The Passmore Sisters

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that I'm never exactly regular or consistent with putting these things up; normally it's a case of when I've got 10 minutes to kill at work, although in this case it's because I'm listening to last night's Gideon Coe show on the 6music iPlayer thing (incidentally, if by some chance you don't listen to this regularly you really should, it's the best show on the radio anywhere) and he played a BBC Session recording that reminded me that I've not put up The Passmore Sisters. So here you go.

Continuing the West Yorkshire theme, The Passmore Sisters were from Bradford, formed in 1983 or 1984 and snuck into the indie charts in 1985 with their debut single 'Three Love Songs'. The band put out half a dozen cracking singles and an album before splitting in 1987. The also, importantly, recorded two Peel Sessions; and if you can get hold of "Story Of A Working Man" from the first session in 1985 I'd highly recommend it (Gideon plays it on the Monday 19th January show, so you've got a week to hear it at least).

So, as usual here are the links you'll want. There's a TweeNet page, a myspace, this post on the excellent Take The Pills blog and a really good write up on the Foxdude page. The myspace page also offers you a link to download the first album First Love, Last Rites which I'd also heartily recommend.

And finally, your aural delight, here's The Passmore Sisters - Safe Place to Hide, which is a cracking bit of indie pop.

The Corn Dollies

To London now with sadly short-lived twangy/jingly-jangly The Corn Dollies. You'll like this lot, they're fantastic and produce really top notch singalong music that's absolutely the sort of stuff I was thinking of when I start this madness 18 months ago.

There's a good little biog/discography here and tweenet and wikipedia have the usual. Unfortunately as Wilfully Obscure points out, there's not a lot else kicking around about the band, which seems a shame as from what I can hear they were great. Sadly I guess you can add them to the ever-growing list of indie bands that were killed by grunge.

Having said that, they did feature on the anti-poll tax/indie masterpiece that is Alvin Lives in Leeds

I don't know why but this song, The Corn Dollies - Be Small Again reminds me of Billy Bragg for some reason, I think the opening twangy-singy bits sounds a but like Accident Waiting to Happen, or maybe that's just me.

The Rosehips

The Rosehips are one of your great should-have-been-bigger twee bands. Formed near Stoke in 1986, the band are another with an indie-lady singer in a line up of:

"Yoland (vocals), Glenn (guitar), Ant (bass) and Mark 1 (drums). The [band's] first release was "The Last Light" on the Subway Records compilation LP "Take The Subway To Your Suburb". Two further singles - "Room In Your Heart" and "I Shouldn't Have To Say" - were released on Subway and the band gigged alongside Talulah Gosh, The Flatmates, The Clouds and The Groove Farm."

Again, I don't want to just copy and paste too much of the already full internet, so the "official" history is here and there is, of course, a lot on the band's myspace page. Oh, and believe it or not, there's a Rosehips tribute band!

The best thing about the internet is that people record such minute details as who the band played with, including such indie legends as the Darling Buds, Mega City Four and The Wedding Present!

So, here you go, this is The Rosehips - Room in Your Heart, it's a great bit of late 80s indie pop.

Circus Circus Circus

We're going with another request for this month's first entry. Circus Circus Circus (also more conveniently for the typer known as Circus X3) were brought to my attention by my mate Dan who'd been digitising his collection of bloody terrible goth singles when this little gem popped up in the middle.

I have to admit here that the only thing that seems to exist anywhere is a MySpace page for the band, but that tells us what we need to know.

The band were formed in Beckhenham, South London in the mid-80s and comprised Doug Hart on vocals, Ric Clark and Mark Shaw on guitars, Richard Bentley on bass and Rich Spicer on drums. From the press cuttings available the band seem to have been a well-produced, slick and stylish five-piece who could belt out a cracking tune. I never saw them live, but they sound a bit like The Shadows.

Still, they obviously toured extensively and released a number of singles and at least one album so someone reading this will know more about them to fill in the gaps.

So, in the meantime feel free to enjoy the (unfortunately crackly) musical stylings of Circus Circus Circus - Inside the Inside Out Man. I rather like it, it's a nice bit of jingly-jangly indie pop and one more added to the list of obscurities.

The Bodines

Not much comes out of Glossop (except for Stuart Hall and Shaun Ryder of course), so it's nice that we can visit there today with The Bodines.

For reasons I can't remember now I'd crossed this lot off my list of bands to put up, goodness knows why, they're as indie as they come. Again, I'm not going to repeat stuff that's easy to find on the internet, but the biography from here sums up what we need to know:

"The Bodines emerged from Glossop in Derbyshire. Fronted by the floppy-fringed Michael Ryan, they became one of the better-known outfits from a crop of jangly indie bands that sprang up around that time... The group's debut album, 'Played' (produced by Ian Broudie, later to enjoy success as a recording artist as the Lightning Seeds) was a fine jangly pop artifact, but it only scraped in to no. 94 in the album charts, in the summer of 1987. "

And there's Ian Broudie again. He gets everywhere. The wiki page and Indie mp3 page have loads more stuff, so go and enjoy there. This particular mp3, The Bodines - William Shatner is taken from a Canadian live bootleg 7" single, which is worth a mention alone.

I'm a fan of the band, they really did produce some cracking indie pop and were much better than their lack of success would lead you to believe. I'm glad I put them back on the list, they certainly deserve to be remembered, not least because Therese, their second single was considered such a yardstick for their genre that it was on the NME's legendary C86 tape; which is always worth getting hold of if you can (or you can buy the updated CD86 version here, which is still as good.)

Talulah Gosh

Well, if nothing else, Talulah Gosh push back my earliest featured single by a year and expand the Oxford-based twee database by another entry.

I'd kind of written off Talulah Gosh as too early for here, but then I heard Gideon Coe play them on 6music (incidentally, George Lamb? Why?) and decided that they were pretty much bang on for posting; let's face it, what do you remember about the band?

Well, we'll wiki them and see shall we?

Talulah Gosh were a guitar-pop group from Oxford, England and one of the leading bands of the twee pop movement, taking their name from the headline of an NME interview with Clare Grogan.

Ooh, Clare Grogan, that should be enough to raise the pulse of most people reading this...

So basically they lasted from 1986 until 1988, released a few decent jingly jangly singles and played a Peel session or two along the way and split; then most of the members went off to form Heavenly, another band that I'll get around to doing at some point.

I won't put too much here again as there's some pretty good fan pages here and here for example and a quick Google brings up more than enough background for even the most dedicated Gosher (I wonder if that's what the fans were called).

You'll like this mp3, it's a cracking bit of indie pop and if there's one thing I like almost as much as a flexi-disk it's a self-referential song name this this: Talulah Gosh - Talulah Gosh. Enjoy.