is now" a mid 90s remix or something?

green day

Cigarettes and Alcohol

best Oasis song, basically perfect tune

DL, yes, that's the one. 1993! And Play Dead right after So Natural!

I swear I will take some of those Now tracklistings to my grave. Have we ever put lord the UK Nows? Vaguely remember a US one happening

“Put lord” = polled

I went through a phase of listening to them all in order until it hit approx the year 2000. The year 1999 was the absolute nadir for chart music.
Madonna never on any Now btw. Probably other obvious exclusions too?

Suede or Electronic probably.

Never particularly cared for Suede but saw what must have been several of their earliest gigs when they'd be first on at the Bull & Gate with about five people watching. Then very quickly they'd have this posse of enthusiastic female supporters who'd stand by the stage even when the place was mostly empty, which was pretty unusual for third on the bill, or.indeed any 'indie' groups then.

Madonna never on any Now btw. Probably other obvious exclusions too?

Think Michel Jackson only has one appearance for similar reasons

Yeah, was thinking of MJ. I revise my former statement btw, I think I only listened to all the Nows of the 90s.

The Hits Album often featured songs by artists such as Madonna, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and other big international artists that did not appear on rival Now compilations, and it was probably for this reason the albums were equally popular throughout the 1980s.

i think "getting away with it" just edges out "regret"
Same

Same

Same

The opposite

"Getting Away With It" is the dictionary definition of "less than the sum of its parts"

Yeah, but those are big parts

CAAL's top five looks spot-on, but I voted Suede of course

Madonna, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston

That's one hell of a five to have locked in.

The song here I loved the most at one point is How Soon Is Now but I can't bring myself to vote for anything Morrissey-related at this point.

CAAL's list is approximately right but I never need to hear Parklife again and *whispers* I quite like Size Of A Cow (I don't expect anyone to agree with me on this) so I have mentally swapped them - though even I will concede there is no way the latter should be above Weirdo. Don't really care about the Charlatans but I could listen to the intro of Weirdo on loop for hours. Shame he starts singing.

Going to leave it to a last-minute whim whether to vote Pulp or Elastica.

(OK I just watched the Size Of A Cow video on youtube and maybe now I understand why everyone else hates them, that is one annoying-seeming bunch of people there)

I never bought any Shines because the tracklistings seemed too obvious to spend money on, plus my friends had a bunch which I could've just asked to tape except I was too much of a snob, but I did have Steve Lamacq's "Weekenders" compilation so yeah, I lose.

(I think I got it for a quid, tbf, plucked out of a bargain bin because a couple of the otherwise quite obvious tracks appeared in a remixed form which sounded potentially interesting, but I still lose)

The Indie Top 20s were mostly before my time - think the last came out in '96 so Shine (1995-1998) may even have killed them off, though I didn't really notice them pre-Shine so they may already have run out of steam or marketing money - but I have the '88 one (Wire! Cardiacs! HMHB! ACR! Sonic Youth! The Shamen, hi Branwell; that explains why I knew "Jesus Loves Amerika" already) and it is bronzed to hell now, one of only a couple of bronzed CDs I've noticed in my collection. Hope the whole series didn't do that.

'Weirdo' made me think the Charlatans were good

they're not a bad band necessarily, but Weirdo is definitely one of their very best

I secretly thought Size of a Cow was an out of character good song at the time but he wasn't called Hunt for nothing

Yeah, the Indie Top 20 series started very indie and gradually got more & more mainstream although even the later volumes would still throw up the odd track by the likes of The Cramps or Urusei Yatsura xps

Hi, Space Cadet! Wow, that sounds like a great compilation. I have weird feelings about Jesus Loves Amerika, but it makes sense that's where you encountered it.

After going down the memory hole of YouTube over the past few days, I'm very sheepishly admitting that I kinda wanna change my vote to Jesus Jones not Electronic. (Especially after seeing how much love the latter is getting on this thread.) Yes, they were a shameless Shamen rip-off act, but that was some Pavlovian nostalgia to hear them again.

I wasn't fond of Size of a Cow, but going back and listening to the singles from Eight-Legged Groove Machine, I did kind of recapture the frothy joy of what I liked about The Wonder Stuff. Were The Wonder Stuff Grebo? Should I start a Grebo thread to hash out what Grebo was, because Stirmonster never told me anything except what Grebo *wasn't*.

This stuff is silly pop joy:

https://youtu.be/cY446CO6USQ

https://youtu.be/7Aw-JYtdW4o

But listening to this with an adult's ear rather than a teenager's, the monetary preoccupation in these singles really kind of stands out - like at the time, it really passed me by, but now I'm really wondering if this is unironic celebration of Thatcher-era 80s greed, or if it's a politically charged lampooning of the attitudes expressed in the songs. They never struck me as a political band, far more a silly jokes bants-type band. But looking back on it now, I don't know?

I sometimes wonder about Jesus Jones. What we're they about? What were their hopes and dreams? Was it baggy? Was it industrial? Was it grebo? Indie? Pop? Were they more like PWEI or more like EMF? What exactly were they going for? Just what was the deal?

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/27896382e82c4ea7e34e2c4fda97d92f8a152c96/0_529_3564_3969/master/3564.jpg

this reveals little

haha especially if the photo worked

It's weird because Jesus Jones were so astonishingly successful - especially in the States but seemed to fit nowhere in the UK music press's plan for what music was doing at the time.

It wasn't that they didn't come from a scene - as I said on the Shamen thread, they shamelessly piggybacked off the Shamen's work. It was more that they weren't legible as belonging to a music press standardised Thing - the way that the music press presented Baggy, or presented Shoegaze or Britpop or The New Wave Of New Wave as being "a-ha, we, the music press have spotted The Next Trend".

They just combined a bunch of stuff that was zeitgeisty and popular, and combined it with a heartthrob looks singer, and had this skyrocketing success that the Uk music press didn't know where to assign.

I'm just glad the Tatu cover of How Soon Is Now exists

WTF is “grebo”???

WTF is "grebo"? Obviously it is the music favored by diving birds of the order Podicipediformes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grebe?wprov=sfla1

No one knows what Grebo is, or where it came from, or what it means. They will only ever tell me what it isn't.

How Soon Is Now came out like 10 years before all these other songs so im assuming it's some remix from the grosse point blank soundtrack or something

it got reissued in 92 with a fancy 2cd single package when the label released a greatest hits set

https://www.discogs.com/The-Smiths-How-Soon-Is-Now/release/490493

https://www.discogs.com/The-Smiths-How-Soon-Is-Now/release/490503

Also I feel like this series always had a side strategy of padding out new tracks with indie disco classics.

xps The Smiths singles compilation came out in 1995.

Oddly Pulp's has the most warm evocative vibe, it actually reminds me of the era and conjured up some of the old late-teens early-90s magic, perhaps purely because it wasn't played as often as some of those other bangers.

Great video too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPGepgWupTw

I wrote a thing about DYRTFT a few years back, re-reading it, it's not a very good thing, however might be good for a dive into the track

https://pulpsongs.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/129-do-you-remember-the-first-time/

Dodgy were in most respects pretty shit, but I do miss the days when a band could have a hit with something so unabashedly and uncynically exuberant and positive as Staying Out For The Summer. It's definitely a song that could only have come out when it did, even if it was a straight sixties rip off

Dodgy winning Gary Crowley's demo clash on GLR five weeks running with Lovebirds. The shit ya remember, although not the song itself without going to YouTube. I'm curious to hear that demo again now.

Dodgy were embarrassing but actually not *that* bad as a band, not good enough for me to ever consider buying any of their records, but respect due for filling a particular niche well.

Before they embraced Britpop, bleached hair and ripping off the Rugrats theme tune, they cast themselves as ganja-worshipping caravan-dweller types. I remember being quite underwhelmed by their very non-psychedelic sound once I eventually got to hear 'So Let Me Go Far', although it has a certain charm that's grown on me, I'll admit. 'In A Room' was not a bad single either

also, they have definitely written their own Wikipedia page

Dodgy is such a terrible name for a band

It really is.
In A Room was surprisingly good, considering.

'Good Enough' was the worst of the Britpop era big hits