Song, by Toad

Much to the surprise of several midland-based illegal betting syndicates, the annual Mercury Music Prize was last night awarded to dour navel-gazers The Double-X at a darts-tournament-themed presentation ceremony in London.

However, the misguided brummie gangsters were not the only ones to get a fuzzy reception on their crystal ball, as pointed out last night by Slackdad on these very pages following Matthew’s accurately dismissive review of the Londoners’ debut album almost a year ago.

Nevertheless, much as it balks me to stick up for Matthew, I do still think his review was pretty much spot on at the time; and remains so a year later.

What Matthew didn’t take into account last year was the music industry establishment’s fear of appearing “out-of-touch” or “un-cool”, which I believe was the main reason the nu-goth ™ outfit was given the prize.

As the traditional music business with its rigid regime of pigeon-holed genres fragments, and the fault lines that divide the artistic and creative side of music from the light entertainment side widen, the moguls holding the purse strings at the record companies and the corporations that sponsor events like the Mercury Awards are finding themselves in a state of fitful panic.

The XX didn’t win the award because theirs was the best album of the year, or even on the shortlist. It wasn’t. Theirs was simply the best image for the Mercury Awards to adopt for a year. The right image was important to them this year in particular, following the cultural vanishing act performed by last year’s winner – urban act Speech Debelle – as soon as the twenty-grand prize cheque was cashed.

The XX have had a year to establish themselves on the festival circuit, and have tickled the underbelly of the charts if not exactly set them alight. So the Marketing Director at Barclaycard can sleep relatively soundly, safe in the knowledge that their sponsorship investment should continue to pay off for at least a few more months.

I bet last year Barclaycard were left thinking they could have just spent twenty-grand down the pub for all the good Speech What’s-Her-Face did for them.

So, by that token, surely Paul Weller or Mumford & Sons should have won. Barclaycard can, quite literally, take them to the bank, can’t they?

Well, perhaps not. A completely safe-as-houses bet such as  represented by those acts would have highlighted last year’s fuck-up instead of quietly sweeping it under the carpet. Media pundits and bloggers would have leapt all over it, claiming that it was a cynical attempt to associate the Mercurys with a successful act for purely business purposes.

I didn’t catch the whole awards show broadcast on the TV last night, but – like the witness to a crime – I saw enough. The live performances largely illustrated what a poor shortlist had been compiled.

The Mumfords delivered a sample of their well drilled live-set which was more than adequate to steal the show from the sample I saw. I’m sure you can catch carbon-copies of Villagers in the back room of pubs at open-mic nights up and down the country. The lad simply doesn’t have a ring of quality about him, and looks like he’s being pimped about by handlers trading on his doe-eyed shyness and funny haircut. I Am Kloot were clearly very competent songwriters and soulful performers, but somehow put me in mind of Chris De Burgh.

Corinne Bailey Rae and her band just embarrassing. She started off by showing us some hesitantly picked arpeggios she learned in her first guitar lesson that morning  (she’s not there yet but she’ll probably get the hang of it in time); before her backing band came struck up. Well, I don’t know which phone-in competition they’d each individually won to get the chance to play on stage at the Mercurys, but you’d think someone would have given them the chance to practice together first.

After that we watched as the token jazz trio from the shortlist warmed up by playing three different songs at once. It was certainly intriguing, but it would have been nice to see their actual performance. At least their sense of rhythm was better than Corinne Bailey Rae’s band. (Having said that though, Matthew’s sense of rhythm is better than Corinne Bailey Rae’s band.)

So for another year we’re left with the bitter aftertaste of music being misappropriated for the sake of corporate media-grabbing, and the unpleasant sticky residue reaches even the fringes of the music scene as the Mercury Awards flaunt their ill-deserved “edgy and independent” image in the music news headlines. How depressing.

Any predictions for the Mercury Awards 2011 then?

The Blue Aeroplanes – Mercury

It’s probably about time we steered away from the low arts here on Toad and introduced a little high culture into the mélange, isn’t it?

Luckily, such respite can be provided in a timely fashion by Edinburgh College of Art graduate Sarah Muirhead.

Sarah is a stalwart supporter of the Edinburgh music scene, as a fan, a close friend to many of the bands and – crucially – as a hardworking bartender in some of the key local venues.

In addition to this, she’s also a wildly talented painter. Her work, generally portraits of strangers she describes as meeting in a “search for interesting characters on the street and in bars”, is simply breathtaking.

You can see what I mean online if you click the link on her name above and have a browse about her site. However, the reason I’m popping a post up now is that you can also see what I mean for real if you head along to the Urban Outfitters store on Princes Street over the coming month, where her exhibition Human Zoo will be on display.

The official launch night, with sparkling drinks and delicious canapés no doubt, is on Thursday night this week. I had been planning to go but someone had to drive the Meursaults to End Of The Road festival because it’s too far for them to walk or something.

If you, however, haven’t got an excuse as good as that to miss it, then you really shouldn’t. I’ll just have to make sure I catch the exhibition when I’m back in town.

Whenever the digital revolution gets mentioned in the press, or indeed in conversation, it tends to be closely accompanied by murmurings about declining CD sales and questions about whether or not the rise in digital sales makes up for that shortfall and whether or not anyone will actually need to own music in five years and so on and so forth.

The answers to the above questions are both simply ‘no’.  There is no need to own music anymore and digital sales will probably not make up for the revenue generated by the somewhat false heights of the CD industry.  So what.

What doesn’t get mentioned too often, though, is what an incredible benefit the mp3 has been to the CD in another sense: it has liberated it from the constraints of being a commodity product.  The mp3 is now the commodity, needing to be as cheap and readily available as possible, with price and availability considerably trumping any questions of quality.  High bitrate mp3s and lossless file formats don’t seem to have made any impression on the digital market when they have been provided at a premium price, and I don’t really think people care that much.  An mp3 is merely a commodity, shunted about in large quantities, and exists simply to reach as many people as possible and to generate revenue.  It is important, but very unglamorous work.

That used to be the job of the vinyl record, of course.  Then for a while it was the job of the cassette tape, although to a lesser extent, and by the nineties it was pretty much entirely the job of the CD.  What did that mean for the little shiny silver disc? Well as with any commodity product, it put pressure on price.  It was all about how cheaply you could make them, and in what volumes.  At those numbers any kind of increase in the manufacturing price has a massive knock-on effect on revenue generation, which is by its very nature what the ‘industry’ part of the industry cared about, no criticism implied.

Now, of course, no-one ever needs to buy a CD; it is as obsolete as vinyl and tapes.  There are still plenty of CD players around of course, and it will take a while to fully die out, but basically the CD has had its day as a delivery medium for music, as has any and every physical medium.  And for these various media that is a liberation, not a condemnation.

As we’ve seen recently, there has been a significant rise in vinyl releases and vinyl sales.  In the last year or so we’ve seen all sorts of things released on tape as well.  I wouldn’t be wholly surprised to see something released on DAT tape or something stupid like that in the near future, provided it still comes with a digital download.  I seem to recall someone from Domino boasting recently at a Born to Be Wide seminar that they had recently released something on a tin of beans.

Basically, it is no longer enough for a CD to be a mere delivery mechanism for the songs, because the mp3 does it cheaper, faster, and with more flexibility – better, in other words.   A physical product nowadays has to justify its existence in its own right, because the music contained thereon is not enough anymore, and this challenge has been risen to with some alacrity by the more forward-thinking record labels and self-releasing bands.  No-one needs to buy a CD these days, so if you are going to bother going to the trouble of making them then you have to make them worth owning.  The packaging has to be beautiful.  There has to be something extra.  It must, in itself, be something which is a pleasure to own and to use.

It reminds me a little of the argument about wine bottle sealing technology.  Screw-tops are, I seem to recall, actually better at preserving the wine properly, but they haven’t really made as much headway as they might.  Simply, they cannot compete with the satisfaction of cutting and removing the foil, and then uncorking a bottle of wine.  It’s a tactile pleasure, and I feel the same about music.

Vinyl may not reproduce music as faithfully as a CD or a high quality digital file, but there is a ritual to putting a record on the record player which mp3s and playlists can never match.  When it comes to opening a CD package to play an album the same has to be true.  Click on the picture above and have a look at the gorgeous packaging of the Now Owl album.  Apart from being an excellent piece of music (buy it here), that album is a pleasure to own, and a pleasure simply to open up and play.

Now, I think the CD has a few years left where people will buy it simply as a commodity – because that’s what they can play in their cars or their living rooms, perhaps.  In general the technology isn’t quite obsolete just yet.  But we are getting ever closer to the point where a physical medium for music is more of a hindrance than a help, and soon it will not be enough to simply put together some graphics and duplicate the music.

And in a way that will be a blessing, because freed from the rather brutal economics of the commodity product, where all is dependent on keeping costs down, you are now selling a luxury item, and the economics of that are rather different.  All of a sudden it makes sense to spend a little more on paper; to think of new ways to package your music; to release on tape, on CD on vinyl, on wax cylinder, on whatever you want; to sit there and hand-fold a few hundred copies and sell them for a little more; to hand-stitch your vinyl sleeves; to superglue actual sequins to your album cover…

When no-one has to buy your product anymore, the people who do buy are the ones who really want to, and they are great people to be working with as they will spend a little more money, and they will appreciate and reward that extra effort.  The whole transaction becomes a little bit more rewarding for everyone, which in my eyes is a very good thing indeed.

Regular readers of my distracted piffle will know by now that I drive a red van with a tape player in it. This has led to a few changes in listening habits, not least because I hardly have any tapes left at all.  A bit like what happened to my vinyl back in about 1995, my collection has been shoved in a box at the back of a cupboard, and I honestly didn’t think I would ever play them again.

Unlike my vinyl, though, my parents didn’t eventually get bored of having it lying around the house and then throw it in the fucking bin.  Yes, they did that.  To my vinyl.  Not that I blame them really, I’d copied it all to tape (oh wait…) and was a student at the time, so there seemed little imminent prospect of me ever having a record player again.  How times change.

Now not only do we have a tape player in the van, we have actually bought one for the house, too.  I bought it off eBay for about fifteen quid a couple of years ago when I first got my hands on the Japanese War Effort’s brilliant Snowbird album, which exists only on cassette.  So for a long while, that tape player was simply a Snowbird Playing Machine, and in a sense the album itself, far from the eminently reasonable two pounds I paid for it at retail, had ended up costing me nearer twenty.

However, the box of tapes in our house is actually still stuffed away under the stairs somewhere, so at the moment the van’s tape player is subsisting on a pretty meagre diet.  In fact, due to the fact that even the van tapes have ended up buried under a pile of old crap somewhere under one of the back seats, I have actually only been listening to one single tape for the last month or so, over and over again.

I made this tape towards the tail end of the nineties and I called it, with tongue somewhat in cheek, Let’s Bop With the Brits.  It is basically just a collection of British music which, for one reason or another, was starting to sound quite old-fashioned by 1996 or so.  There was some Morrissey, some Inspiral Carpets, some Wonderstuff, some Gene, one solitary Stone Roses song, a couple of tracks from Parklife, hopefully you get the gist of it.

Anyhow, yes, for some reason I have had that one tape on repeat constantly for the last four weeks and I now know the words to most of the songs pretty much off by heart, never mind the playlist itself.  With modern music libraries comprising thousands and thousands of files, I am not sure when the last time is that happened to me.

Morrissey – Certain People I Know

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Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide

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Blur – End of a Century

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I’ve been talking to Anthony from God Don’t Like It recently, and I think we both agree that longevity is the key to achieving anything in the music industry, particularly if you are a publication or a label or a promoter or a venue or anything like that – just make sure you stick at it for as long as possible.  For bands, maybe the flash in the pan model is a bit more feasible, but even then only if you play a particular kind of music.

Applied to mp3 blogs the same is true, particularly when you take their popularity boom into consideration.  Most music blogs started up about the time I moved to a Blogger account, in around 2006.  Around that time there was something of an explosion, with new ones popping into existence every few weeks, and consequently the older ones, dating back to 2003/4 and so on ended up with a kind of mythical status in the eyes of many writers (and readers) of these sites, because they blazed the trail that we all follow.

Muruch is a music blog written by a friend of mine, and it trumps all of these whippersnappers: it recently celebrated its tenth birthday!  There are a few reasons why this is an incredible achievement.  Firstly, the sheer slog of writing even a handful of posts a week for no tangible reward is a lot harder than most people think.  I pretty much go from internal monologue to blog post with barely a filter inbetween, which is why I get myself in hot water from time to time, but it is still the only way I can generate this amount of writing this regularly.  For Muruch to have managed ten years of consistent posting is a feat of endurance which I doubt many will be fully able to appreciate.

There is a little more to it than that, however.  Most mp3 blogs, this one included, play pretty fast and loose with the law.  Almost everything I post is sent to me by bands and PR people and therefore cleared for posting, but there are definitely times when I think ‘aw, fuck it’ and just fire something up on the assumption that a/ the band probably don’t mind and b/ if they do mind then they probably don’t care all that much and are unlikely to ever find out anyway.  This applies to a lot of music blogs, but not to Muruch.

Muruch, is entirely, 100% legal, which is one of the reasons they don’t feature all that many mp3s, a fact which hurts their audience somewhat when you consider the importance to blogs of things like the Hype Machine blog aggregator.  As well as this, when the music industry started wielding the ludicrous DMCA and making invalid, nuisance complaints against anyone and everyone, resulting in blogs being vandalised by their hosts or just shut down altogether, Muruch was one of the only ones to stand up and fight back.

Because everything they post is legal they were able to pursue a counter-claim all the way back to the source of the complaint, and by doing so highlighting just how little control bands actually have over their own music.  It was a brave and rather thankless task, but something which I think deserves an awful lot of respect.  So well done Vic, thanks for all the support for the record label, thanks for the last ten years, and good luck for the next ten!

George Davis – Sixteen Tons

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Eels – Sixteen Tons

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Sometimes I really wish we had more poofs and asylum seekers and darkies and bankers and… well okay, maybe not bankers, but benefit cheats and single mums and immigrants in this country.  Because I’d rather a country filled with all those people than one filled with Daily Express readers.

In fact, I think the best way to solve the pressure on the country’s infrastructure which all these gay immigrants seem set to exert would be to organise a swap system.  For every asylum seeker we take in we should be able to ship a Daily Mail or a Daily Express reader off to somewhere like Kabul or Darfur or pretty much anywhere the fuck else but here.

Because the one thing we all know is that the primary reason for abandoning your family and the country of your birth only to wash up somewhere like this with absolutely nothing to your name but the clothes you are wearing is so that you can go to Kylie concerts and drink fucking cocktails.

In some senses you almost have to applaud the Daily Express for this headline.  You really couldn’t make this shit up.  But how the hell can you possibly satirise something so brilliantly insane?  Then again, why waste your time satirising the cunts – why not just tell them to fuck off.

So it seems that 6Music has been saved for now, which is very good news.  Saved is not entirely accurate I suppose; perhaps reprieved might be more like it.  There is still every chance it could go if the BBC were to include the cut in a broader re-strategising of their digital radio offering.

The proposed cuts seemed punitive rather than strategic, a suspicion strongly reinforced by the recent utterances of Tim Montgomerie: “Disgraceful that 6Music has been saved.  When will the BBC share in the pain?” I think we can all agree that he comes across as a stupid cunt, but I am not really going to dig at that too much, as No Rock and Roll Fun has done a much better job of dismantling his nonsense here.

The thing which has been itching at me ever since this was announced was nicely summed up by the Daily Mash (a brilliant site, by the way – sort of like a British Onion) at the time the cuts were first threatened.  The first paragraph of this article sums it up quite neatly: “The closure of the BBC’s 6 Music has enraged thousands of people who insist it is the sort of thing they would probably have liked if they had ever got round to listening to it.”

I am thrilled that 6Music has been saved and it is the only radio station I would ever choose to listen to, but as many have said, what of the Asian Network?  Well it’s a slightly stupid question, and throws the point made by the Daily Mash above into sharp relief.  I like the idea of the Asian Network, in that it sounds like it is probably a good idea, it is nevertheless not aimed at me, not anything I ever listened to and therefore not something I know the slightest thing about.

So really, for me to weep and wail about the Asian Network all I would be doing would be rather hollowly defending something which sounded like the right sort of thing for the BBC to be doing. Honestly, though, it would be a shallow protest, because I have no fucking idea whether the Asian Network really does merit preservation or not.

As anyone who lamented the demise of the Bowery here in Edinburgh last year should have instinctively known when its takeover was first mooted, it is not enough to like the idea of something, we have to actually use it.  One of the reasons the Bowery ended up without a particularly strong negotiating position was that most of us who liked the idea of it didn’t actually go there often enough to keep it open.

Equally with 6Music, do those of us who hate the idea of it closing actually listen to the station all that much?  Do those of us who love independent music actually go to the gigs our favourite promoters put on, or buy the music our favourite labels and bands release?

One of the reasons the things I love are often called ‘alternative’ is simply descriptive: they are things which not all that many people really like all that much.  Things which are not popular often, for simple economic reasons, can no longer afford to exist.  All of which brings me back to the initial point, which is that it is all very well to like the idea of this sort of thing, and quite right to be thrilled that 6Music is, for now, not going to be shut down.  But really, protests and petitions are one thing, but the only real way to support this kind of stuff is to actually make a point of using it as often as possible.

First things first, this post is me asking a favour from a friend, but not from everyone.  A lot of people who read this site do so from a  long way away, physically or figuratively, and most of you can probably ignore this post as it really isn’t your problem.

For the rest, Phil is a good friend of mine who has recently moved down to Edinburgh from Aberdeen, and in doing so has put himself in pretty dire financial straits.  So dire that he recently put his prize Fender Jaguar up for sale, and you might want to ask a musician if you don’t know how much of a wrench that must have been for the guy.

We’ve all wavered on this, honestly.  Partly, sometimes people just can’t afford things, and you can’t have a big teary appeal every time life is not as sentimental as we would like it to be.  On the other hand, I have been in pretty rotten financial states myself from time to time in the past, and without fail my friends have fished me out of the shit every time, despite there really being nothing in it for them at all.

Phil isn’t just a good mate, he has done an awful lot for me since he moved down here, and I owe him a lot for all the extra work and help and support he has provided, and I am far from alone in this.  So we had a look at the actual sums, and realised that pretty much anyone would happily buy a mate a pint, and if we could find about a hundred and fifty such people to donate the price of a pint we could actually buy Phil’s guitar for about as much money each as anyone would happily lose down the back of the sofa without a second thought.

So anyone who has a reason to be grateful to Phil, be it in his capacity as promoter under the name of Slanted and Enchanted, or as guitarist in Meursault or his own musical project Debutant, or just because he is a fucking lovely guy, it would be nice if you wanted to help.  He’s a proud fucker, so talking him into this wasn’t exactly easy, and in the words of Lando Calrissian: “Come on Han old buddy, don’t let me down.”

I know this doesn’t concern most of you, so please feel free to ignore it and I hope you don’t feel intruded upon, but for those of you who wish to help out, please go here and make a donation.

Debutant – La Pucelle

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Meursault – William Henry Miller Pt.1 (Single Version)

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So, yes, in about five hours I will be officially unemployed – dosser or entrepreneur, whichever you prefer.  This is the last time I can skive off and write a post when I should actually be doing something else, because in future the writing of posts will actually be legitimate business.

I take the piss out of Proper Job, but contrary to what you might expect from someone changing careers entirely, I have always really enjoyed what I do.  I have always needed variety in my life, and as a kid I was never able to entirely abandon either my technical or my artistic interests, so product design engineering was a pretty perfect mix.  I’ve been doing this for ten years now, and it’s always been varied, engaging and enjoyable.  Those who know me a little better will know that I quite simply could not have forced myself to do anything for this long if I didn’t enjoy it.

The actual company I’m at now has been amazing, too.  I may not actually be Scottish, but there is a no-bullshit attitude here that I’ve found really refreshing.  No internal politics, no fannying about, no nonsense.  And for some inexplicable reason, considering how much work I’ve had to put into Toad things over the last few years, I’ve made it this far without actually being fired. So thanks guys, it genuinely has been fun.

So, yes, here we are and, quite legitimately, the question of ‘what next’ rears its head.  Well as I have had to point out to Mrs. Toad, who occasionally talks like she’s expecting to gain a housewife, I already have a full-time job to do, it’s just that now I get to do it during office hours instead of at four in the morning all the fucking time. So actually you might not notice much change from the outside.

The label, for example, is already at capacity.  The bands we are already working with are releasing enough material that we can’t really take anything else on.  Never mind my personal workload, we don’t have the budget for it, and I am a little worried that our press friends might start to tune out if we send them too much more stuff than we are at the moment.  There are a couple of things I want to do better, and I am going to have to learn to book tours, so that a couple of our new bands can start to play a little bit more far and wide, but in general not much is going to change.

Song, by Toad, on the other hand, needs work.  The podcasts and video have been doing incredibly well recently, but if I am being honest I would have to admit that the actual blog itself has been treading water for the last year, and that is a bad thing.  I never thought the label or the blog were anything like as interesting in isolation as they are together, but recently the label has very much dominated, and I would like to redress that balance if I can.

I want more interviews, more sessions, more video and more proper posts.  And by proper, I just mean things that take a little time and thought.  These things may not be the glamorous, hit-garnering work, but I think they are crucial if I want to be more than just a guy sitting in his pants firing any old nonsense out into the internets.  And let’s face it, I do.  I am not aiming to be big or famous, because this is always going to be niche, but I think there are opportunities out there at the moment and it would be nice to give things a bit of a push while they seem to be on the up.

The other thing which gets forgotten in all of this of course, is Mrs. Toad.  She has put up with this increasingly demanding project for several years now, and has not complained when I use all my holiday going to festivals, when I spend all my money on gettings CDs made, when I sit up every night until the small hours sending off promos, or when I invite people into her house constantly, either to plot or just to get plastered.  So we are hopefully going to get our evenings back, which I am really looking forward to.  As she said to me recently: ‘What was it like when you had free time – what did we actually do?’ And the truth is, I don’t remember.

So it’s not just that she is shouldering the financial risk for this, for reasons best known only to herself, but also that she has for the last few years tolerated a level of deranged commitment and intrusion that no-one else I can imagine would ever have put up with.  Simply, without her, there would be no Song, by Toad.

So in terms of what you guys see, though, things won’t change fast.  It’s going to take me at least a month just to get on top of the admin, frankly, and even then I am not looking to make any radical changes.  I just want to do more things better, more rigorously, and at a normal time of day.  But for now I am off to Glastonbury to get absolutely fucking wasted!

The Members – Goodbye to the Job

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Dead Kennedys – Take This Job and Shove It

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In many ways I picked an unfortunate time to move to Manchester.  The baggy/Madchester/whatever you’re supposed to call it scene had pretty much peterered out by the time I got there in 1993, and consequently the whole movement pretty much passed me by.

Actually, I’ve never heard any of the people involved in what we call Madchester do anything other than spit when it is described as a scene, so despite having been used as a handy way to bracket a large number of bands for years now, it doesn’t seem like there was that much unity or communication between the various people lumped under that description.  Not that I would know, of course.

Anyhow, my school in Austria didn’t really have what you might in Britain or the US call hipsters.  There were a couple of left-field arty sorts who moved, like the rest of us, in very loose groups.  But these groups were never that well defined, as you see in American high school movies, and although it could be an odd place it was never particularly cliquey – at least not as far as I particularly noticed.

One thing that was certainly true, however, is that the music listened to was generally pretty woeful.  It was Vienna, and the stereotypes about European pop music were broadly applicable: generally dance music and metal seemed to dominate, with a strong showing by MTV pop.  MTV wasn’t as bad back then as it is now – if anyone even mentions MTV in a PR email to me these days it gets instantly deleted – but it was still pretty boring.  It was rare that I ever discovered anything from my classmates, and tended to get a bit further by exploring with my Dad, or just going into music shops and poking around.

Most record shops in Vienna had decks so you could take a pile of vinyl (or, increasingly towards the time when I left CDs) and stand in the corner, listening to all sorts.  I spent hours doing this, and that became the way I tended to find new stuff.  Anything from a vague mention in some classroom or other to a pretty album cover would be dug out, and I would stand there until my feet got sore just listening to new stuff.

So stuff like Madchester, so important over here, never made even the barest impression in Vienna.  I joke about coming to Manchester in 1993 and introducing people to this great new band The Stone Roses, without realising that they’d been the biggest band in the country for the last four years, but that was absolutely true.  Barely a single person at my school had ever heard of them.  A strange Croatian girl I knew from the art room mentioned the band just once, having visited England with her family that Summer, and I dug them out in one of my favourite record shops and fell in love with the album.  But I promise you, I was the only one.

It was pretty much the same with the Inspiral Carpets.  I don’t remember hearing about them, but my parents bought me one of their cow t-shirts, so when I saw the same logo on a record I thought ‘hmm, might try that one’.  I really liked it.  Not loved, but really liked, and the constant whine of their signature organ sound was something I found really exciting.

A bit like the whole of the Madchester movement, however, I never really clicked with the band entirely.  I moved to Manchester, as I said, just as it was petering out and Britpop was moments away from being invented so the Happy Mondays, the Inspiral Carpets and few others kind of passed me by.  This feels like a shame in retrospect because I reckon if I’d have been in England at the time I might have really got into the whole scene, although I am not sure why.  I still have a few Inspiral Carpets songs here and there on compilations – mostly on tape, actually, which I am suddenly re-discovering because our new van only has a tape player – and every time a song of theirs comes on I absolutely love it.  And yet every time I’ve tried to buy a whole album it doesn’t quite have the same effect.

Just one of those things, I suppose.

Inspiral Carpets – She Comes in the Fall

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Inspiral Carpets – Saturn 5

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Inspiral Carpets – Uniform

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