Song, by Toad

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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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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The Spacecast is yet another podcast dreamed up in the pub, this time between myself and Dylan, the official Song, by Toad photographer.  And again it’s one of those podcast which could have gone on for over two hours quite easily, but we don’t do that anymore, not around here, we’re disciplined these days goddammit.

So I’ve missed off about a million other suggestions and come up with a combination of songs genuinely about space, and few that use space as some sort of metaphor and then a few which just stick a few spacey words in the title.  And of course, it starts with something rather splendid… but you’ll have to listen to find out what it is.  Alright, it’s not that special.  Just mildly amusing.

Toadcast #54 – The Spacecast

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01. Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – Rocket Man (03.52)
02. David Bowie – Space Oddity (07.06)
03. Bob Geldof – Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things (15.09)
04. Inspiral Carpets – Saturn V (24.49)
05. The Only Ones – Another Girl Another Planet (28.30)
06. Shirley Bassey – In Other Words (Fly Me to the Moon) ( 32.36)
07. Yann Tiersen (Black Session w. Neil Hannon) – Life on Mars (36.04)
08. Riff-Raff – I Wanna be a Cosmonaut (41.34)
09. The Holy Modal Rounders – Mr. Spaceman (42.59)
10. Tom McRae – 2nd Law (48.29)
11. Blur – Far Out (51.46)
12. Queen – Flash Gordon Theme (57.30)

I’m kind of curious to know what the 90s revival is going to spit out. I mean, it’s presumably inevitable that some time in about 2012 or so we all start looking back at that decade with a sort of patronising, nostalgic affection, but I am still struggling to entirely picture it.

Firstly, perhaps because of my age, I don’t yet look at the 90s with a kind of horrified fashion thrill that is something like revulsion mixed with fascination. This kind of curious horror preceded both the 70s and 80s revival, for me, but I can’t quite see what was so incredibly 90s about the 90s just yet. I’m sure it will come.

I also can’t quite picture the music that will have to be critically re-appraised. The 90s was the era of Britpop, basically, but Britpop doesn’t really sound either laughably old-fashioned or woefully misguided to my ears. Sure, there were shit bands, but the movement itself doesn’t make me cringe enough to be the pre-cursor to a good ironic reinvention. Maybe this will come with time.

Still, I may not be able to imagine quite what music the 90s revival will seize upon and drag back up to the peak of Mount Revisionism just yet. I can’t picture quite what that smug prick of a hipster will put on the stereo with an unbearable look of arch irony and condescending, self-satisfied superiority while all his friends gape in awe at his audacity. ‘Oh my god, dude, that’s like so nineties.’ Mind you, perhaps not. Because things being ‘like so‘ anything is just like so nineties to begin with.

Anyway, I remember making a tape once which I called Learn to Bop With the Brits, which was basically a 90s Revival tape made in about 1998. It had some Wonderstuff, some Inspiral Carpets, a bit of Morrissey, some Echobelly, a bit of James and god knows what else on it. The tape itself is long gone, and I barely remember what was on the thing, but it wouldn’t make a bad starting point for that 90s revival that we’re presumably all going to succumb to in the next four or five years.

Inspiral Carpets – Saturn V
James – Sound
Belly – Untitled & Unsung
Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Morrissey – Seasick, Yet Still Docked