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.

Volume Ten Side 3 - Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, The Darkside, Spiritualized, Family Cat

1. Inspiral Carpets - She Comes In The Fall (Mute)

"This is moody and miraculous with a lovely walking on air melody, but then the organ farts in again and firmly stops them becoming stellar".

I first heard "She Comes The Fall" in its Peel Session guise, and loved it - in typical Inspirals fashion, it was a stirling piece of garage pop, but this time with added flourishes. Barging its way into your mind with almost aggressive verses while the chorus turned you over and rubbed your belly with its sweetness, it also added marching military drumbeats and carefully plucked guitar lines to its arsenal.

The "Life" LP version later on wasn't much different. A bit beefed up, maybe, but pleasing and one of the highlights of a now frequently ignored piece of work.

Then this, the single version, was... well, it was as if the band had travelled back in time, gone to the Sound Techniques studio with Joe Boyd, and played with all the toys in there one merry afternoon. That should make the 7" version an absolute triumph, but oddly it sounds gimmicky and distracting instead. It swirls, honks, echoes and whooshes all over the shop while everyone gets over-excited pressing the "special buttons" in the studio, and it ends up smacking of a poor sixties parody rather than a carefully executed radio edit. It places almost alarming attacks of psychedelia where they feel uncomfortable; those howling electronic sirens during the instrumental break, for example, almost utterly ruin a top drawer Clint Boon performance.

None of this silliness can completely murder the song, of course, which remains strong enough to withstand the assault, but I'll still always reach for the LP version over this.



2. The Charlatans - The Only One I Know (Dead Dead Good)

"The Only One I Know, a track blessed with wah-wah guitar and a hammond organ swirling around a pure hypnotic groove" - Sounds.

"The Only One I Know" was a shock. Firstly, to anyone who hadn't been following The Charlatans closely at this point, which I must guiltily confess I hadn't, something as brightly poppy as this didn't seem possible. "Indian Rope" was slightly psychedelic and meandering, not catchy, bouncy and bouyant.

Secondly, even after I heard it, my first appreciative thought was "That might even get into the Top 40 if it's lucky". The fact that the single then soared into the top ten and could even be caught being used as backing music on keep fit programmes was above and beyond my expectations. It briefly made The Charlatans seem like a serious threat to the Mondays and the Roses - if they could keep this sort of jolly rhumba racket going, who knew what else would be in store?

"The Only One I Know" is so much a part of alternative rock's heritage now that it's actually difficult to take any number of steps back and look at it afresh. The first time I heard it, I adored the bittersweet chorus and those swooping, high basslines, but over the course of thirty or forty listens found myself ground down by one of the main hooks, the repetitive squawking keyboard line, which follows you around throughout like a flock of nagging geese. Like a lot of hook-heavy pop, its instant appeal does eventually become a mild irritant.

For all that, though, I've never once found myself needing to turn the radio off or leave the dancefloor for the bar when it comes on. Two singles in, The Charlatans had managed to pull the enviable (and certainly very profitable) trick of writing an ageless alternative pop tune. This is their "Reward", their "Echo Beach", or their "Birdhouse In Your Soul". It didn't necessarily typify their output, which as we'll see was actually rich and broad, but it did become a very powerful beacon to people who may never have otherwise got to hear the rest of their work - and they'd easily avoid becoming one-hit wonders.



3. The Darkside - Waiting For The Angels (Situation Two)

"an irresistable, etherial psychedelic pop song from the darkside, a trio from the centre of England".

Yet another group who splintered out of the dissolution of Spacemen 3, The Darkside were essentially the other members minus Peter Kember (who would create Spectrum) and Jason Pierce (Spiritualized). Perhaps somewhat inevitably, they were the least successful offshoot of them all, but that's not to say that they didn't create some music of note.

"Waiting For The Angels", for example, is dark, brooding, faintly psychedelic and - while not much of a single, if the truth be told - does slowly and lazily unveil a certain majesty across its playing time. There are mild similarities between this and The Charlatans' next single "Then", mainly around the mood and the bassline, which are surely just a vague coincidence.

The band managed two studio albums before giving up the ghost in 1993.



4. Spiritualized - Anyway That You Want Me (Dedicated) - Vinyl and Cassette Only (for some mad reason)

(no sleevenotes were provided for this track).

Talking of which... it's staggering the way ex-members of Spacemen 3 managed to colonise volumes of "Indie Top 20", and in this case, they're living right next door to each other.

In 1990, opening your new band's career with a cover version of a Troggs single was considered an incredibly suspect thing to do, whether the end result was any good or not. Nothing really says "Actually, we're a bit stuck for ideas" as much as a sixties cover. Jason Pierce seemed to have Brexited out of Spacemen 3 and now didn't have a clue what to do. And yet...

The original "Anyway That You Want Me", if you want to take the time out to listen to it, is a very spindly, pale, uncertain little fawn of a pop song, closer to The Velvet Underground at their most stumbling and unsure than a scaling psychedelic song. And Spiritualized took it and made it mighty, creating an ambitious cover akin to Nilsson's reinterpretation of Badfinger's slightly scrappy "Without You". Crashing, heavy-handed Troggs chords still form the foundations of the song, but surrounding them are a wealth of orchestral flourishes and wailing guitars - it's not a cover so much as a total reconstruction, and it's hard to imagine why anybody would prefer the original. If it can be criticised at all, it's for the overlong ending which tries to be agreeably hypnotic but just becomes blandly repetitious. The single wouldn't have lost much by having 30-45 seconds trimmed off it, and indeed at the time I often found myself skipping to the next track on this LP early.

Obviously, when it comes to Troggs ballads that needed a bit more work, Wet Wet Wet hit what some would call the "paydirt" with "Love Is All Around".



5. The Family Cat - A Place With A Name (Bad Girl)

"The Family Cat present, for your delectation and delight, their second single of 1990. So crank up the gramophone, roll back the carpet and get down to 'Place With A Name'".

"Listening to Leonard Cohen, though heaven knows why", begins this track, a viewpoint that sums up a common human dilemma. We depress ourselves with heavy folk singer-songwriter fare from the sixties when what we probably actually need is some Northern Soul.

"A Place With A Name" is a short, sharp, likeable piece of indie rock which failed to really present The Family Cat as much of a force for the future, but was a distinct improvement on the disappointment of "Remember What It Is That You Love". It lacks the scuffed up aggression of "Tom Verlaine" but replaces it with a lot of sweetness - the brightness was turned up on The Family Cat's world at this point, and that's a side of them that would make itself known on future singles too.

Volume 10 Side 2 - Flowered Up, Field Mice, Saint Etienne, Mock Turtles, Sp!n

1. Flowered Up - It's On (Heavenly) 

"Beds not boxes - don't forget kids, conservation is survival".

Storming seemingly out of nowhere, though actually emerging from Camden Town (and rather than being a band who were based there, they had proper backgrounds in Camden - blimey) Flowered Up were a press sensation in 1990. Even if every review had to mention the fact that they were "London's answer to The Happy Mondays", there was still nothing but admiration for their raw indie-dance sparkle. While baggy had been filled to the brim with comfortable middle-class bandwagon jumpers tacking funky rhythms on to their fey indie tunes, Flowered Up were the proper southern deal - rough round the edges, rebellious, a tad eccentric, and with some mightily good tunes too.

"It's On", their opening salvo, seemed a bit cursed, though. It's first taste of national mainstream television exposure was on the "ITV Chart Show", where a sound fault rendered Liam Maher's vocals largely inaudible. Then, in error, Heavenly Records sent the rather unvarnished demo version of the track to Beechwood for inclusion here. There was nothing wrong with it as such, but it wasn't as good as the finished single, and it certainly wasn't what we wanted or expected to hear. (I believe, but have no proof, that later pressings of Indie Top 20 Vol 10 might have corrected this error. Certainly, "The Best of Indie Top 20" used the right version).

In its true form, "It's On" was a hypnotic and powerful piece of dirty indie-funk, using panpipe sounds, harsh punk vocals and wailing guitars to unlikely combined effect. It's odd, complex enough and powerful enough that it still stands up now. In the video, their obligatory Bez-type character Barry Mooncult - a man who was a glazier before the band formed, and became a glazier again when they split up - grooves away with a giant flower around his bonce, in a manner that would become their visual trademark.

Feted as the next big thing, their debut LP possibly landed a bit too late to generate the impression it might have done had it been ready to go in 1990, but cult stardom was theirs for the taking. We'll meet them one more time, so our story doesn't quite finish here.



2. The Field Mice - Triangle (edit) (Sarah)

"Full length version appears on the 'Skywriting' mini-LP (Sarah 601)"

I seem to have vague recollections of bone-idle journalists declaring this to be a case of baggy bandwagon jumping from Sarah heroes The Field Mice, which of course was bollocks. For one thing, anyone who thought The Field Mice solely specialised in fey jangle-pop hadn't been paying proper attention. For another, "Triangle" has a woebegone electronic pulse to it which more closely resembles early New Order at their moodiest than, say, Flowered Up before them.

Filled with high-pitched Hooky basslines, electronic twitters and sweeping synth sounds, as well as faintly buried vocals, "Triangle" is a raw, mid-paced reflection on singledom which was never going to get many feet on the dancefloor. Piling and layering on different riffs and ideas across its hypnotic brand of budget electronica, this track is constantly evolving and never boring in the way a lot of this early nineties work often could be. Ideally, it also would have gained The Field Mice a bit more attention, but in the end it barely registered outside the usual audience who tended to hear their work. They seemed destined to become a quintessential cult indie act.



3. Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Heavenly)

"A Neil Young song lovingly reconstructed by two ardent fans from suburban London. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs claim to gain inspiration from 'Elvis Presley, our loving parents, and drugs". They are currently working on an album provisionally titled 'Foxbase Alpha" which is due in the New Year".

At this particular point in time, Saint Etienne were envisaged as being a group with no fixed lead singer - hence Moira Lambert acts as the vocalist for this track rather than Sarah Cracknell. Therefore, you could argue that this was a single issued before the proper "group" had completely formulated it's "line-up" (if such old-fashioned rock terminology could ever be easily applied to Saint Etienne).

Whatever the details, this is staggering - one of the few examples I can think of where a cover version  is so powerful that it becomes impossible to return to the original. Looped keyboard lines, a throbbing, prowling bassline and atmospheric washes meet Lambert's yearning vocals, and it sounds unbelievable that somebody didn't think of this years before. As a cover, this would have been equally effective as a disco track in the mid-70s or early eighties. In 1990, as indie-dance took a brief hold over everyone, it felt impossibly powerful, Young's angst being just as applicable to moody indie-kids with baggy clothes as it was to earnest hippies in 1970.

Somewhat surprisingly, it only got to number 95 in the National Top 100 on this release, and a slightly underwhelming number 39 on re-release. It did give Saint Etienne a flying start, however, and ensured they were watched closely by the press from this point forwards.

Note the appearance of the Tufnell Park "Go Home Bible Mike" graffiti in the video as well, which would later loan itself to the title of a Fatima Mansions album track.



4. Mock Turtles - Lay Me Down (Imaginary)

"The Mock Turtles are the best pop group in Britain" - John Harris - Sounds 4/8/90

If Manchester's Mock Turtles are remembered for much these days, it's writing "that song" "Can You Dig It" which was a number 18 hit in 1991 and featured heavily on Vodafone adverts in 2002. Oh, and for the fact that lead singer Martin Coogan is Steve Coogan's brother, and that the character of "Saxondale" is apparently partly based on him.

And if "Lay Me Down" is remembered for anything at all, or at least remembered by the dirtiest of pub quiz hosts who enjoy trick questions, it's for being the single that "Can You Dig It" originally nestled on the B-side of. Originally conceived as nothing more than a quickie number to occupy the empty space, and penned in a matter of moments, Coogan failed to see its potential, and certainly Beechwood Music missed a trick here by not giving it a track listing instead of "Lay Me Down" (they weren't always averse to including B-sides, as we'll see).

All this is deeply unfair on the A side, though, which may be more subtle than its more famous flipside, but is nonetheless a marvellous track. Another prowling bassline meets gorgeous atmospheric guitarwork and Coogan's hushed, delicate vocals to produce a piece of slick neo-psychedelia. It was clearly never going to sell tons of copies, but it's a beautiful wash of sound which many a 2016 neo-psych band would be delighted to write - it's also audible proof that the "atmospheric" work of the forthcoming shoegazing movement was present during the baggy period as well, and may even have done a lot to usher it in.

The Mock Turtles were yet another Manchester band who signed to a major label in 1991 who then seemingly didn't know quite what to do with them. Given the sizeable hit status of "Can You Dig It", you would expect that the label were given rock-solid foundations to build on, but the bouyant follow-up single "And Then She Smiles" fell outside the national top 40, and the LP "Two Sides" sank without trace. That, really, was that.



5. Sp!n - Scratches In The Sand (Foundation)

"A psychedelic cocktail of the sublime, beautiful, angry and sad, Sp!n, as the name suggests, create a deliriously exhilirating sound in hypnotic motion. They have been described as shameless pirates and freeloaders, 'purveyors of bliss-orientated pop' (Dave Simpson - Melody Maker) and of 'playing wildly electric, mesmerising pp that brooks no boundaries' (Stuart Maconie - NME)"

Though if you want aborted promise, this lot take the prize. Hyped as likely glory-boys, their careers spiralled out of control after this single was released when lead singer Lee Clark handed in his letter of resignation, unhappy with the record company's handling of their work. A mere day after that, the group were involved in a road crash which sent bass player John Mason into an eleven day coma. All the press superlatives were washed away in the wake of the chaos and they rapidly became forgotten men.

"Scratches In The Sand" actually sounds very ahead of its time now, and while some feeble attempts were made in 1990 to categorise them as "baggy", it's a much harder, more brittle and downright less funky proposition than that. T Rex styled elements burst through (the "Do you want me like a lover?" lines sound utterly glam) and the whole thing simmers with attitude. With this, you could possibly argue that Britpop landed four years too early.

That's not as daft as it sounds, either. Members Steve Mason and Matt James would later pick themselves up and dust themselves down and recruit Martin Rossiter as their next lead vocalist, and begin a new band called Gene together. More on that lot much, much later - but while Rossiter brought thoughtful and considered lyricism and emotive vocal stylings (and not to mention some success) to the mix, I can't help but wonder what Sp!n might have become under the right circumstances. There's an abrupt rudeness to "Scratches In The Sand" that points towards something very different and potentially thrilling not far down the road.

Indie Top 20 Vol 10 - Side One - The Farm, The Shamen, Paris Angels, KLF, Renegade Soundwave

Year of Release: 1990
Formats: Double Vinyl/ Long Play Cassette/ CD

The trials and tribulations of Beechwood Music continued unabated throughout 1990. The launch of Volume 9 of the Indie Top 20 series had, as we've discussed before, been disrupted by distribution issues. And the launch of Volume 10 saw an unexpected rival emerge in the form of the as-seen-on-TV mass-marketed compilation experts Telstar Records. They rushed out the freaky-dancing flavoured LP "Rave" at almost exactly the same time as "Indie Top 20 Volume 10", and was there a lot of crossover between the two tracklistings? Why yes, there was.

In direct response, a peculiar act of sabotage happened at Telstar's headquarters. Staff emerged one morning to find that their office had been plunged into semi-darkness by the appearance of fly-posters for "Indie Top 20 Volume 10" glued all over the windows. Beechwood Music denied responsibility and put the blame squarely on "fans of their series" - highly dedicated fans who also had access to quality printing machines, the graphic design masterplates of the latest Indie Top 20 sleeve and lots of glue, I'll bet. Telstar chose not to get the police involved and put the activity down to Christmas hi-jinks that had got out of hand, adding that "it's good to have a bit of competition over the period". The free publicity certainly can't have hurt either party...

In the end, "Rave" easily won out in the sales wars, and that's not surprising. It was a cheaply, sloppily produced piece of vinyl with the tightest microgrooves known to man meaning you had to crank the volume right up to get anything much out of it, but it was cheap. And for all that, it did actually contain some odd surprises. The Blue Aeroplanes, for example, and Ocean Colour Scene (in their baggy incarnation) and The Wicked Things, who released records on their own label and hardly anybody had ever heard of. In fact, they're not even on YouTube to this day.

As you can tell, I abstained from this great Indie Compilation War and bought copies of both albums like any good diplomat would. Telstar's effort is far poppier and features a bigger hit single quota, but "Indie Top 20 Volume 10" feels better overall. As we'll now see.

1. The Farm - Groovy Train (Terry Farley Mix) (Produce)

"Forget the music. These boys have got the most practical clothes I've ever seen" Harry Cross.

(You can, if you want, read some of the below entry in the voice of Alan Partridge).

Not long after I started attending sixth form college, I got myself involved in the college radio station.  I briefly ran a very naive and ramshackle little show with a friend of mine, and to try and drum up some interest in it, we decided to run an end-of-year Festive Fifty styled poll of the student's favourite groups and solo acts. We approached people in the common room and during breaks to get them to give us their top three artists of 1990.

This exercise taught us a lot about teenage music tastes in South East Essex at this time (and also that walking around with a pen and notepad asking people their favourite bands made you seem like a dork at best or a sex pest at worst, but hey, most of us on college radio were definitely dorks). Firstly, more young people appreciated Phil Collins in 1990 than any NME, Melody Maker or even Smash Hits poll would ever have told you. He finished at around number twelve picking up lots of nods from deadly serious, usually faintly unfashionable youths who couldn't have given a shit that they weren't supposed to like him (if it had been an anonymous poll, I'd have been interested to see if his standing improved further still). Paul Simon managed to nudge in at number twenty by the skin of his teeth. And The Farm? They won overall. Aced it. They were the college's favourite band of 1990.

We were flabbergasted at the time, but looking back there were other factors afoot. We were asking people not long after the hugely appreciated "All Together Now" had been released, a record both my friend and I actually fancied taking a bet on being that year's Christmas Number One (especially after we added up the poll results). Also, The Farm were proving to be one of indie's great crossover bands. Most indie groups and their fans, even at this point, seemed aloof, judgemental and ever so slightly weird to the Henry and Wendy Normals of Britain, who didn't like loud guitars or skinny kids with floppy fringes on drugs. The Farm, on the other hand,  were happy-go-lucky football supporting Scousers with cheeky grins on their chops and ordinary clothes and haircuts who also happened to be making some very voguish noises. Not only would they gain appreciation in my little corner of the world, but Smash Hits readers would award them "Best Indie Group" at their Poll Winners Party as well.

"Groovy Train" was, of course, their big breakthrough moment, making number six in the National Charts. Featuring a nagging and squeaky guitar riff, shuffling beats, and faintly pissed off lyrics about a haughty lady, it does sound unbelievably of its moment. When an indie-dance crack into the mainstream emerged in 1990, they rushed through it with gusto and threw everything they had at the wall, seeming like a family-friendly version of the Happy Mondays who probably wouldn't try to sell you drugs if they bumped into you at a nightclub. Even the chorus here is gloriously, piss-takingly cynical. "She says: Get on get on get on get on get on/ the groovy train" indeed, although from this distance it does seem as if Hooton was trying to get a rise out of baggy's biggest fashion victims.

In the end, though, The Farm are one of many groups throughout history to prove that when you're the mainstream pop flavour of a fleeting indie/ alternative zeitgeist, history tends to forget you and classic pop stations just don't play you all that much. For all its success at the time, "Groovy Train" is very seldom heard these days, whereas "Step On" and "Kinky Afro" remain inescapable by comparison.

It would have been good to get further chances to discuss The Farm again purely to get under the skin of why their demise throughout 1991 was so incredibly swift, despite releasing one of their finest singles in "Love See No Colour" - but they don't feature on "Indie Top 20" again after this.



2. The Shamen - Make It Mine (One Little Indian)

"Continually slotted in the same genre as The Happy Mondays, The Beloved, The Stone Roses and other indie-dance crossovers - The Shamen, like they did with "Pro-Gen", take it one step further with "Make It Mine"". 

The Shamen really were entering an effervescent period of their careers at this point. "Pro-Gen" was all brassy melodies and excessive lyrical positivity, and "Make It Mine" ups the ante, taking neon Housey keyboard riffs and loud, distorted guitars and managing not to make them sound mismatched. "Jesus Loves Amerika" this isn't.

"Make It Mine" is one of those peculiar singles which sounded way more punchy and almost dangerous in 1990 than it does now. At the time, this seemed like a unique proposition, whereas after the likes of EMF and Jesus Jones poked into the pop charts, it began to feel somewhat sterile. It's important to try to remember that The Shamen did a lot of this stuff first, though, and were incredibly quick to pack the guitars away into their cases and lock them away in storage before the sound became outmoded.



3. Paris Angels - All On You (Perfume) (Sheer Joy)

(No sleeve notes were provided for this track).

It's been suggested by people far wiser than me that the early nineties indie-dance phase is ripe for a carefully compiled "Nuggets" styled compilation or box set. The theory goes that there was an explosion of creativity, energy and passion during the brief period which owed a debt to, but also acted as a progression beyond, the late sixties psychedelic era.

And it's indeed odd the way the "baggy era" has been condensed in rock history to the obvious names (Roses, Mondays, Charlatans, Inspirals) when so many other groups released astonishing pieces of work outside of the Top 40. The careers of the also-ran bands, much like their sixties cousins, may mostly have been confined to one or two dynamite 45s and one very patchy LP, but those sticks of nitroglycerin created some of the happiest nights of my life.

"Perfume", whether you like it or not, was absolutely huge among a certain crowd at the time. Big enough that there were a couple of instances of Paris Angels graffiti at my sixth form college (probably inked by the same person, to be fair) and that it was a constant alternative club staple. But unlike so many 1990 singles, it still sounds unbelievable. From that cheeky "What Time Is Love" inspired loop to the jangling guitars and the epic, soaring, choral female backing vocals it absolutely soars. It's the sound of young kids with access to huge record collections digging through the debris to cherry-pick the finest noises and finally come up with something that sounds utterly contemporary - the Ian Curtis styled drone of the male lead vocals balances brilliantly with the angelic backing of Jayne Gill to create something really bittersweet, something which is every bit as much "indie" as it is "dance".

Even the video manages to present the band as a bunch of garage-based urchins who just happened to have stumbled on a magic formula - smirks and grins all over their faces as the track builds and explodes into dancefloor bliss. Sadly, they never would sound this fantastic again, and a subsequent LP for Virgin Records - released just as the sunset emerged for the whole indie-dance genre - failed to completely live up to expectations. But for "Perfume", I'm completely happy to give the group a lifetime pass. It may have happened by accident rather than design, but it's a staggering, towering piece of work, and one I still return to a great deal.



4. The KLF - What Time Is Love? (Echo & The Bunnymen Mix) (KLF Communications)

"The KLF first released the original version of this track in November 1988 when it was virtually ignored. In March 1990 they played three dates with the new look Echo & The Bunnymen after which The Bunnymen went into the studio to rework the track for posterity".

Ah yes, the "new look" Echo & The Bunnymen. That would be the McCullochless incarnation absolutely everyone has ever forgotten existed, as McCulloch sodded off to form Electrafixion, another band whose impact on popular culture was somewhat negligible.

Still, this reimagining of "What Time Is Love" proved that the band's darkest days did at least produce one source of light. Filled to the brim with backwards guitars, sitar loops, tabla rattling and mystical samples, WTIL was given an unexpectedly old-school psychedelic reworking. Even if the nature of the track becomes trance-like in an old school 1967 way rather than a modern capital "t" Trance way, it acted as a perfectly valid gateway between the droning pop of the sixties and modern Acidic sounds, showing that there was a common lineage whether anyone (apart from Steve Hillage) wanted to acknowledge it or not. They even threw in the goose noises from Pink Floyd's "Bike" at the end to really labour the point.

Ultimately though, would I rather listen to the original? Definitely. In fact, there are even better remixes of "WTIL" out there than this, the Hendrix-riddled "Techno Gate" mix of the track on the original track's B-side being  but only one example. The Echo & The Bunnymen mix of this is a curiosity rather than a superior version, but that didn't stop Telstar from also giving this version a place on their "Rave" LP as well. After all, I suppose - why try to grab sales from fans of one band when you could earn sales from two?



5. Renegade Soundwave - Biting My Nails (Bassnumb Chapter) (Mute)

"A pulse-quickener of a beat, weird dub particles and stray radiation waves from dying satellites, all collide in an effect like a sharp intake of crystal meth."

I'm not sure who those sleeve-notes came from, but Renegade Soundwave sometimes did have a faint whiff of Super Hans about them... so odds-on it was one of the group.

That aside, "Biting My Nails" is a minimal and bass-heavy, robotic and almost threatening sound. It would later be souped up for use in the Nintendo console adverts, showing that while the single itself remained relatively underground, it had a slick modernity about it which loaned itself well to "the kids". It still sounds bossy and threatening even now, but all without losing any appeal - while The Shamen et al may have been punching their fists in the air, Renegade Soundwave were still a bit sinister and devilish in comparison.