Volume 13 Side 3 - Pixies, Spitfire, Babes In Toyland, Smashing Pumpkins, Pooh Sticks

1. Pixies - Planet of Sound (4AD)

Pixies drummer Dave Lovering has been known to perform occasional magic shows at rock festivals and other events - though I must admit that I haven't been following his solo career closely enough to get a keen grip on where most of his bookings come from. (Well look, you don't expect me to research absolutely everything, do you?)

He performed his magic show at an early All Tomorrow's Parties festival once, and a friend of mine approached him to ask when he began this rather unusual performing sideline. His reply was simply: "When my band started making shit records".
"Ah! Trompe Le Monde!" replied my friend, but didn't get another answer.

"Trompe Le Monde" is the Pixies LP which tends to get the most stick. Is it a bad album overall? Not really. There are some solid moments there, and it's by no means an out-and-out failure. Is it a bad LP by Pixies standards? Unquestionably, yes. It was an unfortunate situation for the band. They had been an overwhelming inspiration for the biggest emerging names of 1991, not least Nirvana, and yet they chose this precise period to lose many of the touches that made the so unusual and appealing. Instead of getting some kind of payback for their groundwork, they received critical brickbats.

"Planet Of Sound" was the first single off the album, and in typical form for this time, it's a hollering beast of a brief record which is all sound and fury and not particularly eccentric. The angular riffs are gone, and the rock and roll noise pollution dominates completely. On the first few listens, that was enough to make "Planet Of Sound" seem impressive - it's a spray of cold water and a slap to the face, a song which is so damn loud and aggressive across its two minutes that initially you can't tear yourself away. Unlike "Debaser", though, it stands up to fewer repeat plays, because while that track had fascinating riffs and intricate little diversions, there's not much else going on with "Planet of Sound". It is what it is. It's one big Frank Black dominated howl.

The end of the band was nigh, and Frank Black would drift off to a solo career while Kim Deal made The Breeders a full-time concern, but it's not for no reason that most of the band's LPs are still raved about and played fanatically to this day. "Trompe Le Monde" was just an unfortunately sloppy kiss goodbye.

As for the music they've made since reforming, it is in my opinion better than "Trompe Le Monde" but not as good as their earliest work, but some of it is still pretty damn compelling - but that's all way outside the timeline we're talking about on this blog.



2. Spitfire - Superbaby (Eve)

Spitfire were a curious group who never seemed to achieve a real breakthrough moment, but always seemed to be with us throughout the nineties. Eventually deemed to be part of the NME's "New Wave of New Wave" movement alongside the likes of S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men in 1994, when that collapsed and most of the other groups either died off or were subsumed into Britpop, Spitfire continued their own path despite widespread indifference. And I do mean indifference - they performed a gig at my University in the mid-nineties and lost the audience who began to talk among themselves, which caused the lead singer Jeff Pitcher to tell us we were "all a bunch of cunts!" Clearly he forgot the cardinal rule that you should never berate an audience who are otherwise busy ignoring you.

Spitfire were also slightly unfortunate with their drummers, losing one talented member, Justin Welch, to a fledgling Elastica.

Really though, Spitfire sat awkwardly in any period of the decade, sounding like a snarling, bluesy garage rock band rather than chirpy Britpoppers or sharp New Wave revivalists. "Superbaby" proves this, bringing particularly 1969 sounding guitar licks against clattering basslines and vocals dripping with attitude. Like the sound of mod-rock just as mods grew out their fringes and got interested in Led Zeppelin and the blues, it's got a drive and energy that can be very enticing if you're in the right mood, but wasn't really what the kids of 1991, or 1994 or 1995 were really looking for. They would have been better off emerging around the point of the New Rock Revolution in the noughties, at which point they could have cleaned up. Timing is everything, kids.



3. Babes In Toyland - Handsome & Gretel (Insipid)

Courtney Love has made much of the fact that while she has become a mainstream media figure, Babes In Toyland lead singer Kat Bjelland ("who was my main rival!") has largely returned to the underground. Love has generally tried to paint this situation as an unjust one she feels slightly concerned about, but in reality, I suspect there's a feeling of smug triumph behind it too. After all, back in the day the pair really weren't terribly keen on each other.

So much was this the case that there were continual media rumours that "Handsome and Gretel" was in some way about Courtney. And was it? Well, it's very difficult to tell. It's filled with very explicit insults, such as "My name is Gretel, yeah/ I've got a crotch that talks/ It talks to all the cocks", but they could be about anyone. No clues are offered. It's teenage schoolyard level fury, a stabbing finger pointing in the direction of a hated female figure, and it's utterly impossible to clearly identify who that is. It's snotty and brattish stuff.

With its stabbing bass lines and cackling laughter, it's a two minute taunt, an onslaught. I listened to it a lot at the time, but now it strikes me as the kind of thing that seems fascinating, threatening and foreboding when you're a teenager, not so much when you're a grown adult - that or the sheer shock of it has a very limited impact. No question that Babes In Toyland were hugely influential and deserve some kind of payback, though. The inspiration they gave the Riot Grrrl movement alone can't be understated.



4. Smashing Pumpkins - Siva (Hut)

Now I'm in trouble. The simple truth is, I generally can't abide Smashing Pumpkins, from their pretentious pseudo-profound lyrics to their Classic Rock leanings. They always seemed like a rather worthy and dull mainstream Rock group who had somehow entered the playlists of alternative club DJs and alternative radio stations by stealth. I also briefly shared a flat with someone who was obsessed with the group, meaning that I heard Billy Corgan screaming "THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE!" from a bedroom stereo most mornings and evenings - there's nothing like being forced to listen to a group you don't like much to really breed contempt for their work where shrugging indifference might otherwise have existed. (In fact, even if something is clearly amazing work, over-exposure can lead to boredom - for similar reasons in completely different accommodation sharing with another obsessive, it was years before I could ever listen to Jimi Hendrix again).

But I'm undermining the group more than a bit by failing to acknowledge that, compared to many grunge acts of the era, they did possess quite a varied spread of influences, taking in shades of goth rock, industrial, and blues into the mix. While a lot of the other big names of the period practiced sincerity and "Keep Music Live" styled prissy purity, the Pumpkins did at least benefit from Corgan's varied listening tastes.

Not that you'd know any of this from "Siva". It's mostly a heavy blues-rock grind, broken only by the tinkling gentleness of its middle section, which brings a few unexpected twee moments to an otherwise prowling monster of a track. It's not much, but it's an early indication that Smashing Pumpkins were slightly different from their peers.

These days, of course, Billy Corgan has been one of the few rock stars to speak out vocally in favour of Donald Trump, adding "Social Justice Warriors are like the KKK" and talking about "Fake News". I always knew there was something wrong with that boy.



5. The Pooh Sticks - Young People (Cheree)

Swansea's Pooh Sticks were so C86 it almost hurt in the mid-eighties, and in fact they were usually almost certainly taking the piss. With tracks like "I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well", they were almost a cheeky parodical take on the British underground.

By 1991, however, they had moved their attention to powerpop, and seemed to be approaching it from an equally affectionate and light-hearted angle. "Young People" takes the endearing cuteness of their sound and tacks it on to super-sugary rock and roll, creating a noise somewhere between The Archies and Cheap Trick, never quite tilting the balance in favour of one extreme or the other. They don't sound completely comfortable in their new environment - some of the vocals in particular still have a very indiefied tortured yelp to them, rather than a rock swagger - but that somehow adds to the overall effect.

It's this period of their career, rather than their earlier twee work, which lead them to cult success, and while I don't pick it up to listen to it very often, it's always a charming burst of sunshine when I do. It's sweet and almost over-reaching bedroom mirror rock and roll, something the early nineties was sorely lacking in and indeed, we're little better off in that respect today.

Volume Eleven Side Four - Front 242, Boo Radleys, Bleach, Buffalo Tom, Pixies

1. Front 242 - Tragedy >For You< (RRE)

"Front 242 -Satisfying feelings and imagination, superseding the unity of body and mind. The single 'Tragedy >For You<' announced the release of the album 'Tyranny >For You<'".

Ooh, they're a bit riled. Front 242 make their first appearance on "Indie Top 20" since Volume Seven with a piece of dystopian industrialism that sounds like someone's kicked over a hive filled with battery-operated robot bees. Whatever they are. Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, Front 242 possess an ability to sugar the pill with various melodic fanfares and flourishes, each one sounding more welcome than the last. The track judders to a broken halt on one of them at the tail end, perhaps trying to prove to us that the ugliness will always win out.

"Tragedy >For You<" (and I quite like the over-emphasis on who the tragedy is being aimed it there) does get a tad silly in places, though, with lines like "I still feel disemboweled" and "The sore in my soul/ the mark in my heart/ her acid reign", even if the latter does sound as if it could have been adopted and used within a different context by Brett Anderson a couple of years down the line. Subtlety was not Front 242's strong suit, and in the end you can only enjoy this for what it is - a ferocious and threatening bit of electronic noise. It's really not everyone's bag, but whenever I revisit their work I always find myself enjoying it more than I thought I would.



2. The Boo Radleys - Kaleidoscope (Rough Trade)

"In fact 'Kaleidoscope', 'Aldous' and 'Swansong' are as crucial as anything made in the name of noise and beauty over the last two years" - Paul Lester - Melody Maker.

There's been a slightly unusual approach taken to The Boo Radleys back catalogue over the last fifteen or so years, which seems to take the view that anything they released before "Giant Steps" should be avoided as amateur adolescent doodlings. The band may have been largely to blame for this, making unflattering comparisons to their early work, but the music press didn't help matters much either. For a brief period, the NME mockingly dubbed them the "Do Badlys" on account of their limited commercial appeal and also the fact that they were the low budget also-rans of the shoegazing scene.

One listen to "Kaleidoscope", however, will prove to you that whatever goodness was apparent on "Giant Steps" had almost flowered during their Rough Trade years. Beneath the downright messy production here lies a sweet and seductive melody, growling guitars with beautiful riffs intertwining with each other, and a low budget psychedelic soup of swirling prettiness. It's easy to overlook this and "Everybird" while sifting through their canon, but both tracks could, with a few production tweaks, have equally happily sat on "Giant Steps" without anyone batting an eyelid.

This is their first appearance on the "Indie Top 20" series, and their peculiar career path also makes them the first Britpop band to appear on one of these compilations - although at this point, the noise they were making was such a far cry from the singles they put out in 1995 that it's safe to argue that this isn't the first appearance of any kind of Britpop "sound".



3. Bleach - Decadence (Way Cool) - Vinyl and cassette only

"...makes me think of jets streaming their way through clouds of white and grey, and of guitars imploding under their own power" - Everett True - Melody Maker. 

Far more than The Boo Radleys, Ipswich's Bleach were considered a proper, serious shoegazing proposition, a band who were likely to pick themselves up from the pub circuit to make all sorts of interesting unimaginable transcendent noises. Everett True faithfully sums up some of the early press gushings in his quote above. It really didn't work out as everyone expected. The band made all sorts of rum decisions such as rapping over shoegazing noises on "Shotgun", or splitting their 1992 album recording sessions into two LPs, "Hard" and "Fast", and while they were uncompromising, they were also quite a bit flawed. The Boo Radleys would develop and grow and experiment to a generally positive effect, whereas Bleach didn't really push the envelope so much as playfully doodle a bit around its edges.

Unlike a lot of the bands making similar noises at the time, Bleach did have a charismatic lead singer in Salli Carson, though, whose moody gaze peered from many a provincial gig venue's stage, making the group seem a bit more dark and mysterious than I suspect they really were.

As for "Decadence", I'm afraid I don't really get it. Under-produced, underpowered, immensely repetitious and held together by an unshifting and simplistic rhythm at its foundations, it really is a bit dull. They would go on to release better work, but from this, it's really hard to hear what all the early fuss was about.



4. Buffalo Tom - Birdbrain (Situation Two)

"...smears your ears and leaves your nose runny. A big cacophony with a buried melody and bountiful beat - delightful!" - Liz Evans, Raw. 

"Birdbrain" introduces itself with a bruising, almost glam rock, riff before the vocals bark in demandingly. If you thought they might be throwing away their strongest cards before the song really gets going, however, it carries on its goodness from there forth, holding its nerve and occasionally sticking its head into sunshine streaked melodies in the chorus.

Buffalo Tom were an odd group whose initial appeal appeared to lie in their associations with Dinosaur Jr and the American underground rock scene, but actually had some very trad rock ideas at their heart. While "Birdbrain" gnashes and grinds away, future singles such as "Tailights Fade" were seeped in an almost Springsteen-esque American melodrama, and it was this - rather than their slightly grungey leanings - which assured them a strong cult fanbase from 1990 until close to the end of the decade.

They even managed a top ten hit in the UK by default in 1999, with their unconventional cover of The Jam's "Going Underground", though it wouldn't be unfair to say that this almost certainly would have been lucky to climb so high had it not shared vinyl space alongside a Liam Gallagher cover of "Carnations" as well.



5. Pixies - Dig For Fire (4AD)

"Remixed from the LP 'Bossanova'"

While we're on the subject, while we know and love Pixies for their own particularly sharp-toothed barks of surrealism, they too occasionally showed a conventional edge. On "Doolittle" this was showcased by the almost Monkees-esque Saturday afternoon cheer of "Here Comes Your Man" - the track that got your parent's ears pricking upwards and saying "Ooh, who're these? They're good!" On "Bossanova" "Dig For Fire" takes a similar pop-rock tack, this time seeming like some kind of seventies Top 20 anthem. In fact, while I frequently struggle to get fans of the group to agree with me on this point, elements of the guitar runs veer close to the "If we ever get out of here" element of Wings "Band On The Run", something that was apparent to me on the very first listen and I've never been able to shift from my brain since.

"Dig For Fire" proved that Frank Black was actually a damn good songsmith, not just someone who could make a bloody fine and occasionally peculiar noise. It's a rollicking good listen, but unfortunately the stadium chant nature of the chorus causes its obvious charms - and it has many, including those chiming guitar lines and stomping rhythms - to wane more quickly than they would on most Pixies tracks. This is something I played to death in 1990, then didn't return to very often subsequently. Still, the thrills are there to be had for a while.

Volume 10 Side 4 - Pixies, Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes, Teenage Fanclub, Telescopes, Carter USM

1. Pixies - Velouria (4AD)

"...is taken from Pixies fourth LP 'Bossanova'".

"Velouria" is a strange one, by general standards at least. It comes crashing through your stereo speakers like an epic rock tune at first, scaling a mountain-face like David Lee Roth at his keenest, but constantly gets distracted on its way. It seems to be constantly building towards some grand anthemic chorus, only to deliver Frank Black's barked shout of "Velouria! My Velouria!" It beckons you forward with one hand, then pushes you away with the other.

It's still a strangely beautiful record, though, from those scaling, powerful verses right down to the Kim Deal vocalised outro. It's slightly unpredictable form also creates something a damn sight more interesting than your bog-standard piece of FM rock, twisting and turning around to ensure there's more to draw you back than the obvious initial hooks. Truly horrible and pointless video, though, which looks more like a "Chart Show" home-brew effort than an official product.

This was the group's first Top 40 hit in the UK, peaking at number 28.



2. Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes - Grand Hotel (Avalanche) - Vinyl and Cassette Only

"Shine on Patrick Magee, shine on! Ceadh mile failte."

Mmm. As a teenager, I found the references to the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in this song exhilarating and hilarious, and considered it a true piece of punk rock. Now it feels uncomfortable - a key indication, if any were needed, that we get less flippant about these artistic gestures as we get older. Also, it perhaps shows how politically divided Britain was in 1990, with bilious and murderous hatred being targeted at those who weren't on the correct side of the left-right divide from a variety of sources, and never mind anyone else who might happen to be caught in the firing line. Ladies and Gentlemen, those were the days, and we're set to recreate those days...

Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes were actually old-school Scottish indie-poppers from the mid-eighties who seemed rumly out of place with the rest of Volume Ten's offerings. That said, "Grand Hotel" sits neatly enough next to "Velouria" with its abrasive sound and angelic female backing vocals. It's also a total headrush of a track, scruffy and scuzzed up but ferocious and full-on - an innocent slice of C86 this isn't, obviously.

It was also an unusual Indie Top 20 track in that it wasn't a big seller at the time, even in indie terms, and one EP later (the "Hold Me Now" extended play issued in November 1990) and the group would be no more. Its appearance on this compilation was the first time I was ever made aware of it. Even the Daily Mail's feathers clearly weren't ruffled by its existence, and it seemed to slip under a lot of people's radars. The eighties had been filled to the brim with furious, stabbing and occasionally controversial left-wing records or even anarcho-punk records - the steady flow would continue into the nineties until John Major's government was at its absolute weakest, but interest post-Thatcher began to deplete quite rapidly. The Family Cat's B-side "Bring Me The Head Of Michael Portillo" is the most recent example I can think of, but there may be others which you good readers can think of...



3. Teenage Fanclub - Everything Flows (Paperhouse)

"Teenage Fanclub are going to be as big as The Ronettes hairdos, the Beaverbrook Foundation and Van Gogh's sunflowers".

And the Scottish fuzziness and scuzziness continues. "Everything Flows" is a ballad hiding under a fog of grungey guitars. It's melancholy, snail-paced and yet slightly noisy too. Lyrically it's confused and vague - "I think about it every day/ but only for a little while/ and then the FEELING" sings Norman Blake. Enough said, obviously.

"Everything Flows" feels like waking up in the middle of the night from a dream about an ex, alone, and with a sleep-fogged brain, knowing that your past decisions perhaps weren't the wisest, and not certain that you're any more sure-footed in the present day. It ends with distorted guitars swimming all around the mix, never once picking up the pace or offering a clear resolution. It's beautiful in a horribly disconcerting way. Perhaps unsuprisingly, it was wildly popular with John Peel listeners and did indeed do a lot to launch Teenage Fanclub outside of their existing cult following.



4. The Telescopes - Precious Little (Creation) - Vinyl and Cassette Only 

"Obsession always was one of the most terrifying of human emotions. It's when the noise stops that you silently start to scream." - Melody Maker

We're on side four of Volume Ten of "Indie Top 20", and is that... can that... can that really be a contribution from Creation Records? Well, switch my knickers! Apart from contributing the video to Tangerine's "Sunburst" to one of the Indie Top Videos, they had avoided the series like the plague until now for reasons known only to Alan McGee.

Of course, "Precious Little" is a piece of distorted, sinister and not entirely reassuring noise about love, or perhaps as the Melody Maker scribe pointed out, obsession. Had it been written for my benefit, I think I would have been a bit worried. You could quite easily give the lyrics and the melody to a twee girl with an ukulele in the present day (note to anyone reading - please don't do this) - it certainly starts appropriately enough with "Precious little look outside the sea crashes for you" - but The Telescopes, being The Telescopes, ramp up the volume and turn it into a threatening, obsessive attack, not a simple love song.

It's not their finest single, in truth, but it's certainly never short of being interesting. Stick it on in the company of friends, and witness the silence afterwards.



5. Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine - Rent (Big Cat)

"I've been waiting half of the twentieth century for my housing benefit so that I can pay my rent, I am pissed off" - Fruitbat.
"I like the Pet Shop Boys and I'm more than happy to make them a little bit of cash to help them out, stuff the Poll Tax" - Jim Bob.

The second cover version on Volume Ten takes the same approach of taking the basic template of the original but completely transforming it. Or, if your views of this are unfavourable, it might feel actually as if Carter simply scrawled childishly and furiously all over the Pet Shop Boys original melody with a variety of Crayola crayons.

Obviously, The Pet Shop Boys version of "Rent" was largely deemed to be about male prostitution (subsequently denied by Neil Tennant in recent years) something I doubt either Jim Bob or Fruitbat would have been terribly successful at. Perhaps because of that, rather than due to a deliberate misunderstanding, they seem to have made it about paying the rent in general and turning into a screaming punk assault. It starts calmly enough with a gentle (if cheap) synthesiser pulse, then slowly begins to rumble like a volcano before exploding into a disconnected, screaming rant about the contents of DSS forms.

An unpopular view started to form approximately around this time that Carter were like a rather punkish take on very late Pink Floyd - and when I say "late Pink Floyd", I very much mean the Roger Waters dictatorship years. Initially that might sound ridiculous, until you surf away and listen to "Not Now John" and hear similar spittle, samples, swearing, despair and melancholy rolled into one ball, just with much more careful production values (and classier backing vocals and more saxophones). Even the epic war ballads on "The Final Cut" with their tinkling pianos bore vague similarities to the likes of Carter's take on "The Impossible Dream". Whatever your general view, "Rent" here sounds truly hilarious at first, then weirdly gripping thereafter. It's a marvellous tantrum of a cover.

It was the flipside to their single "Rubbish" rather than an A-side, obviously, so its inclusion here is a bit strange. Clearly either the band or Beechwood Music deemed it more worthy, but I'm glad I got to hear it when I did.

Indie Top 20 Volume 7 Side One - Pixies, Stone Roses, They Might Be Giants, Wire, Throwing Muses

Format: Double LP/ Cassette/ CD
Year of Release: 1989

If Volume 6 seemed scattershot and chaotic in its all-encompassing journey through indieland, Volume 7 doesn't really do much to restore order - but then again, why should it? The notion that the Indie Charts had predominant trends at certain times in its lifespan is true, but the shoegazing moment had its crusty scene running alongside it, the Britpop movement its Trip Hop, and the baggy/ Madchester movement had grunge alongside it (or at least the most successful howls of American alternative rock and punk as it bled straight into grunge).

There's a dominant myth that's been doing the rounds for decades now that Grunge emerged out of the shadows like some kind of murderer in the night and killed off the indie-dance heroes in British society. It's a myth I've probably privately contributed to many conversations myself, purely because it's such a convenient narrative. In reality, the late eighties and early nineties were an incredibly tolerant, diverse time for music, a time when you could go to your local alternative nightclub, sip on an overpriced pint of something truly objectionable, and listen to artists as diverse as The Stone Roses, Sly and the Family Stone, The Aphex Twin and Mudhoney. I should know, because I was there. It's only really when The Stone Roses went on a long, extended hiatus and The Happy Mondays lost the plot that things changed and the focus narrowed. Nirvana hitting the British music scene like a plaid rucksack filled with bricks at a time when not much else was going on inevitably had a significant impact.

But that's for us to think about later. For now, we're about to enter one of the most diverse, fascinating and occasionally perplexing eras in British alternative music. A time when anything went, but also indie music started to sell in quantities high enough for there to begin to be a noticeable mainstream impact. The videos got slicker, the production got better, the marketing more advanced... and far be it for me to court controversy by suggesting that the monstrous sales of Dance twelve inch singles and Stock Aitken and Waterman records may have given distributors a shot in the arm, it probably is the truth.

1. Pixies - Monkey Gone To Heaven (4AD)

"What more can be said about the Pixies". 

A highly apt liner note that remains a good point to this day.

With a mighty crash of five opening notes, "Monkey Gone To Heaven" heralds the moment when Pixies became a huge deal in the UK. The year before, "Gigantic" had been a massive track in the alternative clubs and even reached Number 90 in the national charts, but "Monkey" was truly inescapable in certain circles. The gloomy black and white promo video dominated the Chart Show indie chart for months, and Frank Black's world finally met with the public at large... a world of UFOs, surfing, Christianity, South America, and whatever else his brain was hoovering up at any given time.

"Monkey Gone To Heaven" still sounds extraordinary, and it remains perplexing that Ivo Watts nearly  turned the band down for being "too normal". Compared to many 4AD signings they may have admittedly been less ethereal or atmospheric, but where the very worst of those acts sounded little better than Clannad fans performing in a backyard shed, Pixies took rock and roll to some unpredictable places. While "Monkey Gone To Heaven" is supposed to be an environmental protest song (with various chunks of religious imagery seeping in along the way) the lyrics are so stripped back and scattershot that it could be dismissed as nonsense. Yet when Frank Black brilliantly howls "If the devil is six... then GOD IS SEVEN!" it could also be taken straight from a Black Sabbath LP, so trad is the idea.

Pixies ripped, clawed and tore at the fabric of rock music and the culture that surrounded them, and sounded so fresh and yet so familiar when they arrived that it was powerful beyond measure, like Proper Rock music distorted through exhausted dream sleep. Their blend of cultural influences and references could have turned out naive and messy, but there's a masterful control taking place in their work at an enviably early point. While we may have casually regarded them as American eccentrics at the time, their approach slowly became absorbed by other more successful acts from their home country... not least the quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic being applied to the verse/chorus structure, and the belief that early seventies hard rock wasn't an embarrassing corner of music history to be pilfering from.

And let's not ignore the fact that Kim Deal's basslines, which always sound as if they're being played with the thickest plectrum in the world, also added a huge amount to their sound.



2. The Stone Roses - Made Of Stone (Silvertone)

"Let's call them The Stones - no-one will get confused" - Sounds - 15th July 1989

It's very, very telling that the liner notes for both Pixies and The Stone Roses are tremendously half-arsed, almost as if everyone involved knew there was no point in expanding on the pre-existing narrative.

But let's not get too carried away here. That liner note may conveniently fit the idea that The Stone Roses were universally adored from the moment "Sally Cinnamon" first fell into the world, but it's not how I remember things at all. Rather, it seemed suspiciously as if the comparison the Sounds journalist was making to The Rolling Stones had been taken out of jokey context to prove a point the band wanted to make.

The simple truth is that while The Stone Roses and their manager Gareth Evans were keen to tell anyone that they were the most important group in Britain (if not the world) surprisingly few people believed them initially. Record Mirror ridiculed the entire situation by referring to their much-reported Manchester gig attendance figures and stating "Manchester City get more people in, and we're not putting them on our front cover either". The NME gave the debut LP 7 out of 10 and almost (but not quite) dismissed it as a nice enough psychedelic pop pastiche. Much history has been rewritten around The Stone Roses since because music journalists were caught with their trousers down - many still had all their money riding on The House of Love as being alternative rock's next big dominant force. The Roses seemed like a parochial, retro irrelevance, and who needed John Squire as a guitar hero when you could have Terry Bickers? (Though to be fair, both can be astonishing guitarists in very different ways).

That's not to say that "Made Of Stone" wasn't viewed as an exceptionally good single by most, but perhaps it's not really been given enough credit even since for its relative richness and complexity. Starting with a truly beautiful interwoven guitar and bass line, Ian Brown's hushed vocals then enter and begin singing what appears to be a surreal, lyrically drifting ballad about the righteous death of a wealthy scoundrel.

I'm possibly stretching comparisons to breaking point by saying this, but if you spin back to Volume Four of "Indie Top 20" and listen to Wire's "Kidney Bingos", there are clear and unacknowledged parallels in the approach, from the delicate prettiness of the interwoven guitar and basslines to the soft, surreal and yet actually very political lyrics, followed by a unifying anthemic chorus. The over-arching concept of The Stone Roses debut album was the 1968 French student riots, from the sleeve right through to many of the contents, seemingly wishing that similar values would transport themselves into a Thatcherite 1989. Wire's "A Bell is A Cup Until It Is Struck" was similarly very agitated and dystopian in a similarly blissed and calm way. It's highly doubtful the two bands ever even listened to each other, much less took influence from each other, but the fact that parallels can be drawn gives a significant hint towards the dominant mood of the times. The Poll Tax riots were just around the corner, ecstasy was everywhere, and among the youth of the country there was a significant kickback, a sense once again that the times could be changed and certain forces could be overthrown.

Of course, The Stone Roses may have been lyrically oblique, but they were still less lyrically baffling than Wire. Even with one listen of "Made Of Stone", it's possible to hear that it's clearly a song with a revolutionary darkness at its heart. "I'm standing warm against the cold/ now that the flames have taken hold/ at least you left your life in style" brings to mind a Porsche in flames in a riot-strewn Manchester street, and an unprivileged Ian Brown toasting marshmallows on the funeral pyre of a millionaire.

The chorus is so anthemic against this comparative menace that it did cause a few of the band's critics to take shot. John Peel sneered on his 1989 Festive Fifty countdown "Well, I can see that's got a certain sing-a-long factor..." Like many, he refused to do a u-turn on his original dismissive approach to the group, but I insist... they weren't just some kind of retro rock band.  They plucked a wide array of influences from the family tree of rock music before coming up with something engagingly different and relevant. They may have obtained the services of John Leckie as a producer for the album, knowing that his work on XTC's "Dukes of Stratosphear" was authentic psychedelic pop, but not a single track on "The Stone Roses" sounds exactly like an equivalent piece of 1967 era music.

Critics might argue, of course, that "Made Of Stone" does sound a bit like Primal Scream's "Velocity Girl", and I'll pass on discussing that one.

It's also tempting to pass on discussing the fact that the national chart peak of "Made Of Stone" on its first release was number 90. It hung around the indie top ten seemingly forever, of course, notching up a slow trickle of sales across the entire year, but the band were not big players in any sense. Time, a more sympathetic press, and the power of word of mouth would all work in their favour very, very soon, until the dam very suddenly broke.



3. They Might Be Giants - Ana Ng (One Little Indian)

"Ng is one of the most common Vietnamese names in the New York telephone directory - that's where the name came from. The song, however, is a love poem to an imaginary woman on the opposite side of the globe. It was the Number 1 college radio song in the USA; displacing U2. The video was a big MTV hit. The LP has sold over 200,000 copies in the US".

Clang, cla-clang, clang... ca clang clang, clang clang.... Ana Ng announces itself like a piece of music being played by a stammering robot trying to negotiate its way around an electric guitar. Of all the singles released by They Might Be Giants, it's probably one of the more accessible despite its quirkiness, taking a fairly complex lyrical conceit and peppering it with some very sharp, emotionally resonant observations, with lines like "I don't want the world - I just want your half" punctuating the clever-dickery of the "everything sticks like a broken record" gag.

There's an overwhelming sense that the single isn't as smart as it wants to be, though, and the band spend more time on attempted profundities than they do on the arrangement. By the time the track is due to close, the constant, nagging repetition of the chorus sounds uncomfortably like an idea without a firm conclusion.



4. Wire - Eardrum Buzz (Mute)

"Wire are criminally undersung - Eardrum Buzz is another of Wire's Hole-In-One, Inch-Perfect singles. A product of sheer draughtsmanship in the tradition of "Dot Dash", "I Am The Fly" and "Map Reference". If Wire weren't so good at this, they might have had a hit by now. But no matter". - Melody Maker

And if "Eardrum Buzz" couldn't become a hit single, you had to wonder what on earth Wire could produce that would be. Of course, it wasn't.

Alongside "Outdoor Miner", it represented the closest they came in their careers, though. Enjoying television and radio airtime, "Eardrum Buzz" was essentially jagged but excessively catchy synth-pop styled through the band's well-developed art-punk approach. Much more unashamedly Pop than anything they had issued prior to this point, it's polished and scrubbed within an inch of its life.

"Eardrum Buzz" is the Wire single a lot of Wire fans pretend to dislike or disapprove of. Subtlety isn't its strong suit. Rather than gently weaving its way into your brain, it approaches with a sledgehammer and demands squatter's rights. The lyrics are also almost sub-sixties psychedelia in their infantilism, with the chorus of "Zee zee zee zum zum/ buzz buzz buzz in the eardrum" dropping things down to almost "Fee fi fo fum" levels.

For all that, however, it's a burst of sunshine and a total joy. Had it been a huge hit, its ubiquity may have become trying; on the cultish lower-reaches-of-the-Top-75 status it managed, however, it's a private pleasure and nothing at all like a guilty one. And hey, it was still a bigger hit than The Stone Roses "Made Of Stone"...



5. Throwing Muses - Dizzy (4AD)

"Dizzy was released as a double A side single along with "Santa Claus" in March 1989. It is also to be found on the group's third full-length album Hunkpapa".

When we last encountered Throwing Muses on Volume Three, the noise was akin to an antagonised, hysterical racket in a rural henhouse. By comparison, "Dizzy" was a shock, another song from an unlikely source that sounded like it wanted to be a hit. While the verses combine flashes of poetic travelling imagery and almost crash into chaos, the chorus is pure late sixties/ early seventies Americana pop. It's hardly Lobo's "Me And You And A Dog Named Boo" - in fact, it may still be millions of miles away from that - but it's not impossible to reimagine "Dizzy" as a huge, overproduced stadium hit from another era.

It still remains one of the key tracks people most readily associate with Throwing Muses to this day, and while it may have just dropped short of getting mainstream attention, there's no reason why it shouldn't have achieved it.