The Plague - Looking for the Sun (b/w Here Today Gone Tomorrow)

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1968

If there's one thing about a lot of psychedelic and hippy singles of the sixties I find hard to take, it's the lyrical references to all the sad old losers in the world who work nine to five.  "Wear a suit and tie/ when I'd rather sit and die", as The Leaves ranted in "Too Many People" - because, like, wearing a suit is a sign of sure evil and signals the fact that you are regularly tickling The Man's cock.  Complete drivel, obviously.  

That said, you can appreciate their sentiments of anarchy and freedom however clumsily they may be expressed, even if it does involve forcing yourself back into the mentality of a time when new pathways and possibilities did seem to be opening up that didn't necessarily mean living a conservative nine to five life.  The Plague here, for example, released a sinister 45 which seems to be examining the dilemma from a rather bleak perspective.  The B-side "Here Today Gone Tomorrow" is a taunting, nagging, finger-wagging piece of work with some very sneering vocals - "Save for your holiday/ twelve months you work, two weeks you play/ next time summer comes around/ you may be six feet underground" they warn like psychedelic Grim Reapers.  Fair point, chaps, although putting out one single with Decca then disappearing without trace so that bloggers and writers in the future can't identify who the hell you are doesn't seem like much more of a long-term strategy.  Still, they tried.  They at least did that, didn't they?

It's a solid two sides on offer here, though, with the A-side "Looking for the Sun" being more chiming and subtle, but still having a similarly eerie and doomed feel.  Despite this, luck was not on their side.  By the time Decca launched this on to the public the summer of love had come and gone, and psychedelic pop was beginning to seem a bit like yesterday's news.  Had this been issued earlier I'm tempted to argue that it might have been a hit, but sadly it's hard to imagine it being a jolly daytime radio staple - it was always going to achieve cult status at best, and that's exactly what happened.  Original copies of this are so sought-after now that they frequently sell for three-figure sums.  My copy (pictured above) is a facsimile issue, hence the printed-on "spider" in the middle (it would seem that pressing plants don't seem to have the facility to create ye olde "spiders" in the middle of seven inch records anymore).

Rumours abound that The Plague were actually a studio-bound record label project rather than proper hippies, which (if true) just goes to show that The Man can disguise himself very well when he wants to.  I'd appreciate some confirmation on who The Plague really were and where they ended up, but I'd be joining a long, long list of people wanting to know the answer to that, so I won't hold my breath.

Download it here

The Fatima Mansions - Against Nature

Label: Kitchenware

Year of Release: 1990

Following the collapse of Microdisney (whose "Clock Comes Down The Stairs", "39 Minutes" and "Peel Sessions" albums are already available on this blog) Cathal Coughlan appeared to waste precious little time in moving on.  No sooner had the last single from "39 Minutes" been thrown carelessly out by Virgin like an unwanted gift than the Fatima Mansions project appeared at the end of 1989.

It would seem that the early line-up of the band was tentative, and Coughlan was scrabbling his way around in the dark for some kind of identity of his own.   In the liner notes for the compilation "Come Back My Children" he even mentions that this period of the band's history saw a lack of "any recognisable style or identity".  It was under such meandering circumstances that the mini-album "Against Nature" drifted out in 1990.  Whilst it carries the Fatima Mansions badge, it actually sounds more like a solo project than anything else, lacking the abrasive, harsher edges that many FM records boasted.

However offputting it may be to hear about albums that lack cohesion, however, "Against Nature" is still a marvellous little record to behold, being a ragbag of gothic baroque ballads, stomping riffs, and even Hi-NRG disco.  It sounds more like a compilation than a studio piece, but - provided you can tolerate swallowing so many conflicting tastes in one mouthful - is frequently a revelation for anybody with an open mind.  This is effectively the sound of a brilliant and criminally under-rated songwriter letting go and dabbling with a wide sonic palette, discovering noises and devices which would later be put to more strident use on later LPs.

Coughlan's love of Scott Walker is no secret, but "Wilderness on Time" and "Big Madness" are the closest he's come to that man's more melodramatic moments.  Both have spartan backings, with the former only having a harpsichord keyboard setting to keep Cathal's voice company, but are rich with drama and intrigue.  "Wilderness" is almost ridiculously surreal lyrically, pushing matters to a point even Jimmy Webb dare not take them, yet sounds so woebegone as to make the most bizarre lines sound significant, and demand to be taken seriously.  It's probably one of his finer moments, and that it should be buried as the third track on a mini-album is a tad unfair.   "Big Madness", too, is filled with end-of-the-affair obsessive attention to detail, containing the simultaneously disturbing and heart-wrenching lines "I phone you just to hear your voice/ so please don't judge me so/ it's just that I don't think I'll rise again/ 'til I've seen how low I can go".  The whole track explores the fine line between obsession/ depravity and common-or-garden romance, backed again minimally but effectively. 

Beyond the ballads, "Only Losers Take The Bus" is probably the best-known track here, and trailing it is "The Day I Lost Everything" which almost explores MOR rock territories whilst simultaneously mentioning Jimmy Tarbuck.  Precious few people could get away with this sort of thing, you know.  

Opening Side Two is also the Stock Atiken and Waterman apeing disco belter "13th Century Boy" which seemed spectacularly contrary at the time, but seems charming now, as well as smelling like a possible hit single in another parallel universe somewhere perhaps, where Jason Donovan styled singles referring to the dark ages regularly visit number one.  

The Fatima Mansions are an unjustly sidelined band, and of all their catalogue, "Against Nature" is probably the most unjustly sidelined album.  It's not their best piece of work, but it's certainly a long drop away from being their worst, and is a fascinating glimpse of a great songwriter with his guard down, free of the constraints of a contact with a major label and doing a smash-and-grab session through various genres and sections of pop's great music store.  Coughlan still frequently performs "You Won't Get Me Home" live, which seethes with fantastic one-liners which haven't dated one iota, and most of this album has aged in a similarly graceful way.   Like most of their back catalogue, it deserves a reissue.

Download It Here

Tracklisting:

1. Only Losers Take The Bus

2. The Day I Lost Everything

3. Wilderness on Time

4. You Won't Get Me Home

5. 13th Century Boy

6. Bishop of Babel

7. Valley of the Dead Cars

8. Big Madness/ Monday Club Carol

Left and to the Back Sampler

(Sorry folks - for various reasons too boring to go into here, I've decided to take the sampler offline as of 8 February 2012.  It seems irrelevant anyway now that we have a Spotify playlist here, and in any case I put this online when the blog was only just over a year old... we've covered a lot more ground since then, and also heard a lot of better music.  Still, if you badly want to hear these tracks, follow the links to them at the bottom of the page and they should still be available).  

I realise that doing a "Best Of" sampler for this blog may seem like either egotism gone to wild and irrational extremes or a sign that the supplies of interesting material are drying up (or even both).  However, let me justify myself a bit here first.

It all started when I flicked back through some of the download stats for the blog and realised that a lot of brilliant mp3s from the first few months had barely been touched, purely because nobody was really reading at the time of the blog's launch.  It's hardly Piccadilly Circus at the moment, I'll grant you, but back in those peaceful Spring days of 2008 the traffic resembled that of a small dirt track leading to a tractor shed round the back end of a village in Wiltshire.  All the likes of Animals That Swim and Jack could content themselves with was an occasional visit from a stray mp3 farmer revving in from Google (usually looking for something other than what I had actually uploaded).

Then there were other mp3s which had suffered from public disinterest, primarily because I probably hadn't sold them very well in the original entries (a rush-written entry usually leads to public apathy - if it's something nobody's heard of, you have to really work to pique the reader's interest).  Hence Mike Conway's "I'm Gonna Get Me A Woman" seems to have been rejected by even the keenest readers of this blog, despite being the kind of marginally offensive, fruity piece of easy listening about perfect housewives (who can "cook real good") that Mike Flowers parodied in the last decade.  And whilst Eddy Phillips' slightly dodgy "Limbo Jimbo" may not necessarily be worth a sniff, its B side "Change My Ways" should have got more attention - Christ, this is the man out of The Creation, the band the record label were named after, aren't you lot even curious about an obscure solo outing?

Then... there was material I provided YouTube links to, but no mp3s, so "Yon Yonson", "Crawl Babies" and "My Star" all appear for the first time on here in mp3 form below.

What finally cemented my decision to put this 2 CD compilation together was TJ from the Out on Blue Six blog getting in touch to suggest it might be a good idea, apropos of nothing.  If he was having the same idea independently of me, perhaps it wasn't so daft to do a sweep through the blog and pick up what I feel are some of the best or most interesting bits after all, and present it as a sampler.  So, if you're here for the first time, you'll now have a playlist which to me underlines what L&TB is all about - the content is, in my opinion, usually either sublime or ridiculous, although perhaps some of it falls awkwardly between those two stools as well (and I'd be happy to confess that some of the more rubbishy obscurities I uploaded here for the sake of curiosity value probably stank like stools, too).

There was also quality stuff which seemed really popular, some of it unexpected. I never honestly believed that so many people out there were desperate for copies of Bob Morgan's "Marguerite", but the fact that it was the gallery music for "Hart Beat" must have triggered nostalgic memories.  Also, it's a brilliant piece of work, which always helps.  Placing it on this compilation is probably unnecessary, but I've decided to include popular downloads as well, just to provide an honest and accurate overview - "Best ofs" wouldn't be "best ofs" without hit singles, after all.

That's enough in the way of justifications, and I'll say no more.  There won't be any commentary for this tracklisting either, since the original entries on the blog (which I've linked to) should more than suffice - and perhaps, for once, this is your chance to listen to the music without my intrusive interpretation of it infecting your mind.

CD One

1. Animals That Swim - Faded Glamour (Elemental - 1996)

2. Action Spectacular - I'm A Whore (Bluefire - 1998)

3. The Pastels - Crawl Babies (Glass - 1987)

4. Boys Wonder - Goodbye Jimmy Dean (Rough Trade - 1988)

5. The Clique - Security (Detour - 1995)

6. Thor's Hammer - My Life (Parlophone - 1966)

7. The Hush - Grey (Fontana - 1968)

8. Medium - Edward Never Lies (CBS - 1968)

9. Ice - Ice Man (Decca - 1968)

10. Moonshake - Coming (Creation - 1991)

11. Bob Morgan - Marguerite (Gem - 1979)

12. Lenny Henry - The (Algernon Wants You To Say) OK Song (Jet - 1981)

13. Idi Amin - Amazin' Man (Transatlantic - 1975)

14. TISM - Greg! The Stop Sign (Mushroom - 1995)

15. Earl Brutus - Navyhead (Deceptive - 1996)

16. Dave Howard Singers - Yon Yonson (Hallelujah! - 1987)

17. Marvin - Marvin the Paranoid Android (Polydor - 1981)

18. Boutique - Strawberries and Cream (Trade 2 - 1996)

19. InAura - This Months Epic (EMI - 1996)

20. Master Singers - Highway Code (Part One) (Parlophone - 1966)

CD Two:

1. Murry The Hump - Cracking Up (Too Pure - 2001)

2. Leer Bros. Band - Mystery of Love (Intrepid - 1969)

3. The Tickle - Good Evening (Regal Zonophone - 1967)

4. Whiteout - Detroit (Silvertone - 1994)

5. Tiger - On The Rose (Trade 2 - 1996)

6. Yossarian - Gilbert and George (Satellite - 1998)

7. Psychic TV - Good Vibrations (Temple - 1986)

8. Cuban Boys - Oh My God They Killed Kenny! (For Us - 1998)

9. Kenny - Hot Lips (Polydor - 1976)

10. Screemer - Interplanetary Twist (Bell - 1976)

11. Harry Corbett - Like The Big Guys Do (Pye - 1963)

12. Mike Conway - I'm Gonna Get Me A Woman (Plexium - 1968)

13. Upholstered Eldorados - I Wanna Talk Like Iggy Pop (Box 52 - 1990)

14. Brainstorm - My Star (Microphone/ EMI - 2000)

15. Eddy Phillips - Change My Ways (Charisma - 1976)

16. Camel Drivers - Give it a Try (Buddah - 1967)

17. Beacon Street Union - Speed Kills (MGM - 1967)

18. Rolf Harris - Animals Pop Party (Columbia - 1966)

19. David McWilliams - Mister Satisfied (Major Minor - 1968)

20. Microdisney - Are You Happy? (Rough Trade - 1985)

21. Jack - Dress You In Mourning (Too Pure - 1996)

22. The Singing Postman - You Can't Keep Liven In The Past (Parlophone - 1966)

Break

That's it, enough is enough... I'm off on holiday for a week or so.  It would seem that the rest of the world is doing it at the moment, so why shouldn't I (to paraphrase the title of an awful Cranberries album)?

This blog should be active again around 11 June, but no promises.  In the meantime, let Giorgio Moroder entertain you with a brief snippet of his least-appreciated moment, the aptly titled "Underdog".  As they used to say on Top of the Pops, we'll play out with him, but we'll be back next Thursday.

Ten Benson - 6 Fingers of Benson

Label: Deceptive

Year of Release: 1998

I'm not going to bore you all by beginning yet another blog entry stating that the late nineties were a peculiar time for alternative music, because the fact that Ten Benson were hotly tipped for the top by the NME really should prove that in spades.  Of all the skee-wif predictions in a continually surprising world, this had to be one of the biggest ones - at the time of their praise, Ten Benson were a lo-fi recording act who released scuffed-up hillbilly art rock songs about unshakeable supernatural claws (in "The Claw", naturally), the devil ("Evil Heat"), and a lot of other more lyrically impenetrable offerings.  As likable as it was, it was surely never going to excite the breakfast show team on Radio One, and so it proved.

Coming across like the more absurd and interesting inbred cousins of Rednex with a cheap home studio, and producing sleeve art that barely merits the use of the word "art" to describe it (why did I bother uploading that picture above?  I'm sure I deserve to get those five minutes of my life back) they were deliberately childish, primal, and ridiculous, but produced some of the catchier and more infectious songs of the underground at that time.  Indeed, both "Evil Heat" and "The Claw" impressed the late night radio listeners enough to get high up in John Peel's 1998 Festive Fifty, the latter sneering down at the opposition from the number 4 slot.  It's a marvel, and deserved the attention, sounding so much like the early 1950s shock singles that plagued the American market that it could be slapped on a playlist next to them and not lose any impact.  This and "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus come from the same ludicrous mindset.

"6 Fingers of Benson" is merely a compilation of their first three singles A and B sides.  After this point, they began spoofing Heavy Metal with songs such as "Teenage Tits", and became ironically rockist and matey with The Darkness, but (in my opinion) lost a lot of their oddness and charm in the process.  That said, later track "Rock Cottage" (from their first LP proper, "Hiss") with its harmonies of "uhmmmm.... hot sausage" probably does deserve to be heard.

The band split last year with a final gig in London, remaining very much a cult wonder, which may have surprised the odd NME journalist out there, but didn't particularly surprise me, however much I might have wanted "The Claw" to be issued on a major label and become a surprise smash in the process.  

Download it Here

Tracklisting:

1. Evil Heat

2. Bardot Style

3. The Claw

4. Transport Overseas

5. Uncle Benson

6. City Hoppers

And click here if you're curious and urgently need to see the video to "Teenage Tits" (that's my webstats through the roof for the next month at least, I'll warrant).