THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 9
STAR TURN ON 45 PINTS – “Pump Up The Bitter” (7″ single)
In England, the ‘answer record’ long since got elided into the ‘novelty record’ – our Top 40 is unparallel[…]

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – “Legal Man”
A goofy 60s-pop pastiche which sounds a little like the theme from Eurotrash, a little like Stereolab on a Ribena high, and a little like a group doing whatever they want, because they know their fa[…]

Signal Drench did a Top 100 albums of the 90s. I’m a sucker for top 100 albumses of the ninetieses, as you know. Signal Drench’s I mostly disagree with, especially the top end (Slint annoy me), but there’s some neat and compact writ[…]

All Music Is Bad!: in a couple of days we launch the Bad Music issue of Freaky Trigger, and to mark the occasion, a special blog is being readied, a sick mutant lock-it-in-the-attic half-brother of NYLPM which will last for the 6 weeks the new issue […]

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 8
MJ HIBBETT AND THE VALIDATORS – “Hey Hey 16K” (on the album Say It With Words)
Before there were PCs or blogs or geek pride or the internet, there was the ZX Spectrum, one of the few things in this l[…]

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 7
BILLY BRAGG – “Between The Wars” (7″ single)
I don’t like Billy Bragg much, ‘specially not when he sings about politics. Not because I disagree – in fact quite the opposite: I[…]

John Peel’s “Dandelion” Label: following up on yesterday’s review of Bridget St. John. In the early 70s, John Peel was a hairy groupie monster who also found time to run a financially catastrophic record label (euphemism from […]

HENRY COW/SLAPP HAPPY – “War” (from the album In Praise Of Learning)
THE FALL – “War” (from the 12″ Behind The Counter)
Critics as famous as Greil Marcus and Nik Cohn and as minor as me love to talk about pop[…]

Smog: Dongs of Sevotion: so you want to be like me, eh Fred? Well, as you correctly surmise the only way to do that is to listen to a lot of SMOG. Here’s Pitchfork writing about their new album, which I found disappointing and in places even tu[…]

Goran Bregovic’s unofficial site: Goran Bregovic provides a lot of the (excellent) music for Emil Kusturica’s films – find out more about him here, though sadly the site sheds no more light on what is Freaky Trigger‘s only gen[…]