Given away with the April 1992 edition of Select Magazine, one that came with Kurt Cobain on the cover. Otherwise, it was an issue packed with t-shirt bands such as James, Carter USM and Senseless Things.

Eleven songs all told, and , as normal with Select, there were a couple of pages devoted to providing some more details about each of them, with a band member or solo performer quoted in a short interview style.

The wider selling point was was that three of the tracks were ‘exclusive unreleased’, three were demos, one was a remix and the other four were edits.  It was also given an official catalogue number by the label – C-RE 128.

NB : Tape and songs were previously featured on this blog back in February 2014.

A1: Boo Radleys – Lazy Day (version)
A2: Swervedriver – Son of Mustang Ford (demo version)
A3: Teenage Fanclub – Kylie’s Got A Crush On Us (unreleased – recorded live at a soundcheck)
A4: Silverfish – Vitriola (demo version)
A5: Love Corporation – Gimme Some Love (remix)

B1: Ride – Time Of Her Time (live version)
B2: mk – Play The World (edit)
B3: The Telescopes – You Set My Soul (unreleased)
B4: Slowdive – Shine (edit)
B5: Sheer Taft – Atlantis (edit)
B6: Bill Drummond – The Manager’s Speech (edit)

Copies can be found on Discogs for £1.99 (plus P&P) mostly from European-based sellers.  It would likely all add up to not far short a fiver all told.

Regular readers will know that Bill Drummond is a hero of mine and someone I have long reckoned is a bonafide genius.

Here are the words from the magazine which accompanied The Manager’s Speech:-

It is 1986 and Bill Drummond, former manager of Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Strawberry Switchblade, has just quit his post as Head of A&R at Korova. The label’s last signing is Brilliant, soon to be produced by SAW and featuring Jimmy Cauty.

Drummond signs to Creation for an album, modestly titled ‘Bill Drummond – The Man’, awash with anarchic Country & Western and infamous for the track ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’. He releases a 12-inch single, ‘King Of Joy’ and Creation want a video and B-side. He elects to make a ten-minute promotional clip of himself pushing a street-cleaner’s dustcart through a park, a gold disc stuck on the front, a guitar in the bin, “spontaneously pontificating” on the subject of pop stardom.  The opening section appears on the Select tape.

BILL DRUMMOND: “I did it cos it was cheap and we needed a B-side. It’s a sort of layman’s eye-view of the pop business. The view of some guy you meet in a pub, or a cab driver, and you make the terrible mistake of letting him know you’re in the music business and he starts giving you his theory about it – ‘Fuckin’ Duran Duran, eh?…..’ It was kind of cynical but I really felt I had a future as an artist rather than someone behind the scenes”.

A year later Drummond and Cauty release their first single as The JAMMS. Shortly after they mutate into The KLF.

I’ve tracked down said clip.

JC

June 1990.  My first birthday spent with Rachel.  She tried to book a last-minute trip to Italia 90 to take in Scotland v Brazil but there was just no room at the inn.  We ended up heading to Albufeira in Portugal where we watched a number of matches in various pubs that were packed with tourists from all parts of Europe – lots of great memories.

We weren’t the type to go clubbing as we felt ancient, but thinking on it now, we weren’t….it was just that the pure dance music of the era wasn’t our scene.  We were, however, enjoying some of the stuff that had a bit of an indie-bent to it, and many of the tracks that have been featured in previous editions of this feature, soundtracked that first happy summer together. As you’ll find out, June 1990 itself was a far from vintage month for new singles.

It began with EnglandNewOrder at the top of the pile.  It ended with Luciana Pavarotti battling for the #1 spot as folks rushed to buy his version of Nessun Dorma that had soundtracked the BBC coverage of the World Cup.  Football and music were now interlinked in a way that I hadn’t ever really experienced – interesting to note that the other #1 in the month of June 1990 was Sacrifice by Elton John who was one of the few pop superstars to have previously linked his fame with a love of the great game, having invested in his local and unfashionable club at Watford in the mid 70s and become its chair.

But’s that’s enough of the all-our-yesterdays stuff from me. Here’s the music.

Touched By The Hand of Cicciolina – Pop Will Eat Itself

See….I wasn’t bullshitting about the omnipresence of football and music in the month of June 1990.  PWEI had released eight singles prior to this, with only Can U Dig It ever scraping into the Top 40.  But they came to greater prominence with this magnificent celebration of Italia 90, combining a house tune, sampled football commentary and a lyric that paid homage to Italy’s best-known hardcore porn star.  The single came complete with a cheeky sticker on the sleeve that declared it the “unofficial World Cup Theme”.  Entered the charts on 3 June at #28, stayed in that position the following week and then dropped out quickly as soon as the tournament was over.

It’s still an incredible sounding piece of music.

Lazyitis – One Armed Boxer – Happy Mondays with Karl Denver

A single that had bummed on its initial release in May 1989 now re-entered the chart at #46 in June 1990, illustrating the huge interest in everything that was coming out of Madchester. Composed by a stellar and unusual cast – credits are rightly given to Lennon/McCartney, David Essex and Sly & The Family Stone as well as those who performed on the song.

Shall We Take A Trip – Northside

A third entry for Factory Records in the singles chart this week – possibly for the first and only time.  The debut single from Manchester band Northside hung about the lower end of the charts for a month or so, entering at #53 on 3June and rising to #50 the following week.  It’s a fairly impressive effort given that the single was banned by the BBC thanks to the drugs references.

I’ll mention in passing the appearance of an initial slow burner that eventually seemed to take over the nation.  Unknown American rapper MC Hammer sneaked into the charts at #66 on 3 June 1990.  Nobody was really paying too much attention – there was football to be watched.  Three weeks later, his infectiously catchy (i.e., annoying) U Can’t Touch This, propelled by a promo video dominated by a crazy dance and crazy trousers, went Top 20 where it stayed for a further 12 weeks.  There was barely a singles chart over the next year and a bit that didn’t have an MC Hammer song in the Top 75.

The chart of 10 June 1990 had plenty of new entries, but for the most part they should, mainly in the interests of good taste, also be skipped over:-

Step By Step – New Kids On The Block(#2)
Oops Up -Snap! (#13)
Nessun Dorma – Luciana Pavarotti (#22)
Whose Law (Is It Anyway) – Guru Josh (#32)
Thinking Of You – Maureen (#38)
Mona – Craig McLachlan and Check 1-2 (#44)
Move Away Jimmy Blue – Del Amitri (#54)
Love Is – Alannah Myles (#61)
Jack’s Heroes – The Pogues and The Dubliners (#64)
Ways Of Love – Claytown Troupe (#70)
Time – Kim Wilde (#73)
Chapel of Love – London Boys (#75)

Just typing out that list illustrates just how much money was spent by record labels on stuff that had no chance of ever recouping its cost. Utter madness.

There was one other new entry in the chart. Which sort of illustrated the point.

Won’t Stop Loving You – A Certain Ratio

ACR, had left Factory Records to sign with A&M in 1987. The major label obviously felt they had a success story on their hands but the Good Together album and the three singles lifted from it in 1989, had sold dismally.

They did, however, get their name into the singles chart in June 1990 with a new single, which benefitted from the fact that it had been remixed by a bloke whose band were at #1 in the charts. Yup, the friendship with Barney Sumner sort of paid off, and after entering at #69, the single climbed to the dizzy heights of #55. ACR were dropped soon afterwards by the label.

The chart of 17 June was similar to that of the previous week. The new entrants included Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Bruce Dickinson, and Magnum (an indication that some sort of hard rock festival was in the offing). It also saw Bob Geldof‘s appropriately titled Great Song of Indifference enter at #43 only to fall out of the charts altogether the following week.*

* CORRECTION :  I hadn’t spotted that Bob Geldof’s single in fact climbed the charts in the filling weeks and went on to be a Top 20 hit.  Happy to put the record straight…in my defence, I’ll just say that I can’t recall the song at all…

Two songs worth mentioning. The first of which saw a third chart single (#46) in 1990 for the biggest rap act on the planet, while the second saw a song enter at #67, a full 34 years after it had been a #1 hit:-

Brothers Gonna Work It Out -Public Enemy
Paint It Black – The Rolling Stones

The Stones single had been re-issued on the back of it being the title tune to the hit TV series Tour Of Duty.

The new chart of 24 June was just as depressing in terms of the majority of new singles. Indeed, the whole thing was pretty stagnant with only the aforementioned MC Hammer being a new song inside the top 20, with the others all hovering around the previous week’s positions.

These four, however, are rare rays of light, entering respectively at #40, #48 #49, and #75

She Comes In The Fall – Inspiral Carpets
Put The Message In The Box – World Party
Dangerous Sex – Tack Head
Anyway That You Want Me – Spiritualized

This was Tack Head‘s only ever brush with the singles chart.

The cover of a Troggs song was the debut single from Jason Pierce‘s new band following the break-up of Spaceman 3.  And one of SWC’s favourite songs of all time.

I bet these facts are making a few of you shake your heads and wondering where the time has gone.

JC
(aged exactly 57 years)

This one is for my good pal Jonny the Friendly Lawyer.

Today should have seen myself and Rachel boarding a plane to head over to Los Angeles to be the guests of him and his wife, Goldie.  There were all sorts of plans in place, including a Flaming Lips gig and dinner in a restaurant highly recommended by SWC.  Oh, and I would have celebrated my 57th birthday over there.

But for now, it’s all very much on hold.

A recent posting highlighted some Peel Session versions of songs by PJ Harvey, and in it I recalled that I had first heard Water courtesy of a cassette giveaway with a music magazine.

I also mentioned all the other acts that had been included on the cassette and it was that fact which prompted Jonny to say ‘sounds like a hell of a cassette’.

Radio Daze was given away with the May 1992 edition of Vox Magazine.  I was never really one for keeping old music papers or mags, so it has long been part of a landfill just outside of Glasgow. The cover looked like this:-

Given there was an ‘exclusive’ story on The Jam and a feature on The Cure, I’d likely have bought it notwithstanding the tape offered up these:-

A1: The Cure – 10:15 Saturday Night (broadcast 11 December 1978)
A2: Madness – The Prince (broadcast 27 August 1979)
A3: Happy Mondays – Mad Cyril (broadcast 27 February 1989)
A4: Babes In Toyland – Catatonic (broadcast 29 September 1990)
A5: Buzzcocks – What Do I Get? (broadcast 19 September 1977)
A6: Chicken Shack – I’d Rather Go Blind (broadcast 22 June 1969)
A7: The Undertones – Love Parade (broadcast 7 December 1982)
A8: Billy Bragg – A13 (broadcast 3 August 1983)

B1: Syd Barrett – Gigolo Aunt (broadcast 14 March 1970)
B2: The Only Ones – The Beast (broadcast 14 April 1978)
B3: The Fall – Return (broadcast 15 February 1992)
B4: PJ Harvey – Water (broadcast 3 November 1991)
B5: Inspiral Carpets – Beast Inside (broadcast 5 June 1990)
B6: The Birthday Party – Big Jesus Trash Can (broadcast 10 December 1981)
B7: The Damned – Neat Neat Neat (broadcast 10 December 1976)

Copies of the tape can be found on Discogs from as little as 99p each, although someone in the USA is asking for $30 to part with his copy.

JC

An anti-ICA, of a sort, for Earth Day, sorta

A Guest Posting by Hybrid Soc Prof

Your ‘Struggling to get the boys out of bed’ Michigan Correspondent

JC writes…..

This arrived in my Inbox on 21 April. If I had been able to get my shit together at that time, it would have been posted on Wednesday 22 April. It’s still a great read, even if the late appearance takes away from some of the impact of HSP’s excellent words. Over, without further delay, to our man in Michigan.

HSP

In honor of the politically ambiguous event that is Earth Day, an anti-ICA where the anti-part is like the anti- in the anti-folk of early-80s New York… sure as heck sounded like folk, it’s just that it wasn’t done by folksters.

Basically, I searched my hard drive for the word Green. Then I tossed out all the album titles with the word, all the band names with the word, all the songs where the word was a root rather than stand-alone (all those versions of Greensleeves, POOF!)… and I still had too many. So-o-o, I reduced the list to songs that started with the word Green and got a manageable number.

I then played with different combinations, permutations, sonic themes and trajectories and ended up with these. It ends with my favorite of the bunch.

About Earth Day, my area of expertise is political ecology/critical environmental sociology. I was raised hiking, camping, canoeing, rafting, recycling, worried about extinction, population, consumption, resource inefficiency, pollution, acid rain, nuclear energy/war/winter, solid waste, litter, and – after we moved out of low income neighborhoods in smog-filled cities – with an organic garden and massive compost pile in the backyard. We were pretty active in Earth Day 1970 – I was 8.

By the time I wrote my undergraduate thesis on acid rain and freshwater fish, however, I’d studied pesticides, deforestation, desertification, the ecological devastation of war from Southeast Asia to Central America, and the anti-toxics campaigns soon to combine with struggles against environmental racism as what we now call the environmental justice movement. Of course, at that point, Reagan was dismantling the environmental state in all its legislative, administrative and bureaucratic manifestations. I’d thought environmentalism was about sublime nature – as America wrote in the song, Horse with No Name, “plants and birds and rocks and things”… I’d thought it was about ecological science and rational, expert-led, science-based policy. I’d though that no reasonable person could oppose what some European scholars later named ecological modernization.

By my second year of grad school, however, I’d read enough histories of the idea of nature, enough environmental history, enough research into the history of environmentalism to understand why elite “environmental” concerns with population, landscape preservation, resource efficiencies, environmental health and consumption were seen by some folks on the left and right as bourgeois concerns the implementation of which would hurt and disenfranchise working people, small businesses and small farms… much less the people of the global south, particularly land-poor low income women. Legitimate critiques of technocratic blindness to social justice and refusal of democratic participation in program implementation abound.

Like a lot of environmentalists, I find wilderness, mountains, plains, oceans and wildlife sublime. I marvel at and am in awe of them. Put I’m privileged to do so. Similarly, I’m physically and spiritually rejuvenated when I spend time in such places, where such beings still reside. Moreover, I think resource efficiency – extractive and in consumption – is inordinately important for all manner of reasons, including not despoiling landscapes, polluting neighborhoods and eliminating species. On top of that, who in their right mind wants to live in a polluted, litter-strewn, toxic terrain watching people of all ages die young? And who is affronted by the fact that all negative environmental consequences disproportionately effect lower income – especially lower income historically oppressed minority – populations?

But the thing is once you’ve made it to the last paragraph – and I know this is less of an insight for our European readers than it is for Romantic Americans who tend to think North and South America were pristine and Edenic, barely populated much less modified by “natural” peoples living lightly on the land – it should be clear that environmentalism is far less about Nature and Science – defined by gov’t and universities – and far more about health and justice – broadly defined.

Environmentalism, then, isn’t about pierced and tattooed, patchouli-drenched, long-haired, unshaven, bicycle-riding, vegan, recycling-obsessed, squatters younger than 28 fighting to save the planet – as most of my students, and pretty much all of their parents – think, it is and has always been about quality of life. The question is, of course, quality of life for whom and how many, and that’s not a technical question, it’s a social one… connected to the pandemic.

Thanks to all here for improving my quality of my life.

Side A
Green Jeans – The Fabulous Fleerekkers
Green Sea – Blue Stingrays
Green Onions – Booker T and the MGs
Green on Red – The Serfers
Green Fuz – Green Fuz

Side B
Green River – Creedence Clearwater Revival
The Green Manalishi – Arthur Brown
Green Machine – Hawkwind
Green Light – Sonic Youth
Green Shirt – Elvis Costello & the Attractions

HSP