Record Store Day 2028

Every year Record Store Day sees albums I bought in the 1990s reissued at eye-watering prices. If I could spot winners such as Luna and The Sundays then, surely I can spot the future collectables now. The logic is flawless, and shouldn't be confused with the fact that albums were pressed in small vinyl runs in the 90s and for half that time I didn't have a CD player and only bought vinyl anyway for the rest of the decade.

Box Elders - Alice and Friends
The late 00s saw a preponderance of garage rock bands who were largely uninspired revivalists. Box Elders were different, though. So different that they coined a new genre for their garage rock, "cave pop". They recorded their first single in a cave under the drummer's house in Nebraska.

They were teenagers so could write a song called Necro with the line "what do you call it when you love someone who's dead?". Alice and Friends is a masterpiece in bubblegum psych pop.




Fugu - As Found
Fugu claimed their debut album was an "idiosyncratic baroque sequel to "Sgt Pepper" meeting "Smile" and meant to be made in perfect 60's facsimile." It wasn't. Their second album, though, was.

It had the songs Paul McCartney forgot to write in 1967, recreated the urgent, irresistible power pop of the Raspberries and touched on the gauche melancholia of Neil Young on After The Goldrush to stride the world of popular music like a colossus of Smile harmonies and baroque, electronic grandeur.

As Found was never released on vinyl. Record Store Day, I'm waiting (10 years, I know).



Kings Go Forth - The Outsiders Are Back
They played a similar multi-faceted, driving funk and jubilant soul hybrid that sustained Curtis Mayfield's 1970s high watermark. It's soul music embracing its inspiration and opening windows to the future. They made only one album. God knows why. God, they were red hot.



Hacia Dos Veranos - Limay
Lawrence said in 1982 that the guitar Maurice Deebank used on Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty “made a sound like pins popping in your head”. I get the same sensation listening to Limay.

A better authority than me, The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean, said of Hacia's Ignacio Aguila: "Their guitarist is a maestro: economical, precise, lyrical. His rolling, arpeggiated style will remind you of Felt’s Maurice Deebank or Vini Reilly, but he also possesses a faint echo of Johnny Marr, in that for all his sense of space and harmony he’s playing tunes first and foremost."

Full disclosure: I'm part of the label that released this. We released it because it's brilliant.



Weekend - Sports
Kevin Shields, 1995: "I'd like to be around in five years' time, making better and better records." mbv, 2013: a collection of Loveless outtakes with drum’n’bass samples added in 1996.

Weekend, Sports, 2010: a sonic assault of no-wave sullenness, psychedelic insanity, hypnotic riffs and intense tunes dug up from a crypt. This will be repackaged with Red, a strong contender for the last decade's best ep, and their debut single, All-American.

Sports is still available. So is Red. This is where my argument falls apart and I start a new one: what the fuck's wrong with everyone not buying Weekend records?

C Mimi - Heavenly Peace

The year is 1983. The synth has one setting but there's also "melody from toy music box (composer unknown)". The place is Japan, although its darkness and quirkiness suggests Sheffield was in her mind, and C'est une Chanson is a definite throwback to French pop, accordion and all.

Heavenly Peace is a strange and wondrous ep. You might get it first time, it might grow on you or it could just not be your thing. Don't worry about it if it's not your thing. There are loads of unchallenging, simple, easy records - many of them wonderful - out there you can enjoy.

But if you want avant-garde, experimental music that makes you catch your breath and look at the world differently, then Heavenly Peace is a real record that tells you what the future sounded like in 1983. It still, today, sounds like it's pointing to some ways forwards.

It's sold out at source, but Low Company have copies.

Itchy Bugger - Done One

Low Company is a London record shop run on similar lines to Glasgow's now departed Volcanic Tongue. They stock wyrd folk, gauche DIY, witchy psych, loner electronics, post-punk jerkiness and any dance music variants found under the floorboards on the scene's outer fringes.

They've started a record label to release Done One by Itchy Bugger. Almost inevitably because of the name, Itchy Bugger is from Australia, a country whose musicians are seemingly unburdened by finding names you wouldn't object to wearing on a t-shirt.

Itchy Bugger is also known as Josh, formerly of Heavy Metal who were, depending on your outlook, either murder-punk maestros or reprobates with a fondness for animal drugs. Maybe they were both. Itchy Bugger's Done One is more lo-fi DIY with motorik beats and psychedelic chanting. However butterfingered it is they somehow manage to stumble towards the prize and grab it.

The recreation of The Creation's Painter Man as Baker Man shows they share some DNA with the Television Personalities. They might have had the same absentminded guitar teacher as The Cannanes and they've definitely got a similar primitive rhythmic drive and discordant jangle as the mighty Great Unwashed.

I like this album a hell of a lot. Stream it and buy it from Low Company.

Hairband

When people talk about a new band from Glasgow, I listen. Same way I do if they're from Dunedin or Melbourne. It'd be reckless not to. Especially when that band features members of Breakfast Muff and Spinning Coin.

Enough biography. Tell me what they sound like
Post-punk without the scratchiness. Misery and melody. They're the only band to realise that the first two Go-Betweens albums inspired Life Without Buildings' Any Other City, one of the key British albums of the last 20 years.

I'm basing all of this on one song, but it's a bloody good song. You should hear it.

Yes I should. Let the music play.



How am I supposed to find a band called "Hairband" on The Googs?
No idea. The Hit Parade do okay, so maybe it'll work out. Although I am hoping they say in an interview that "if anyone finds our music on the internet and listens to it, that's a bonus".

I'm told they've already signed to a label with some experience in the dark arts of marketing and social media, so we must hear more soon. We really must.

Can you end this torture by tying it in with some other Scottish bands?
I thought you'd never ask. Hairband are on the Glasgow Nights compilation in aid of Money Advice Scotland, alongside luminaries such as Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai and The Pastels.

Mope Grooves v the Marine Girls

So many bands are compared to the Marine Girls even though they don't really sound like them. The comparisons are more about a certain DIY simplicity, being physically trapped in the suburbs as the imagination roams free, a sonic sparseness, an ideal of doing what you want mistakes and all where the mistakes make the perfection.

And yet no bands cover them, apart from Unrest, once. It's obviously not through musical intimidation. It's more likely the Marine Girls in their teenage self-obsession created a spell that can't be broken. Even though they weren't fantastically original they didn't sound like anyone else. Okay, pedants, maybe the Raincoats a bit and those usual suspects the Velvet Underground.

Courtney Love told Tracey Thorn: "Kurt always wanted to do a cover of that song of yours, ‘In Love’." I'm sure that wasn't in the mind of Mope Grooves' Stevie Pohlman when she covered In Love for their new album, Vanished.

It's a shuddering, ramshackle interpretation that sounds enough like Mope Grooves - or not like the Marine Girls - to matter. If any other bands fancy overcoming their nerves, there could be a fascinating tribute album.

Roxanne needs an answer film

At 14 years old I was going gold
While I was putting dope hits in the mix
Ripping shows with Kane and Biz Markie
Fucking up Roxanne and taking out Sparky
Niggas came in flocks from blocks and blocks
To watch the Rox knock bitches out the box
And every place I played, I headlined

Those few lines from Shante's Big Mama do a better job of telling her story than the dramatisation of her life, Roxanne Roxanne. Or dramatisation of part of her life, 1984 to 1989, just before the release of her first album, so we don't even come close to 1992's Big Mama.

After the success of the four-part documentary Hip-Hop Evolution, it seems counter productive to sacrifice the music of a hip-hop great at the altar of domestic drama. The film starts promisingly with Shante's rap battle prowess, but that's just a set-up for a lot of reality-TV style back story.

When Roxanne's Revenge hits, the film focuses on Shante's alcoholic mother's reaction to finding out her daughter is being talked about. Shante is on the radio and in a local paper, but there's no mention of the record selling 250,000 copies in New York alone.

Calling the film Roxanne Roxanne, after the song that inspired her to write Roxanne's Revenge, is a mistake. It fortunately leads the way open for an answer film - a documentary focusing on a hip-hop great, her music, her rivals and her influence. You could call it Roxanne's Revenge.

Birdie - Bowling Green: the truth revealed

Bowling Green was originally scheduled for release as a split single with The Clientele’s On A Summer Trail in 2014 on a label I co-ran, the Hangover Lounge.

At the last minute, Birdie pulled it, saying they weren’t happy with the mix. It would have been perfect for the label because it’s a hymn to Clerkenwell and environs, namechecking the Hangover Lounge’s venue, The Lexington, and its final resting place, the Betsey Trotwood.

Instead, we got Spiral Staircase, which they’d released 14 years earlier on their debut single. I didn’t think this was right and wanted to pull the release, or just have it as a one-sided Clientele record.

My colleagues disagreed. One of those colleagues, John Jervis, runs WIAIWYA, who are releasing Bowling Green. It’s only fair, then, to give everyone who bought a copy of Spiral Staircase/On A Summer Trail a free download. Right John? “Fuck off.”

Okay then. Paul Kelly of Birdie, how about I upload the demo to appease the masses? “Away with you, satan's dark messenger.”

Righto. Truthfully, Bowling Green is perfect for any label interested in releasing the very best popular music, especially if by ‘best’ you mean ‘Laura Nyro transplanting her Stoned Soul Picnic from Central Park to central London’.

A few years before we’d released Birdie’s first new material in 10 years, A Message To The Sun. Just before we sent that to be mastered Paul asked us not to release it. I managed to talk the perfectionist down that time. The label decided quickly and unanimously to use A Message To The Sun as the lead track on the second Hangover Lounge ep.

Like A Message To The Sun, Bowling Green was one of the songs Birdie recorded in 2002 for a planned third album. I’ve spent the best part of a decade trying to get them to finish that album.

It might yet happen. I started cajoling Paul and Martin Kelly into reforming East Village in 1996. A mere 19 (NINETEEN) years of browbeating, flattery and begging later, they played one song, Shipwrecked.