Scorpio Rising

I've been meaning to do Scorpio Rising for ages, but kept forgetting. Then when I remembered I convinced myself I'd already done them. This is one of the perils of ageing. Still, better late than never.

The Liverpudlian baggy/fraggle funsters were formed in 1989 by Mickey Banks, "Sploote", Martin Atherton, Steve Soar (who left in 1993) and Colin Owens. That's a rock and roll name. Colin. There should be more famous rock star Colins. I can only think of Colin out of the Shamen off the top of my head. This is another peril of ageing.

Sorry. formed in 1989, the band toured extensively with such indie luminaries as Ned's Atomic Dustbin, the Senseless Things and PWEI and I'm pretty sure I saw them support Carter USM in the early 90s, although my first port of call for all things Carter doesn't seem to back that up so it's probably my memory again.

There's not that much on the band kicking about on the internet, which is a shame. The myspace and wikipedia page say pretty much the same thing, although the book I have in my hand seems to suggest that the band's first single is called "Stangest Times EP", but both those pages call it "The Strangest Things Turn You On". The actual bit of vinyl is called the "Stangest EP" and the track is indeed "Strangest Things Turn You On"; the normally pretty infallible Discogs doesn't even list it. Come on internet, buck your ideas up!

Listening to it, it's definitely Scorpio Rising - The Strangest Things Turn You On:

Right click etc etc to download
Whatever it's called, it's a cracking bit of indie which possibly sounds a bit more Madchestery than I remember, but certainly has some lovely swooping guitar and that very recognisable indie drum beat that cropped up a lot in 1991.

Tramway

I think I mentioned before that I had a self-imposed limit for buying this crap off ebay; and this is only the second time I've broken it, the first was The Lillies and this time it's Tramway. So, who were Tramway? Why did I feel the need to spend over a tenner of my hard-earned on a little known 7" from an even littler known band? And why did I get all excited when I heard the recorded loveliness? Well...

As a bit of background, along with shit old C86 bands, one of my great loves is the sport of cycling; which is a good indie past time. Fruitbat out of Carter is a big cycling fan, as is Nigel from Half Man Half Biscuit, so is the oft-mentioned Gideon Coe. Anyway, I happened across mention of a song called "Gianni Bugno Wheels" (Gianni Bugno was a great Italian cyclist in the mid-80s to mid-90s) on my meandering about the internet and as part of my hunt for the mp3 - which turned out to be a rather lovely instrumental number - I discovered the band who'd recorded it were called Tramway, were a bit 1991 and had also recorded a song called Tour Du Pont.

And then my interest was really piqued.

It turns out that the one time and briefly employed drummer in the band was one Jez Butler; which rang a bell but I couldn't place. Until I found his personal web page. Jez Butler had been in a band called "Cake" with not one, but two ex members of The Flatmates! Oh and the band's only two singles were released on - your favourite and mine - Sarah Records. That's got to be an indie full house! And is also why I had to dash over to ebay and waste my money on this.

right click, saves as, to download
The band released two singles, Maritime City (as above) and Sweet Chariot on Sarah and an album called 'A Brand of Lovin' (where Gianni Bugno is name checked) on the Siesta label. On 'Maritime City' the band consisted of Chris Young and Matthew and Nancy Evans, although the band variously employed the talents of the aforementioned Jez Butler and someone known only as A Henderson as well.

Oh and there's what turns out to be a Portuguese site (which I only worked out after some aimless buggering about with Google's translate thingy) which says of Maritime City it sounds a bit like Felt and "it is nothing but excite other that gives the disc a charming nonsense" and furthermore "wronged those bands that appear and vanish without leaving more records" - which I rather like the sound of.

So there you go. I'm no investigative journalist, but if that's not increased the sum of knowledge on the internet, I don't know what has.

The Sea Urchins

As we roll headlong towards the second anniversary of this internet nonsense, I'm clearing still the backlog of stuff I wrote down ages ago and never got round to putting on here; so let's keep clearing the metaphorical decks with The Sea Urchins.

Formed in West Bromwich in 1986, the band were intially signed to the legendary Sarah label after being launched onto the C86 scene with a couple of split flexi disks which brought them to the attention of the label. Were flexi disks the 1980/1990s equivalent of Myspace? Discuss. There's a question for my newly thought of BA (hons) in Indie Pop, I'll probably run it out of one of the crapper ex-Polys.

Anyway, I digress. Formed by James Roberts, Patrick Roberts, Simon Woodcock, Robert Cooksey, Bridget Duffy and Mark Bevin (who was replaced by the time the first "proper" single came out), the band were flexible in membership over their life and had split due to contractual shenanigans before Sarah released an album of all their recordings in 1992. Latterly the band have reformed on and off for gigs and an album 2000; in the meantime, several members of the band had continued to play as Delta.

If you want some train of thought ramblings, try the myspace page and if you want a brief overview, the band are on wikipedia.

So, for your Midlands listening delight today, here is The Sea Urchins - Please Don't Cry, and it might just be me but didn't Oasis steal this lock, stock and barrel for whatever that dirge with Rhys Ifans in the video was?

And this is a test of a nice embedded mp3 thingy, let me know if you like it.

Pele

I'm pretty sure that Pele aren't the band I thought they were when I started looking into them, but now I can't remember who I was thinking of. Not that it matters, because they're a great band who released some really cracking jaunty country-fused indie in the early 90s and are a hitherto terrible omission from this place.

I now know that, thanks to the official site that's the source of the wiki page and is nicely added to by the ubiquitous myspace page that the band were formed on Merseyside in 1990, gigged around the North West of England, signed a record deal and within a matter of months had released their debut album. Aiming to capitalise on the album, their debut single was released in no time flat and featured on heavy rotation on Radio 1 before record company mistakes robbed them of a proper chart hit. It's ok though, their second single went to number 1 in South Africa.

A number of pretty major indie hits followed before some long-winded and painful legal shenanigans with their record company left the band heavily in debt with no rights to their songs until the record company in turn went bust. Phew.

Anyway, whoever I was thinking of before setting out on this excursion, I bet they weren't as good (on record or live; when they were apparently fantastic). Have a listen to the 'destined-to-not-chart' first release, Pele - Raid The Palace and right from the first bits twangy guitar and fiddle you know you'll be tapping your feet along. Then you'll go back for a few more listens, it's great.

The Moonflowers

Following in the great "you can't be indie unless your band name has a 'The' at the start..." theme of recent times, it's The Moonflowers today; proudly ploughing the same furrow as Flowered Up and knocking out some of that old fashioned trippy indie that was oh so popular in the early 90s.

There's a whole site dedicated to them here and more myspace gubbins for me to regurgitate; but basically:

"Formed in December 1987 for a few parties: [the band] made records until 1997...Following the success of indie hit 'Get Higher' in 1990, they were transported to a national, then international platform beseeching their audience and followers to hold hands while they watched the group cavort and leap about in an effort to obtain world peace by the year 1999."

Got to set your sights high I guess...

Unfortunately The Moonflowers are another of the bands (like The Chesterfields and Lush) who have an ex-member who died early; in this case drummer Toby Pascoe who died aged 32.

Well, on that cheery note, here's The Moonflowers - Fire; try not to hum Weeee-kender as you're listening.

Just a note as well, the 7" this is copied off doesn't appear to be on their "official" discography, it certainly looks kind of promo, maybe my reader can offer some sort of extra information?

The Wendys

Apologies for lack of updates recently, I'm building up to a solid few weeks off and need to get my house in order (literally and metaphorically).

In the meantime, let's get back on the horse with The Wendys.

As usual, pop over to the wiki page for a bit more information, but this time we're celebrating not only a great Scottish band, but a gen-u-ine, honest-to-goodness, Factory Records white label as you can see in the picture at the top.

This little rarity has an A4 insert that says:

"The Wendys are the first band to sign to Factory since northside and also share the same producer...Ian Broudie."

The insert also claims, oddly, that this is the band's first release on the label, but as you'll see in the linked Wiki article it's actually their second, although this rather detailed page seems to imply that their "first" EP entitled "More Than Enough" never got a proper release; maybe my reader can help fill in the blanks?

There's some great stuff kicking about the internet about the band, all of which is worth a read; an NME clipping and of course a myspace page (I should really be collecting all these; if only I wasn't such a bloody luddite and understood myspace).

Well, enjoy this: The Wendys - The Sun's Going to Shine for Me Soon, it's a cracking bit of indie pop and far better than Northside any day.

The Dylans

Right, it's Friday, so let's go with a classic sing-a-long, top notch indie classic from The Dylans; and I dare you not to be singing along after the first twenty seconds.

Long before Sheffield was the 'indie' capital of the world, The Dylans were plying their trade out of the grim north, and they might not have been as big as we'd have hoped, but boy weren't they just a great band!

All the history you need is on the wiki page and at Discogs.com and you know you should own at least one of their singles, if not, what the hell were you doing in 1991?

"I hear your tambourines
Inside my head, she says
I hear your tambourines
On Planet Love, she says
On Planet Love..."

Go on, get that baggy t-shirt on, flick what's left of your indie fringe about, go to the nearest pub for a pint of snakebite and dance along to The Dylans - Planet Love; it's what Fridays were made for.

One big question remains mind you, why were all the best indie club nights on a Tuesday, not a Friday?

Top

Another entry in the "fuck me, that was hard to Google" stakes today with Top.

As requested by Kirtsy and Steve in Facebook group of this here page, Top were a Liverpudlian three-piece who kicked around for a couple of years at the start of the 1990s.

Clinging onto the coat-tails of Madchester and the Liverpool scene that gave us The Las and their ilk, Alan Wills, Joe Fearon and Paul Cavanagh knocked out a few cracking singles and an album (Emotion Lotion) and even recorded a Peel Session before going the way of so many other of their contemporaries.

The internet knows very little of Top - possibly due to the aforementioned Googling problems - so any more detail is again welcome.

You can listen to Top - Buzzin' here and should you wish buy a copy of "Emotion Lotion" here, for as little as 89p!

Northside

Oh God, it's Northside. I was going to write off May as a bit of a washout, it's been a long month with various crap, capped off with the laptop I use to copy the music on this page playing silly fuckers. But then I found a tune flitting in and out of my head that I guess I heard on a radio in passing and I couldn't shake it. Nor, I have to say, could I work out what it was; all I could remember was the odd snatch here and there and half a chorus. Then I found out. It was Northside. And not Shall We Take A Trip?

No, it was this; the add-it-to-the-list-of-Ian-Broudie-produced Northside - Take 5. If only it had been Dave Brubeck.

Now, Northside divide opinion like few other of the 1990s Manc-indie-dance-flare-wearing-sub-Mondays groups. I don't mind them in a "haha! I remember that! (now) way", but not everyone would be prepared to spend £1.99 on the 7" and still own it. I'm sorry.

The Wiki says, rather sterily (is that a word?):

"Northside are a band from Oldham, England that borrowed heavily from the Madchester scene of the time...Formed in 1989, they released their only (and well respected) album Chicken Rhythms on Factory Records in 1991...Northside were considered a real goup of the 1990's scene."

Should you want more, and I'll understand if you don't, there's a Myspace page and a Facebook group (what sort of knob has one of those..?) Ahem.

Anyway, probably most famous for Shall We Take A Trip? the band actually released three singles, the above being the last, and an album. Hands up who owns that!

Sod, it, enjoy the Dave Brubeck jazz-lite number as well.

Oh, and you can buy the "Best" of Northside here.

The Lillies

One of the genuine joys of doing this is that every now and again someone emails and says "have you heard of so-and-so? They were great!"; The Anyways were one of these, The Nilon Bombers were another. This particular record though is probably my favourite so far. It's a flexi disk (yay!), it's a football crossover and, more importantly, it's by a painfully cool indie supergroup consisting of Simon Raymonde from the Cocteau Twins, Chris Acland and Miki Berenyi from Lush and Kevin Mckillop and Russell Yates from Moose. You just know it's going to be good.

So this is it. A supergroup called The Lillies and a swooping, spacey bit of indie memorabilia called "And David Seaman will be very disappointed with that..." recorded to commemorate Tottenham Hotspur beating their arch-rivals Arsenal in the 1991 FA Cup semi-final on 14 April 1991 helped by a wonderful free-kick by Paul Gascoigne at the very height of his genius. I remember watching the game, my Spurs-supporting mates still talk of the game and Gazza's goal in hushed tones. And, more importantly, it led to this fantastically rare bit of plastic tht you could only get by buying The Spur, a Tottenham fanzine/magazine of some reknown.

To say I was excited when this came up on eBay would be to commit the greatest understatement in years. I was agape, my mouth could have caught a double-decker bus, my eyes were that particular wide, stary look that only 6-year-olds get on Christmas day when they get their first BMX; God I was in awe. So much so that I hastily put in a bid that was far, far above my self-imposed five pounds limit (including p&p) that I've set for buying these old records. I don't think I've HAD to have anything quite so much in years, probably not since I first saw a ZX Spectrum in action. I'm actually shaking just thinking about it, that's how badly this bloody blog has affected me.

The only thing that made it even better was that the seller was called Stuart. Stuart Mutler in fact. Only the bloody editor of The Spur and the man whose idea the whole thing was in the first place. The man who told me

"The flexi disc was my idea (I was the editor of 'Spur') and I got the artists together all those summers ago. Simon did most of the work. The others came in for one day. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Although with the attention the recording got on release, I think Miki may have regretted her involvement. She kept getting badgered by supporters, and it detracted some people from her work with Lush."

And really very kindly included scans from the NME and Melody Maker reviewing the thing in the first place.

I really can't do justice to how owning this thing is the best thing ever and I can't copy out all the wonderful words about it, so there are two links here and here to read and the mp3 here The Lillies - And David Seaman will be very disappointed with that.

It's a great bit of swooping indie pop, just as you'd imagine the Cocteau Twin, Lush and Moose would make if they had free rein to do whatever the hell they wanted together.

Oh, and here is "that" goal...


"Mabbutt has gone forward, with Stewart to the right. Lineker and Howells to the left. Is Gascoigne going to have a crack? He is you know! Oh I say! Brilliant!"

PS, Stuart says there's a few more of the mag/flexi combinations going up on the old eBay soon, so keep your eyes open!

The Telescopes

More spacey 1991-based indie today with Burton-on-Trent's only* famous sons The Telescopes and once more into the white label promo versions of EPs with Celeste, as featured here.

There's a very good site here with all your information, so again I won't wade too much into the background and Wikipedia is again a mine of useful information; although, one question is asked by the Wiki: is Jo Doran, the erstwhile backing singer and guitar-botherer related to Sara Doran out of Blessed Ethel?

The Telescopes were much-loved by the music press of the time, Steve Lamacq who was working at the NME at the time loved them and so did the Melody Maker. It's cheating a bit putting them on here as they reformed in 2004 and are still touring around the place, but let's remember them where they belong, as part of the early 1990s indie/shoegazing pantheon.

So this: The Telescopes - Celeste, is the title track from the EP.

* Yes, yes, apart from Freddie Starr

Buy music by The Telescopes

Stare

I've been asked about this particular EP a couple of times in the past and I'd elevated it to some sort of mythical level in my mind; probably because the band in question are a bit of a sod to Google for (and easily steal S*M*A*S*H's thunder as hardest band to research). I've no idea whether, in reality, Stare are that obscure, but I tell you what, you try to find anything about them on the internet...

What do we know about them band then? Well, not much. Between 1991 and 1992 this four-piece, who are possibly from Nofolk, released three EPs called Stare, Mood and Work on the Fusebox and Big Life record labels. The band members were Michael Brown, Karl Goodbody, Richard Hammerton and Derek O'Sullivan.

And that's it really. All my usual sources of information have come up blank and I'm at a bit of a loss. To try and help remember this lot, I've stared a Wikipedia page for them here; as usual anyone with any useful facts and information, please feel free to add them there and we'll try and build up a better picture.

What I can tell you is that this is Stare - Stare from the Stare EP and sounds a little like Thousand Yard Stare, who themselves make searching for our friends difficult and is a pretty good bit of indie pop.

Update: For James and a couple of other people that have asked, this is the whole Stare EP (14mb .rar file); I'm not keen on hosting the whole of any of these records, so if there are complaints I'll take it down. Also, it's on Rapidshare so it won't last forever, get it while it's hot!

Bleach

Bleach are a criminally overlooked indie band as anyone who saw them live will attest; and the Snag EP is a great record by anyone's standards.

It's pretty hard to find stuff about the band around the internet; not least because there's an American Christian rock band (now there are four words that'll strike fear into the heart of the honest indiepopper) of the same name.

Having said that, once you know what you're looking for there are a few pages about, most of them on blogs like this...

This page has what you'll need to know which is (and I'm copying this as sadly the site is on Angelfire so you'll be lucky to see it working):

"The band were a four-piece, formed in 1989 by Salli Carson (vocals), Steve Scott (drums) and brothers Neil and Nick Singleton (guitar and bass respectively). Their debut ep appeared in 1990, they made some great records for the next few years, then split in 1993... Bleach were sort of lumped in with the shoegazing crowd, with bitter lyrics about betrayal and estrangement, plenty of reverb and distortion, you know the kind of thing. Singer Salli Carson often switched her vocals from a soft, almost plaintive side to bitter, guttaral tirading within the space of a verse, whilst the rest of the band washed away around her in a sea of reverb and white noise."

There are a couple more pages on Wilfully Obscure and Pogo-a-gogo; which are both great sites and Trouserpress say:

"This quartet from Ipswich recorded three EPs inside a year's time and received an inordinate amount of British press accolades for them. Scoring an American deal with the soon-to-be-bankrupt Chameleon label, Bleach released a compilation of those EPs and then apparently disappeared off the face of the earth."

Track 3 on the EP: Bleach - Bethesda is my personal favourite track of the four on the EP, it's a cracking bit of jingly-jangly indie-pop shoegazing; the kind of song I started doing all this for in the first place. Enjoy.

Moose

Surely you can't want more jingly jangly indie nonsense? You do? OK, here are London based indie popsters Moose.

I hate copying willy-nilly from Wikipedia, but apparently, and I have no way of verifying this either way,

"Moose have been credited by some as being the first band to be called "shoegazers" which was inspired by an early gig of theirs at which [singer and guitarist] Russell Yates read lyrics taped to the floor."

Can this be true? Surely someone like Ride would have been the first shoegazers? Moose as the first shoegazers? It's the first I've heard of it!

I've got a load of old NMEs somewhere, I'll try and check at Christmas, but in the meantime, if you can prove this bold claim then please let me know! (This bit of typing is getting very exclamation mark-heavy, for which I apologise).

So, the band were possibly instrumental in the popularity of shoegazing, produced a load of cracking tunes in the early 90s, never achieved the fame they probably deserved, disappeared, reappeared to try their luck again around the millenium and promptly disappeared again. This is a running theme for bands on here.

There's a really nice little fansite here (which, by the way, would be a leading exponent of shoegazing as a style of web design, if such a thing existed. Take a look at it and you'll see what I mean. That site is the most shoegazingest website I've seen in ages).

And to keep you going and remind you of the alleged first ever shoegazers, from 1991's Reprise EP, have a listen to Moose - Last Night I Fell Again, it's rather good.


(Right click, 'Save as...' to download)
(And now, if you can imagine me wandering off, shaking my head and muttering "first ever shoegazers, I just don't know...", the illusion is complete).

Carter USM

I have a confession to make. I fucking love Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. More than any other indie pop band, Carter are my absolute favourite. Don't get me wrong, The Family Cat and all the rest are the soundtrack to my jingly jangly youth, but Carter are my favourite by a long, long way.

So, it's taken me a long time to put them up here, not because they don't count, but because I wanted to wait and see how those rose-tinted memories stood up to the gigs that were played in Glasgow and London this year. I also wanted to make sure I could decide on an mp3 to put up here. Carter were my introduction to the world of indie pop. I remember vividly that I was on a coach back from a school trip somewhere and we stopped at a motorway service station. Being a bit of a sad bastard I didn't rush into the newsagents and buy a copy of Razzle like the hard kids did, I bought an NME. It had a review for 101 Damnations in it and it sounded to me like the greatest album ever produced. Of course, when I finally got to a shop to buy it and got it home, it was.

I'd hate to say that Carter changed my life, because that would be over-egging the pudding somewhat, but from then on I was hooked. I even grew a fringe like Jimbob - thank God there aren't any photos of that.

Over the next couple of years I saw them whenever I could. At least twice at the Poly in Huddersfield (I hope you've been paying attention, there's a quiz later on the support bands) and at the 1991 Reading Festival where, apart from the Sister's of Mercy and some no hopers called Nirvana, they were the best thing ever.

It's just a shame they weren't more fashionable. All the cool indie girls in their black and purple hoopy tights (you know you loved them!) went to Cud. Teenage Fanclub were the kings. Carter were my favourites. I don't care if I'm wrong.

Anyway, I decided. Much as Sheriff Fatman is the crowd pleaser and Only living Boy in New Cross is the big hit and After the Watershed is the one the Rolling Stones tried to ban and Bloodsport for All wasn't played on Radio 1 "because of the Iraq war", I had to go for Carter USM - Shopper's Paradise because when they played it at Brixton I had a smile a foot wide. This isn't the original Christmas special edition I'm afraid, just the one from 30 Something (admittedly a white label version :), but do you care? I don't. And I care even less that the photos have fucked the formatting on this.

Tell your kids, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. Best indie band ever.

Resque

Now we're talking. For the first of this month's posts we have those excitable Reading based scamps Resque. Previously known to one and all as International Resque, the band dropped the first word sometime prior to this little offering: Resque - She Drives My Train.

There must be something in the water in Berkshire. Reading and Oxford seem to feature heavily in any list of indie pop home towns.

Resque toured extensively with Carter USM, which of course is where I was first introduced to them (specifically at a gig at Huddersfield Poly in probably 1991. It was in the Great Hall mind - ask your dads kids!); and it only took the first 30 seconds of this to remind me of their lovely jingly-jangly Beatlesesque pop offerings.

And of course, in 1993 or so after the band split, Wez, the Resque drummer was latterly recruited to the by-then slightly past it Carter to bolster the duo into a 'proper' band. It wasn't his fault...

There's a nice little fan site here for more information, but there's not much to be found about the band around the internet so I'm a bit at a loss I'm afraid. All stories welcome!

Thousand Yard Stare

You may not believe me, but I do have a kind of plan for where this page is going and what order I'm going to do stuff in. I've got a little notebook and everything (very reasonably priced, 79p from Sainsbury's). But then something comes along that makes me stop and shove something in that I'd forgotten about or was saving for later.

This is one of those times.

Partially because a chap called "cambridgemartin" linked to this blog from something called the Panic Club board and said it was great except for the upcoming band and partly because I'd forgotten that the featured mp3 is of one of my favourite football-metaphors-for-life records (right up there with Mathematically Safe by Half Man Half Biscuit). So ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for Thousand Yard Stare!

Hailing from the much-maligned industrial wastelands of Slough, Thousand Yard Stare banged out a succession of pure jingly-jangly indie pop EPs of the finest quality for four years or so in the early 1990s and were right up there in the pantheon of the country's finest exponents of energetic dancey sing-a-long music that we love so much.

This particular football-metaphor-driven ditty, Thousand Yard Stare - 0-0 AET featured the talents of Martin Bell of The Wonder Stuff on fiddle, topped the Indie music charts and even made its way onto the UK top 40 singles chart.

I'd forgotten just how good Thousand Yard Stare were and I'm sorry it took so long to get them in here; but it was all part of the masterplan. Promise.

Anastasia Screamed

We're cheating a bit here, I'm afraid. Not really cheating, but pushing the borders of what I'm doing here, for no other reason than because Anastasia Screamed are Americans and came "out of the same late-'80s post-punk Boston music scene that produced the Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies".

But they don't really sound like the Pixies or Dinosaur Jr (well, no one does I guess), this particular song sounds almost like an angry James, but with some really top notch jingly-jangly guitars - as all good Fire Records bands could turn out.

There are some pretty good biographies around the internet, not least the above and also here and here so I won't bother you too much with the details.

Instead, have a listen to Anastasia Screamed - Tornado and make up your own minds. Better than the Pixies? Probably not. Just about obscure enough to fit in to these pages? Probably.

I'm at a bit of a loss again I'm afraid. Even though I'm only putting this stuff up here so people can stumble across it and be reminded of the indie vinyl they've got kicking about in the loft, every time I do one of these and I'm not really 100% sure about the band I'm doing I feel like I'm cheating.

If it's any consolation there's a good BMX Bandits one coming...

The High

Formed in Manchester, the Stone Roses would go on to change the face of indie pop with their seminal 1989 debut album (called "The Stone Roses", oddly enough). However, while still young and unknown in 1984, the band had a guitarist called Andy Couzens. Unfortunately for young Mr Couzens, in 1986 a disagreement with the band's the manager ended with him leaving the soon to be massive Roses.

Fortunately for us though, the departed guitarist went off and set up his own band with three former member of another local group called Flag of Convenience*. This new band was called The High.

The band played their first gig in 1989 at the Ritz Ballroom in Manchester - a fantastic venue with a rather springy dancefloor - and were signed straight after to London Records, who they chose over local label Factory amongst others.

Anyway, the usual story follows, hotly-tipped Manchester band, release well-received singles and critically-approved debut album then fail to live up to expectations, hang around for a few years but never recapture the hey-day and split up. They did release a new album in 2004 though. No, me either.

I feel I'm doing the band a disservice, but I'm a bit sketchy on all the details. I was requested (for want of a better word) to put them up and I just can't remember that much about them, so apologies if I've misrepresented.

So this is The High - Box Set Go; the original version of this record was produced by legendary Madchester producers Martin Hannett and John Pennington. Unfortunately this recording is of the 1991 version. The vinyl is in a gatefold sleeve though!

* The fourth member of the band, one Steve Diggle, would soon re-form his original band, The Buzzcocks, you might have heard of them

Milltown Brothers

I don't know why, but I had in my mind that the Milltown Brothers were from Ireland; they're not of course, they're from a little town in Lancashire called Colne - which I discovered as soon as I opened up Wikipedia.

And do you know what only just occurred to me? The band are called the Milltown Brothers; we know that. We also know that the band contains two brothers, Matt and Simon Nelson, so far, so Columbo. But, hang on, Colne is a Lancashire mill town. So, hold your horses here... You mean they're brothers, from a mill town? Christ I must be thick, it's taken me the best part of 20 years to work that out...

I shan't bore you with all the details of the bands history, that's well documented on their myspace page, which is well worth a visit. But suffice to say that the band can be added to the long list of "indie bands that were far better than you remember and should have been far bigger than they were, if only the record company had spent some money and nobody had invented Nirvana".

The Milltown Brothers are, almost inevitably, still pottering along; they released a new album in 2004, but for a perfect slice of 1991 indie pop, have this here mp3: Milltown Brothers - Which Way Should I Jump?, it's got the standard "ding-ding-ding-dinga-dinga-ding-ding" jingly-jangly indie guitar riff in it, so that rates an 8/10 on the Carter Scale of indieness and frankly, dear reader, that's all you need to know. Get the fringe flicking and have a dance round the lounge. You won't regret it.