My Cassette's Just Like A Bazooka?

Apologies for the dull title to this posting, but it’s a very deliberate attempt to ensure that anyone googling for info on these cassettes lands here.

For new readers – about a year ago I tried to do a search like that myself, and found out that there was no one place where you could find track lists and other details for the full series of cassettes you could purchase, via mail order, from the NME back in the eighties.  Indeed, some of them didn’t have any presence on the internet at all.

So I set out to change that, and what you’ll find below gives you full information (title, catalogue number, release date, full track list and a picture of the artwork) for all the cassettes from C81 in, err, 1981 to Indie City 1 & 2 in 1988 – plus the same for the two CDs which continued the catalogue number sequence, and a batch of vinyl albums you could buy via the same process (collect coupons from the paper for a month, send them off with payment, and wait a month for the postman).  And, because they were there, five cover-mounted vinyl EPs that came free with NME between 1985 and 1987.

You also get my opinions and observations about each item, but hey, that’s the price you pay for all the scholarship.

This isn’t a particularly easy site to navigate – basically, you just have to scroll around till you find what you’re looking for – so there’s a list below, itemising what’s covered, to make the search a little bit easier.  The notes and “reviews” were added in the following sequence – cassettes first, in the batches they were released, from oldest to newest – then vinyl albums – then CDs – then vinyl EPs.  So, in other words, if you’re interested in C81, you need to go right to the bottom.

So: what you get as you read down the page is:

Vinyl EPs

Poll Winners 84 / Drastic Plastic / Big Four / Fourplay / Hat Trick

CDs

The Last Temptation of Elvis / Ruby Trax

Vinyl Albums

Good To Go / Blow The House Down / Sgt Pepper Knew My Father / I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die

Cassettes

Indie City 1 & 2

Mixed Peel / The Tape With No Name / The World At One

Hi-Voltage / I Dreamt I Was Elvis / Blow-Up UK / Bush Fire / Pocket Jukebox 2

We Have Come For Your Children / The Latin Kick / Low Lights And Trick Mirrors / What’s Happening Stateside

Feet Start Dancin’ / Pogo A Go Go / C86 / Holiday Romance

Tape Worm / Straight No Chaser / All Africa Radio

Raging Spool / Little Imp / Neon West

Department of Enjoyment / Chess Checkmate / Night People

Mad Mix II / Ace Case / Smile Jamaica

Racket Packet / Stompin’ At The Savoy

Mighty Reel / Pocket Jukebox

Jive Wire / Hit The Road Stax

Dancin’ Master

C81

And with that, my work here is done.

This blog is dedicated to Roy Carr, and Ablex Audio Video of Telford, Shropshire, without whom…

The last batch of music provided by the NME in the eighties came free with the paper itself – a series of cover-mounted vinyl EPs, presumably aimed at generating impulse purchases from new or irregular readers (I don’t remember them ever being announced in advance, so presumably they assumed we regulars would stump up our weekly payment regardless – though memory may be at fault here).

I’m aware of five such EPs but there may be other, later ones, as my regular NME reading pretty much came to an end in 1987.  If you know, please add a comment to this post.

No pictures of the packaging for these babies, by the way, as they came in plain, and rather flimsy, white paper sleeves.  And I couldn’t be arsed to play them on my ancient and unreliable turntable, so the comments below are based on what I remember from more than twenty years ago. Or, in a lot of cases, on what I can’t remember.

NME Poll Winners ‘84

Catalogue Number: GIV 1

Released: May 1985

Bronski Beat Hard Rain / Cocteau Twins Ivo / The Smiths What She Said / U2 Wire (Dub Mix)

Drastic Plastic

Catalogue Number: GIV 2

Released: September 1985

The Style Council My Ever Changing Moods (Live) / Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Forest Fire (Live) / Robert Cray Band Bad Influence (Live) / Prefab Sprout Real Life (Just Around The Corner)

NME’s Big Four

Catalogue Number: GIV 3

Released: February 1986

Tom Waits Downtown Train (NME Version) / The Jesus and Mary Chain Some Candy Talking / Husker Du Ticket To Ride / Trouble Funk Let’s Get Small

Fourplay

Catalogue Number: GIV 4

Released: September 1986

Elvis Costello and the Attractions Uncomplicated / Billy Bragg Honey I’m A Big Boy Now / Mantronix Hardcore Hip Hop (NME Version) / Miles Davis Splatch

NME’s Hat Trick

Catalogue Number: GIV 5

Released: February 1987

Sly and Robbie – The Taxi Connection When You’re Hot You’re Hot / Steinski and the Mass Media The Motorcade Sped On / Sonic Youth White Kross

Notes:

What’s interesting about these EPs is that, as point-of-sale, giveaway items intended to generate impulse buying, you’d expect them to be much more targeted at obvious reader tastes than the more esoteric cassettes.

And they certainly start out that way.  After all, an EP made up of Poll Winners is, by definition, going to contain some of the readers’ favourites.  But by the time of Hat Trick, the grand old NME tradition of improving the readers with stuff they really ought to like is firmly in place.

To be honest, I can’t remember much about Poll Winners at all, as the only band out of the four I had any time for back then were The Smiths, and even then, What She Said eludes me.  I’ve warmed to the Cocteaus but not the extent of finding room for Ivo on CD, so I’d guess that if you like them generally, you’ll probably like this.  As for Bronski  Beat, well, they were always a group you had to pretend to like, because they were admirable and worthy, but the music never did it for me, and while I’d love to hear a Wire song called U2, the same cannot be said of the reverse.

The first two tracks on Drastic Plastic continue the trend of appealing to NME readers’ lowest common denominator, but on the second side they start trying to educate us – Prefab Sprout hadn’t broken through at this point, and for about ten minutes in 1985 Robert Cray was going to make blues the hippest and most popular music on earth, if you’d believed his admirers in the press.  Clearly that didn’t happen, but Bad Influence, the only blues song I know that owes more to I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself than Robert Johnson, is by far the best thing here.  And does anyone else think Forest Fire is one of the most over-rated songs ever?

Big Four is the best of the batch; all killer, no filler, and a perfect balance between the crowd-pleasers (side 1) and the this-is-good-for-you (side 2).  There’s nothing on there that’s not a classic, and, hey, there’s the NME trying to break go-go music again!  A special word for Husker Du’s Ticket To Ride, which single-handedly made me realise that The Beatles were okay after all, and it was time to drop the post-punk posturing about how much I hated them.

Fourplay tries to repeat the Big Four formula, but doesn’t quite achieve the same quality.  No problems with the opening track from Blood And Chocolate, Elvis Costello’s last really good album, but Billy Bragg’s track is a minor work (a country song, and quite charming, but not one of his really great songs).  It was almost mandatory to pretend to like Mantronix in 1986, to the extent I used to buy their singles at reduced prices in the ex-chart bargain bins, but at this distance I can’t remember anything by them at all.  And the Miles track is fine enough, in his latterday, more-funk-than-jazz style, but it’s no Kind of Blue.  The whole thing says 1986 even more than Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Maradona performing a song about Westland from the Chernobyl Festival.

And finally, Esther, NME’s Hat Trick tests the listeners’ patience by consisting of nothing but “improving” works.  Sly and Robbie were great in the late ‘70s but by this time they were churning out tepid funk-reggae by the yard, and Sonic Youth, as was usually the case, are conceptually brilliant and totally dull at the same time.  Steinski, doing what he did (collages of samples, found noises and TV and film clips over hip-hop beats), provides the best track, though as songs about the Kennedy assassination go it’s not as good as efforts by the Human League and Magazine.  Steinski was amazingly hip for about three weeks in 1987, and pointed to a fascinating direction hip-hop has lost track of over the years, i.e. interesting.

The cassette catalogue number sequence continued with a couple of CD releases in the early '90s.  But you know, it just wasn't like the old neighbourhood...

The Last Temptation of Elvis

Catalogue Number: NME 038/039 (available on CD and vinyl)

Released: 1990

Disc 1: Elvis Presley Dialogue / Bruce Springsteen Viva Las Vegas / Sydney Youngblood (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear / Tanita Tikaram Loving You / Robert Plant Let's Have A Party /
The Pogues Got a Lot O'Livin' to Do / Holly Johnson Love Me Tender / Paul McCartney It's Now or Never / Dion Mean Woman Blues / The Jesus And Mary Chain Guitar Man / Cath Carroll & Steve Albini King Creole / Aaron Neville Young and Beautiful / Vivian Stanshall No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car / The Primitives Baby I Don't Care

Disc 2: Hall & Oates Can't Help Falling in Love / The Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra Crawfish / Ian McCulloch Return to Sender / Fuzzbox Trouble / The Hollow Men Thanks to the Rolling Sea / The Blow Monkeys Follow That Dream / Lemmy & The Upsetters with Mick Green Blue Suede Shoes / Nanci Griffith Wooden Heart / The Jeff Healey Band Down in the Alley / The Cramps Jailhouse Rock / Les Negresses Vertes Marguerita / Pop Will Eat Itself Rock-A-Hula Baby / Elvis Presley King of the Whole Wide World (outtakes)

Not just Elvis songs, but songs from Elvis movies.

I can’t comment on this one – I wasn’t excited enough by the track list to buy it, so I’ve never heard it.  I likes me some Elvis, but for reasons I can’t remember this didn’t float my boat.

Ruby Trax

Catalogue Number: NME 040 (available on CD and cassette)

Released: 1992

Disc 1: The Wonder Stuff Coz I Luv You / Billy Bragg When Will I See You Again? / The Jesus and Mary Chain Little Red Rooster / The Mission Atomic / The Fatima Mansions (Everything I Do) I Do It For You / St Etienne Stranger In Paradise / The Wedding Present Cumberland Gap / Aztec Camera with Andy Fairweather-Low (If Paradise Is) Half As Nice / Dannii Minogue Show You The Way To Go / Welfare Heroine Where Do You Go To My Lovely? / The Blue Aeroplanes Bad Moon Rising / Senseless Things Apache / Teenage Fanclub Mr Tambourine Man

Disc 2: Carter USM Another Brick In The Wall / Blur Maggie May / Tears For Fears Ashes To Ashes / The House of Love Rock Your Baby / The Frank And Walters I'm A Believer / EMFShaddap You Face / Suedede Brass In Pocket / Tori Amos Ring My Bell / Kingmaker Lady Madonna / Marc Almond Like A Prayer / The Farm Don't You Want Me? / Ned's Atomic Dustbin I've Never Been To Me / Boy George My Sweet Lord

Disc 3: Jesus Jones Voodoo Chile / Bob Geldof Sunny Afternoon / Johnny Marr and Billy Duffy The Good, The Bad And The Ugly / Cud Down Down / The Fall Legend Of Xanadu / Sinead O'Connor Secret Love / World Party World Without Love / Inspiral Carpets Tainted Love / Elektic Music Baby Come Back / Ridede The Model / Vic Reeves Vienna / Tin Machine Go Now / Curve I Feel Love / Manic Street Preachersreachers Suicide Is Painless

NME wished itself a happy 40^th birthday by compiling specially recorded (for the most part – they found the Tin Machine track down the back of a sofa, or something) covers of various UK number ones from 1952-1992, a period which stretches from Secret Love (Sinead O’Connor, understated and charming) to (Everything I Do) I Do It For You (The Fatima Mansions, over-doing the irony and charmless).

Inevitably, it’s a curate’s egg, and looking at the track list, the first thing that strikes me is that I don’t remember much of it at all.  The next thing is that I’ve forgotten who some of the bands are, if indeed I ever knew (Welfare Heroine?  Senseless Things?  Cud?  Elektric Music?).  And of those I can remember with any degree of clarity, some (The Fall, Marr & Duffy) are desperately disappointing, some don’t even meet your already minimal expectations (Geldof) and a tiny, tiny handful are good – O’Connor, as noted, plus Blur’s charmingly laid-back Maggie May, Aztec Camera’s If Paradise… (similarly charming and laid-back) and, best of all, a titanically erotic Ring My Bell from Tori Amos, which replaces the original’s girlish teasing with a head-on sexual onslaught.  Oh, and Vic Reeves thinks Vienna is in Belgium.

And Jesus, weren't the Blue Aeroplanes a dull bunch?

As well as the cassette series, the NME also offered a few vinyl albums on the same collect the coupons, give us your cash and wait a month basis.  To wit:

Good To Go

Catalogue Number: NME Bomb 1

Released: 1986

Side 1: Trouble Funk Good To Go / Hot Cold Sweat Meet Me At The Go Go / Trouble Funk Still Smokin’ / Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare Make 'Em Move (The Wrecking Crew's Theme) / E.U. E.U. Freeze / Wally Badarou Keys (The Chemist's Theme)

Side 2: Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers We Need Money / Donald Banks Status Quo (Little Beat's Theme) / Trouble Funk Drop The Bomb / Ini Kamoze Riot Zone (Call The Police) / Trouble Funk I Like It / Redds and the Boys Movin' And Groovin' / Trouble Funk Good To Go (Reprise)

Side 3: Osiris War On The Bullshit / E.U. Sho' Nuff Bump'n

Side 4: Trouble Funk In The Mix (Don't Touch That Stereo) / Trouble Funk Drop The Bomb

As noted somewhere below, go-go was a short-lived, highly percussive, rough and ready  funk genre that gripped Washington DC for a couple of years but never really took off anywhere else.  It’s probably a bit harsh to say it was a white eighties NME reader’s dream of “If only modern black music were like…” come true, but it’s probably correct, too.  I certainly enjoyed it, and even bought a Redds and the Boys 12" single, though it did come from the bargain bin in Woolies in Durham, so I wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of the go-go scene.

The NME bust its collective balls trying to break go-go in the UK, an effort which culminated in this, an extended version of the soundtrack album for an Island-records sponsored movie about the scene which also failed to break it outside DC.

This differs from the “official” soundtrack by throwing in a second album of long tracks which was only available through the NME offer.  It’s a hefty bonus, because too much of the first album is taken up by generic soundtrack music.  On the second record, you get four genuine classics of the style at the ten-plus minutes they’re supposed to last. Taken in conjunction with the first album, you basically get the greatest hits of the entire genre, and probably all the go-go you’d ever need apart from Chuck Brown’s majestic live album from 1987.    

Blow The House Down

Catalogue Number: NME HOUSE 1

Released: 1987

Side 1: Adonis and the Endless Poker The Poke (Your Turn To Work Me Mix) / Joe Smooth & Anthony Thomas Goin’ Down (Dub Mix) / C-Quince featuring Professor Funk I Can’t Wait (Coming Mix) / F.X Faith, Hope and Charity (More Fun Mix)

Side 2: Patrick Adams & Jack In The Bush Underwater Jack / Masters At Work Alright Alright (Heart Mix) / Chip E If You Only Knew (Subway Whop) / Mr Lee & Kompany Can You Feel It (House Trax Mix) / Fingers Inc. You’re Mine (Mine Remix)

I was losing touch with popular music by the time this House compilation, released in conjunction with Westside Records, emerged in 1987.  This may be to do with the fact that I finally had a proper job, or more generally because I was getting a little older, but for me it’s a reminder of that strangely liberating moment when you realise that (a) you don’t know who the NME is going on about, (b) you don’t care, and (c) if you do choose to read about them, you care even less.

So I remember very little about this other than that it seemed to be towards the Acid end of the House spectrum, and – vaguely – the hooks from the Joe Smooth, F.X., and Chip E tracks.

But, you ask, is it any good? I haven’t got a clue.  I just don’t know how to evaluate this kind of thing. 

The Sugarhill Groove: Roots of Rap (Rare & Original US Mixes)

Cat No: NME FUNK 1

Released: 1988

Side One: Grandmaster Flash It's Nasty / Sequence Funky Sounds (Tear The Roof Off) /Trouble Funk Hey Fellas

Side Two: Treacherous Three Whip It / West Street Mob Let's Dance / Grandmaster Flash Wheels Of Steel

Side Three: Adventure What Is Your Fantasy (Eyeland Mix) /  Mean Machine Disco Dreams / Sequence And You Know That

Side Four: Funky Four + One  That's The Joint / Treacherous Three Yes, We Can Can / Sugarhill Gang  Sugarhill Groove

I must confess to not even knowing this existed till Eddie posted his comments below - many thanks sir.  It's a set of early hip hop and the grooves that inspired it. I've never heard it, but the track list sounds excellent.  In keeping with the slightly obsessive nature of this site, I'll point out that the final track also appears on the 1981 cassette Dancin' Master.
 

Sgt Pepper Knew My Father

Catalogue Number: NME PEP LP 100

Released: 1988

Side 1: Three Wize Men Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / Wet Wet Wet With A Little Help From My Friends / The Christians Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds / The Wedding Present with Amelia Fletcher Getting Better / Hue and Cry Fixing A Hole / Billy Bragg with Cara Tivey She’s Leaving Home / Frank Sidebottom Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite

Side 2: Sonic Youth Within You Without You / Courtney Pine When I’m Sixty-Four / Michelle Shocked Lovely Rita / The Triffids Good Morning Good Morning / Three Wize Men Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) / The Fall A Day In The Life

NME celebrated the 20^th anniversary of Sgt Pepper by producing – a few months late - an all-star remake, the proceeds from which went to the newly-founded Childline.  It’s most famous for leading to a number one single, Wet Wet Wet’s bland covers-band verson of With A Little Help From My Friends.  Technically, it was a double A-side, but Billy Bragg does himself no favours by claiming he’s had a number one single as a result.  It could have had a blank b-side, Billy, and the Wets would still have got to number one; they were the teenage girls’ band of the hour.

Anyhoo, the original often used to be called the best album ever made.  It’s not even the best album by the Beatles, but if you can offset that daft “I hate the Beatles” prejudice many of us wore with pride in the eighties, and to which a few diehards still rally, you can accept that it’s a colourful entertainment and a record of massive historical and cultural resonance.

The remake, however, is rubbish, from the Three Wize Men’s trying-too-hard-to-be-clever start to The Fall’s going-through-the-motions finish.  In fact, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever and going-through-the-motions cover pretty much every track, with the exception of Frank Sidebottom, who is by far the best thing here, just by virtue of being himself, i.e. a man with a papier-mache head singing childish nonsense in a daft voice.  The rest is desperately forgettable.

Still, all in a good cause, mate.

Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die

Catalogue Number: NME NAM 1

Released: 1988

Side 1: Country Joe & The Fish I Feel Like I'm Fixin To Die / Kenny Rogers & The First Edition Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town / Tom Paxton Talking Vietnam Pot Luck Blues / Jimmy Holiday I'm Gonna Help Hurry My Brothers Home / Staff Sgt Barry Sadler The Ballad Of The Green Berets / Jan Berry The Universal Coward / Johnny Taylor Jody's Got Your Girl And Gone / Eric Burdon & The Animals Sky Pilot / William Bell Marching Off To War

Side 2: Phil Ochs I Ain't Marchin' Anymore / Lightnin' Hopkins Vietnam Blues Pts 1 & 2 / Allen Orange  VC Blues / Victor Lundberg An Open Letter To My Teenage Son / Terry Nelson & C Company  Battle Hymn Of Lt. Calley / The Elegants with Vito Picone Letter From Vietnam /Merle Haggard Okie From Muskogee / Joe Tex I Believe I'm Gonna Make It

The best by far of NME’s vinyl albums, this is an endlessly fascinating mix of songs about the Vietnam war that came out while it was being fought.  It’s fantastically eclectic, covering folk-rock, psychedelia, country, blues, and, magnificently, soul.  To say nothing of insane monologues and singalongs from right-wing nutjobs, one of which – Sadler’s The Ballad of The Green Berets – was a US number one in 1966!

Most of it is musically great and all of it’s historically fascinating.  The soul tracks are the best, though, especially Johnny Taylor’s brooding hard-luck tale of back-home girlfriends being stolen away by the local Lothario, and Joe Tex’s indescribable song about a guy in a foxhole whose letter from his girl is so inspiring it makes him stand up and shoot “two more enemies”.  And it namechecks Batman and Robin, as everything had to in 1966.  Politically, it’s bizarre beyond belief: musically, it’s among the top 10 tracks from the whole ‘80s NME catalogue.

The soul tracks may be best because Vietnam hit black America so much harder than it hit white America – as the copious, fascinating sleeve notes make clear.  So what with the quality of the contents and the quality of the packaging, this is a fantastic album and one that’s crying out for a CD re-release.

Catalogue Numbers: NME 036 (Indie City 1) and NME 037 (Indie City 2)

Released: Autumn 1988

Track lists:

Indie City 1

Side 1:Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Tupelo/Depeche Mode People Are People (Different Mix)/Sonic Youth Death Valley ‘69/Cabaret Voltaire Nag Nag Nag/Josef K Radio Drill Time/Motorhead Motorhead/Orange Juice Blue Boy/The Fire Engines Candy Skin/The Mekons Never Been In A Riot/Gang of Four Armalite Rifle

Side 2: The Freshies I’m In Love With The Girl On The Virgin Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk/Aztec Camera We Could Send Letters/The Damned Smash It Up/The Three Johns Death Of The European/Newtown Neurotics Mindless Violence/The Red Skins Lean On Me/Colourbox Official World Cup Theme/Joy Division Transmission/Cocteau Twins The Spangle Maker/The Normal Warm Leatherette

Indie City 2

Side 1: The House of Love Shine On/The Loft Up The Hill And Down The Slope/The Pogues Dark Streets Of London/The Triffids Wide Open Road/The Smiths Hand In Glove/Robert Wyatt Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’/…And The Native Hipsters There Goes Concorde Again/The Cramps Human Fly/R.E.M. Radio Free Europe/Special AKA Gangsters

Side 2: Dead Kennedys Holiday In Cambodia/The Southern Death Cult Fat Man/The Cult Spiritwalker/The Primitives Really Stupid/Jonathan Richman Roadrunner (Twice)/James Hymn From The Village/The Fall Roche Rumble/Pop Will Eat Itself Black Country Chain Saw Massacre/This Mortal Coil Song To The Siren/New Order Murder

Verdict

The Indie City twins are the last cassette-only, mail-order NME sets and thus – an unavoidable cliché lurches up the slope towards us - the end of an era.  After this, there were two mail-order-only items available as cassettes or CDs (The Last Temptation of Elvis and Ruby Trax) but these were qualitatively different as they featured tracks specifically recorded for the NME.  Thus, in essence, they’re novelty items (or curio, to be kinder), as opposed to either (a) snapshots of what’s going on right now, or (b) smart guides to label archives or specific genres.  And after that, we were in the land of freebie cover mounts, where oblivion beckons.  And waaaaaaaay too old for NME (I’d stopped reading regularly in 1987, since you asked, and haven’t bought it since I clipped me coupons for Ruby Trax).

Indie City is what you’d come up with if you were asked to guess what NME cassette compilations from eighties were like, if you’d never actually read it at the time or come across said cassettes.  In other words, it’s a set of (mainly) student disco classics.  This is both fun, as it’s hugely enjoyable, and saddening.  Saddening, because it may well be what most of the readers listened to most of the time, but it doesn’t reflect the admirable scope of the NME - and its readers - at their most ambitious.

As such, it reflects where the NME itself was by the late eighties, which is to say its third distinct phase of the decade.  At the start, with writers like Morley and Penman, it was close to being an avant-garde art magazine, full of theorising on the nature of pop, which is reflected in both the brown rice quirkiness of the C81 and the semiotic irony of Dancin’ Master.  Then, through the broader cultural tensions of the mid-eighties, it was at war with itself as to how music could ally itself to social change (no one, on either side, doubted this was either desirable or possible).  You had your Right But Repulsive roundheads on one side – the volubly politicised Soul fans (biggest error: their belief that hip-hop was inherently left-wing, rather than, for the most part, brutally and rapaciously capitalist).  On the other, you had the Wrong But Romantic cavaliers, who still believed in Rock as profound and redemptive and allied to something  like the counter-cultures of previous rock eras (biggest error: thinking that The Long Ryders were the future of anything).  The audible evidence for this is the occasionally baffling, but usually thrilling, eclecticism of the mid-eighties tapes.  Then, the soul boys all got the boot in 1987, when their blatant support for Kinnock in the general election (he was on the cover, with an order to vote for him) upset the Tory board of IPC.  So, by the time Indie City appeared, NME – though still on the left – was entirely in the hands of the Rockers, whose worldview was probably closest to most readers anyhow.  And so it finally became what most people had always assumed it was – a fanzine for just-a-bit-left-of-mainstream rock bands whose main constituency was students.  It lost the intellectual excitements of the previous two eras, but it stabilised the decade-long sales decline, and it was undoubtedly a funnier read than it had been since the pre-punk era.  And how not, with writers like Kelly, Quantick, and (a bit later) Collins and Maconie on board?

Indie City, then, is the perfect reflection of the tastes of the new regime and the majority of the readers at that quiet point just before Madchester hauled into view.  That’s why it’s both aesthetically conservative (which in turn is why it’s a bit depressing) but enormously entertaining (which is why it isn’t at all depressing); not so much Indie classics as Indie classicism.  There are some survivors from C81 (and even some of the same tracks, but that seems appropriate, as they were landmarks; it doesn’t feel cheap like the reappearance of the DAF track on Hi Voltage), but Linx and James Blood Ulmer are not among them.  Put another way, it is pretty whitebread.  Then again, one thing that comes through which isn't in evidence on any previous NME tapes is an honest-to-gosh sense of humour.  The tracks by The Freshies and …And The Native Hipsters had been Peoples’ Favourites for years, but always given short shrift by the likes of Morley (Mancunians making jokes you didn’t need a grounding in art history to understand?  Disgraceful!) or Soul Fuhrer Stuart Cosgrove (Anyone making a joke?  Disgraceful!).  No earlier period of NME would have ‘fessed up to the unalloyed hilarious brilliance that is Motorhead, albeit in small doses.  And the Robert Wyatt track is very, very funny. Deliberately, in case you were wondering.

There is some continuity with previous tapes, notably the tradition of starting with weaker tracks (Nick Cave’s Tupelo is a fine and mighty thing, but too much of a “builder” to grab you as an opener, and as for Depeche Mode, well, dear oh dear; likewise, on the second tape, Shine On is a miserable opener, and The Loft and the Triffids are also a bit flat), and New Order’s Murder is hardly a big finish.  But as for the rest, if you’re going to compile 40 Great Crowd-Pleasing Indie Bits From 1976 (Richman) to 1988 (PWEI), Incorporating Key Acts, Key Trends And Mandatory Classics, there’s probably no better way to do it.  Put another way; you may not agree with the brief, but there’s no denying they’ve fulfilled it.

And, as it’s the last “pure” NME eighties cassette, let’s have a few of these to finish on.

There At The Outset On C81, And Here At Close Of Play: Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Wyatt, Josef K, Special AKA

Really There At The Outset, Etc: Orange Juice’s Blue Boy and Aztec Camera’s We Could Send Letters

Most Persistent Manager: And The Winner Is… Cabaret Voltaire, with six appearances on NME cassettes: runner-up, Robert Wyatt, with five

Surprisingly, Putting In Their First Appearance On An NME Cassette: Sonic Youth, The Cramps, R.E.M, and, above all, Joy Division

Least Likely Lyric: Motorhead, Motorhead, for: We're moving like a parallelogram.  Like a what?

Catalogue Numbers: NME 033 (Mixed Peel), NME 034 (The Tape With No Name) and  NME035 (The World At One)

Released: Autumn 1987

Track lists:

Mixed Peel

Side 1:The Undertones Here Comes The Summer/Wire I Am The Fly/Robert Wyatt I'm A Believer/Madness Bed & Breakfast Man/Gang of Four At Home He's A Tourist/New Order5-8-6/The Slits Love And Romance/Billy Bragg Love Gets Dangerous/The Adverts
Gary Gilmore's Eyes

Side 2: The Birthday Party Release The Bats/Culture Two Sevens Clash/The Ruts SUS/The Folk Devils Ink Runs Dry/T Rex Ride A White Swan/The Fall Put Away/Wah! Basement Blues - The Story Of The Blues/The Electro Hippies Mega Armageddon Death/Chickens /The Damned New Rose/That Petrol Emotion Can't Stop

The Tape With No Name

Side 1: Steve Earle Guitar Town/Dwight Yoakam Please, Please Baby/Patty Loveless Wicked Ways/Sweethearts of the Rodeo Midnight Girl, Sunset Town/Randy Travis What’ll You Do About Me/Reba McEntire Have I Got A Deal For You/Johnny Cash The Night Hank Williams Came To Town/Kathy Mattea Train Of Memories/Rosanne Cash The Way We Make A Broken Heart/John Hiatt Memphis In The Meantime/Dave Alvin Border Radio/Highway 101 featuring Paulette Carlson Good Goodbye

Side 2: kd lang and the reclines Got The Bull By The Horns/Lyle Lovett Cowboy Man/Ricky Skaggs A Hard Row To Hoe/The O’Kanes Oh Lonesome You/Georgia Brown George Jones On The Jukebox/The Forester Sisters 100% Chance Of Blue/Joe Ely Silver City/George Strait All My Ex’s Live In Texas/Rattlesnake Annie Funky Country Livin’/Emmylou Harris Sweetheart Of The Pines/Nanci Griffith Ford Econoline/John Prine Paradise

The World At One

Side 1: Salif Keita Sina/Najma Akhtar Dil Laga Ya Tha/Yanka Rupkina with Trakiistra Troika & Kostadim Varimezov Ot Kak Se Mara Rodila/Kass Kass Mister Oh!/Yiorgos Mangas Choreptse Tsifteleli/Sidiki Diabete & Ensemble Ba Togoma/Ketama No Se Si Vivo O Sueno/Zouk Time Guetho A Liso/Abdul Aziz Mubarak Ah’Laa Jarah

Side 2: Ofra Haza Galbi/Hukwe Zawose, Dickson Mkwana & Lubeleje Chiute Nhongolo/Shirati Jazz Dr. Binol/Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Ya Mohammed Bula Lo/The Real Sounds Of Africa Murume Wangu/Jali Musa Jawara Fote Mogoban/Dilika Amazimuzimu/Sadik Diko & Reshit Shehu Valle e Gajdes/Jorge Cabera A Fuego Lento/Sasono Mulyo Gamelan Gon Kebyar

This is a much more entertaining outing than the previous batch of cassettes, but it’s abundantly clear that, by this stage, the thrill has gone.  The tapes through 1985 were eclectic in the best way: jamming stuff you’d probably never hear up against stuff you really wanted, thus ensuring you the listener were exposed to new sounds and new ideas in a way you couldn’t help but enjoy (well, mostly).  It was didactic, and it was –arguably - arrogant, but it was painless, fascinating and frequently thrilling.  It also summed up what was good about the early-to-mid eighties – that you could, as it were, have your starter, your main course and your dessert on the same plate, at the same time.  The trouble was, the accompanying archive sets (fun as they were) gradually took over, for whatever reasons, and this went hand-in-hand with one of the bad things about music in the eighties – the rise of niche marketing. And that keeps genres and styles apart from each other.  It’s much easier for the industry to work this way, but it doesn’t favour creativity, because if all you hear is what you’ve always heard, that’s what you’ll get in future.

The John Peel show had always been eclectic, of course, and continued to be so long after the industry wised up to niche marketing.  Mixed Peel is a sampler of the hundreds of sessions recorded for the shows up to 1987 (there were clearly hundreds more to follow).  Although Peel sessions dated back to the late sixties, the only ones here to predate punk are from T. Rex and Robert Wyatt (his fourth appearance on an NME cassette), and the whole thing is weighted towards what would be considered typical “NME music”.  That’s fair enough – the rag needed to make some money, and of the three tapes in this set, it’s the one with the highest obvious NME reader appeal.  However, sitting as it does in the comfortable middleground, it doesn’t really reflect the great man’s breadth of taste, though it’s all fairly invigorating, as is obvious from the track list: tidy, mostly on-the-spot versions of some very good songs.  If I have to single out a “best track”, I’ll go for The Damned, if only because I heard that entire session recently and it’s magnificent.  Quibbles: if you’re going to have a largely forgotten, undistinguished band like The Folk Devils, why not include their best song, Hank Turns Blue, instead of this one?  And, apart from an attempt to seem contemporary, why include dullards like The Electro Hippies (thrash metal novelty act - you know, songs that last about five seconds and a vocalist who sounds like a drunk being sick) and That Petrol Emotion?  Still and all, the whole thing makes for a better listen than pretty much anything else that came out in 1987, which may well be the all-time nadir year for pop music.  But it’s a shame it went for entry-level Peel, because there’s so much more that would have reflected his ethos more accurately (June Tabor, Ivor Cutler, Misty In Roots, Can, The Nightingales, some of the visiting bluesmen who he gave air to throughout the early seventies… to say nothing of slightly more accessible but legendary sessions from Siouxsie and the Banshees), and more courageously.  Still, at least they got The Fall, and a sampler of the epochal Slits sessions, without which it would have made no sense whatsoever.

The Tape With No Name is the successor to the 1984 Neon West, being a more up-to-date sampler of the less cheesy, less conservative end of country.  It’s not as durable as Neon West, because the earlier taped cherry-picked from a decade of music to select undeniable classics, whereas this looks at the then-recent mid-eighties and lacks the gift of hindsight.  Consequently, there are quite a few forgettable items, even from some of the more familiar names.  On the upside: it’s even more down-to-earth and cheese-free than its predecessor, it’s got some serious star names on it (most of them in good-to-very-good form), and, at twenty-four tracks, the VFM concerns which arise on NME cassettes in their latter years are well absent.  There’s nothing here that will have you stamping on your Stetson in disgust, and though, as noted, there’s quite a bit of forgettable filler, there’s very fine stuff indeed from Steve Earle, The Sweethearts of the Rodeo (as good a take on small-town ennui as you’ll ever hear), Johnny Cash and his l’il gal Rosanne, John Hiatt, Joe Ely and George Strait.  And in the finest track, Nanci Griffith’s Ford Econoline, you get all of Thelma and Louise but better in a tad over two minutes.  Nanci has become a big favourite round at Bazooka Towers, and this is where we first heard her: probably the last example of an NME cassette opening our ears to something completely new.  But, coming back to niche marketing (and this tape reinforces that by having the Harp Beat Festival logo on it), wouldn’t it have been much more fun to hear Nanci surrounded by contemporaries like Public Enemy and The Pixies?

The World At One is, as you might have guessed, a compilation of World Music, a notion which encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the Niche Marketing approach to music, as – with the best of intentions – where else exactly does music come from but the world?  And, as many before me have noted, what exactly does the classical music of Bali (Sasono Mulyo) have in common with folk-dance music from Crete (Yiorgos Mangas), other than, err, not coming from round here?  The notion of World Music is both logically wobbly and faintly patronising.  Or, as Louis Armstrong said when a journalist asked him if what he played was “folk music”, “I ain’t never heard no horse sing”.

Anyhoo, grumbles apart, this is splendidly diverse and illuminating, though as with the earlier All-Africa Radio I’m hampered by not quite knowing what to listen out for to really make it come to life.  But even a confused listener like me can’t deny the genius of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, one of the greatest voices ever recorded, in any style or genre, anywhere; and one of his rival great voices is of course Bulgaria’s Yanka Rupkina, caught here doing that spine-chilling Bulgarian thing.  And I loves me some Yiorgos Mangas, of whom the largely too-sketchy liner notes claim that he “sound(s) like the lost link between Albert Ayler and a Muezzin chant”.  It’s even better than that promises.

And that, apart from the following year’s valedictory Indie City, is it for the NME cassettes.

Catalogue Numbers: NME 028 (Hi Voltage), NME 029 (I Dreamt I Was Elvis), NME030 (Blow-Up UK), NME 031 (Bush Fire) and NME 032 (Pocket Jukebox 2)

Released: Spring 1987

Track lists:

Hi Voltage

Side 1: Suicide Ghost Rider/Soft Cell Memorabilia/Matt Johnson Red Cinders In The Sand/Holger Hiller Jonny (Du Lump)/ Erasure Senseless/Thomas Leer Letter From America/DAF Kebab Traume (Live)/Cabaret Voltaire Baader Meinhof

Side 2: Holger Czukay Hey Baba Rebop/Depeche Mode Black Celebration/Neu! Hallogallo/Can I Want More/Colourbox Breakdown/Yello Homer Hossa

I Dreamt I Was Elvis

Side 1: Elvis Presley Good Rockin' Tonight (Live - Short Excerpt)/Billy Lee Riley Red Hot/Jack Earls Let’s Bop/Ray Harris Where’d You Stay Last Night/Carl Perkins Put Your Cat Clothes On/Sonny Burgess We Wanna Boogie/Jerry Lee Lewis Hillbilly Music/Rudy Grayzell Judy/Hayden Thompson Love My Baby/Ray Smith Break Up/Glenn Honeycut All Night Rock

Side 2: Hal Harris Jitterbop Baby/Pat Cupp That Girl Of Mine/Johnny Todd Pink Cadillac/Glenn Barber Atom Bomb/Benny Joy Spin The Bottle/Truitt Forse Chicken Bop/Dick Bush Hollywood Party/Rock Rogers That Ain’t It/Danny Reeves I’m A Hobo/Danny Boy Don’t Go Pretty Baby

Blow-Up UK

Side 1: Loose Tubes Hermeto's Big Breakfast/Stan Tracey & Peter King In Walked Bud/Clark Tracey New World/Human Chain Jolobe/The Jazz Renegades A Sack Full Of Soul/Sphere featuring Andy Shepherd For C.C.

Side 2: Courtney Pine Big Nick/Jamie Talbot Mornin'/Steve Williamson Splutain And Scenic/Tommy Chase Quartet Double Secret/Joe Harriott Shepherd's Serenade/Tim Whitehead's BorderlineYellow Hill/Working Week Soul Train/Loose Tubes Arriving

Bush Fire

Side 1: Jacob Miller Keep On Knocking/Doctor Alimantado Best Dressed Chicken In Town/Freddie McGregor Big Ship/Augustus Pablo Up Warrika Hill/The Wailing Souls War/Black Uhuru Natural Mystic/Clint Eastwood and General Saint Tribute To General Echo/Half Pint One In A Million/Eek-A-Mouse Terrorists In The City

Side 2: Frankie Paul War Is In The Dance/Yellowman Zungguzungguzungguzeng/Barrington Levy Prison Oval Rock/Keith Hudson Felt We The Strain/The Heptones Love Won’t Come Easy/Johnny Osbourne Water Pumping/Lone Ranger Johnny Make You Bad So/Coco Tea Coco Tea Medley/Nitty Gritty Hog In A Minty

Pocket Jukebox 2

Side 1: Earl Bostic Flamingo/Hank Ballard & The Midnighters The Twist/Christine Kittrell I'm A Woman/ C.L. Blast Somebody Shot My Eagle/The Impressions Talking About My Baby/Ann Sexton I Want To Be Loved/Aaron Neville Struttin' On Sunday/ Robert Cray That's What I'll Do 

Side 2: The Shangri-Las Give Him A Great Big Kiss/John Lee Hooker Big Legs, Tight Skirt/Jimmy Reed Shame, Shame, Shame/Albert King We All Wanna Boogie/Wynonie Harris Good Mornin' Judge/Nina Simone Love Me Or Leave Me/The Dells Don't Tell Nobody/Don Thomas Come On Train/Earl Gaines Turn On Your Lovelight 

Verdict

Five tapes in one batch looked like a bargain, but less was more: collectively, this was the most disappointing set of tapes offered in the whole eight years between C81 and Indie City.  There were four main reasons for this.  First up, the tapes all seemed really short – as though you weren’t actually getting a lot of VFM.  Point of fact, they probably aren’t that much shorter than many of their predecessors, but they feel that way.  This may be partly due to the second reason for the disappointment – the quality.  Whether or not you liked selections on the earlier tapes, you never felt the compilers didn’t know what they were doing.  The quality here is patchy, to say the least.  Our third, closely related reason, is a certain incoherence – even when the quality is pretty good overall (as with Blow-Up UK, f’r’ex), it’s not always clear what the point of the tape is.  Let’s take a closer look, and pin down some of these problems more clearly.

Hi-Voltage is very mixed bag of what now gets called electronica but was then called… well, not very much at all, as 1987 saw less overall interest in electronic music than at any time before or since.  Acid House and Detroit Techno were about to become massive, but no-one really saw that coming at the time.  So quite what a cassette full of synth-twiddlers was supposed to tell us in 1987 is unclear.  It covers quite a wide time frame (the earliest track, Neu!’s Hallogallo, is from 1972), but fails as a history (there’s no Kraftwerk, for Hoggoth’s sake, and no Pet Shop Boys, who were probably the biggest pop group in the country at that point).  The selections are quite diverse, which in theory is good, but it gives the tape an almost incoherent feeling, as it lurches from one thing to another without any obvious plan.  And the best track, the titanic Hallogallo, isn’t really electronica at all (and it’s let down by a really flat sound quality – on the original Neu! album, this comes across as one of the greatest things ever made, but it seems curiously noodling here).  And watch as pop does indeed eat itself – the DAF track has been recycled directly from C81.  That’s unforgivably lazy.  That’s a rip-off.

Electronic music does seem to attract a certain kind of tosser – the type of people who seem to think that just playing electronic instruments makes them a mad genius.  Step forward, Holger Hiller and Yello, both of whose tracks are maddening when they’re on and completely forgettable when they’ve finished.  Falling into the Just Plain Forgettable camp: Matt Johnson, Erasure, Thomas Leer, Colourbox.  I played this tape just the other night and can’t remember anything about any of the tracks mentioned in this paragraph, and hell, in general, I like Colourbox a lot, to this very day.

Electronic people also like to think of themselves as “transgressive”, which is usually as tedious and unconvincing as the “admire my mad genius” tendency just noted.  Step forward, then, Depeche Mode, surely the least convincing bad boys in pop history.  Heroin addiction and clinical death notwithstanding, they never looked anything but comical, and while some of their tunes are quite enjoyable, many of them – and Black Celebration is one of them – are let down by lyrics which even 14-year-olds would cringe at.

This leaves some genuinely great tracks by Suicide (ironically, one of the weakest NME tapes is one of the few that starts with an absolute work of genius), Soft Cell, Neu! and Can (both the latter two, from the 1970s, still sound like they’re beaming in from several decades in the future), and decent ones from Holger Czukay and Cabaret Voltaire, putting in a fifth appearance on an NME cassette.  So the total is: four good tracks, two decent ones, one laughable one, one disqualified due to being recycled, and six completely forgettable ones.  Those statistical grounds, plus the fact that the purpose of the cassette is completely unclear, lead to the inevitable conclusion that this tape is a bit of a turkey.

I Dreamt I Was Elvis, however, is the last turkey in the shop – probably the worst NME tape of the lot.  It’s a rockabilly compilation.  That’s not the problem.  Rhino Records brought out a 4-CD set of rockabilly last year, which mixes classics and obscurities, and it’s a gem.  The problem with this is, it’s a crap rockabilly complilation.  Continuing the Hi-Voltage irony, it starts (after a teasing bit of Elvis) with a classic from Billy Lee Riley (who can resist him singing “My gal is red hot!” followed by the immediate backing singer response “Your gal ain’t doodly squat!”).  However, after that the big names (Perkins, Lewis) are distinctly underpowered, the songs are mostly forgettable, and the performances more creepy than anything.

Side one was licensed from Charly, who in turn took all tracks from the Sun/(Sam) Philips archives.  At least four of these items weren’t issued at the time, and you can see why Sam Philips made that decision.  They’re dull.

Side two comes from Ace, via - originally - a wide spread of labels.  This tips the overall trend from dull to irksome.  I have a soft spot for Rock Rogers That Ain’t It, which is so primitive it sounds like it was made by DC Comics’ swamp-monster Solomon Grundy, but the rest is like nails down a blackboard.  This is mainly because of an audible gulf between the self-belief and actual talent on display.  These guys are so cocky, and so crap, you just want to slap them.  The worst offender is Hollywood Party by Dick Bush (nice name, mind though but), a puerile attempt at credibility by association – the “Hollywood” stars name-checked in the song are in fact characters from big rock and roll hits (Be-Bop-A-Lula, Long Tall Sally, etc).  It will have you pulling your hair out, it’s so unjustifiably pleased with itself.  Of course, the combination of arrogance and ineptitude can be charming – it’s a large part of the appeal of sixties garage band music – but for some reason (probably the sparse arrangements - garage bands could always turn the amps up to eleven and buy a fuzztone pedal) it doesn’t click at all here.

This tape is quite interesting as psychopathology overlaid with sociology.  On track after track, you hear inbred, barely-literate hillbillies oozing excessive amounts of testosterone but trying to express it verbally in the clichés of mainstream fifties teen-speak.  This attempt at pretending to be nice guys while they’ve really got rape on their minds is very, very creepy.  You get the impression that their idea of the ultimate seduction line is “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll pull out before I shoot”.  Essentially, this is the sound of white Deep South masculinity in crisis as the gene pool becomes so shallow, it drains out.  From that perspective, it’s interesting, if unsettling.  From a musical perspective, however, it’s a big let-down.

Thankfully, things pick up quite a bit on the remaining three; the reviews are shorter, but that’s only because there’s less to complain about, and hell, it’s fun to rant.  Blow-Up UK celebrates the British jazz scene, which was undergoing one of its occasional high profile periods at the time, and the tape certainly captures the driversity of the moment.  Most of the tracks are good, though the downside of diversity kicks in as the tape as a whole lacks focus.  There’s not a whole lot in common between the Post-Bop Revival of Courtney Pine, the original British Bop of Stan Tracey, the Hard Case Hard Bop of Tommy Chase, and the more European sensibilities of the Loose Tubes gang.  The Joe Harriott track is great, being more adventurous than anything else here, though it’s twenty years older, and it’s the best thing here, along with Stan Tracey’s heroic Monk interpretation.  I also have a soft spot for Jamie Talbot's absurdly cheerful version of the Al Jarreau jazz-funk hit Mornin'.  Low point is Tommy Chase, whose attempt to be the Football Hooligan Art Blakey made sensible people cringe even then and is done no favours by the passing years.  But even that’s not too bad as a piece of music.  So a decent collection of tracks overall, but the eclecticism makes it all seem somewhat bitty.

Bush Fire is the gem amongst this group.  It celebrates ten years of Greensleeves Records, then as now the UK’s leading independent reggae label.  The quality is consistently great throughout, and it’s packed with classics – there’s no point in singling out “best” tracks.  Really – it’s all good, and it manages to showcase all aspects of reggae over the period involved, from dub and deep Rasta spirituality to dancehall slack.  Greensleeves recognised its quality, as they made it available on CD for general purchase a couple of years later.  And a tip of the titfer to Nitty Gritty for his superb title Hog In A Minty.  I have no idea what that means, but I love it.  Incidentally, my friend Annette once experienced a bush fire, but to say more would be ungentlemanly.

Finally, there’s Pocket Jukebox 2.  As with the original, it’s an eclectic mix of old blues, R&B and soul, but it fails to meet the expectations raised by the original.  There are various reasons for that, the most important being simple precedent.  For the NME readers of 1982, there’d been nothing like the original Pocket Jukebox before it came along, so its impact was immense.  We all wanted a sequel that was as good, but this could never happen, simply because it was a sequel.  Also, many of us had been investigating the Charly and Ace catalogues as a direct consequence of the original tape, and this also raised the level of expectation, as we were much better informed. Crucially, though, the compilers missed a couple of tricks.  It gets off to a blazing start with Earl Bostic (of whom we are obliged to ask: did he come to a sticky end?) and Hank Ballard, and there are other classics herein (notably from Wynonie Harris and the myrmidons of melodrama themselves, the Shangri-Las, with the atypically hilarious Give Him A Great Big Kiss).  But the songs, overall, lack the humour that ran through the original, and some great artists are on less than great form (Aaron Neville, Albert King).  And by including more contemporary recordings such as C.L. Blast’s overlong, somewhat generic Somebody Shot My Eagle, the mood is disrupted.  All that said, it’s still a pretty damn fine way to spend fifty minutes, and there’s no better way at all to spend three minutes than listening to The Dells’ Don’t Tell Nobody.  If you'd never heard the original Pocket Jukebox, you'd love this thing to bits.        

Oh, and – for those of you paying attention – here’s the fourth reason this set of tapes was so disappointing.  The graphics.  Many of the earlier cassettes had fantastic packaging, so it was a real let-down to see these five in identical, cheap-looking livery, with only a change in the colour scheme differentiating each tape.  The eighties were rubbish in so many ways, but they were a golden era for graphic design, so the paucity of ideas here felt almost insulting – as though the NME themselves didn’t care any more.  The sensitive among you should look away now:
 

Catalogue Numbers: NME 024 (We Have Come For Your Children), NME 025 (The Latin Kick), NME026 (Low Lights And Trick Mirrors) and NME 027 (What’s Happening Stateside)

Released: Autumn 1986

Track lists:

We Have Come For Your Children

Side 1: Count Five Psychotic Reaction/The Mojo Men Dance With Me/The Knight Riders I/The Novas The Crusher/The Barbarians Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl/Circus Bad Seed (You’re A Bad Seed)/The Shapes Of Things So Mystifying/The Swingin’ Medallions Double Shot Of My Baby’s Love/The Premiers Farmer John/The Stereo Shoestrings On The Road South

Side 2: The Kingsmen Louie Louie/The Castaways Liar Liar/The Lollipop Shoppe You Must Be A Witch/Merrell Fankhauser Gone To Pot/The Bad Roads Blue Girl/The Balloon Farm A Question Of Temperature/The Jades of Forth Worth Little Girl/The Knickerbockers Lies/The Moving Sidewalks Need Me/She Outta Reach

The Latin Kick

Side 1: Tania Maria Yatra-Ta/Charlie Palmieri Bugalu/The Jazz Crusaders The Latin Bit/Ray Barretto El Watusi/The Super All Stars Ban-Con-Tim/The Jazz Renegades Manteca/The Fania All Stars Congo Bongo

Side 2: Tito Puente Para Los Rumberos/War Cisco Kid/Willie Colon featuring Ruben Blades Pedro Navaja/Joe Bataan Subway Joe/Celia Cruz & Johnny Pacheco Quimbara/Cannonball Adderley Minha Saudade/Stan Kenton Viva Prado

Low Lights And Trick Mirrors

Side 1: Billy May Main Theme From ‘The Man With The Golden Arm’/Chet Baker But Not For Me/Cannonball Adderley Sambop/Mark Murphy Honeysuckle Rose/Stan Kenton The Peanut Vendor/Jeri Southern It’s Bad For Me/Richard ‘Groove’ Holmes That Healin’ Feelin’/Peggy Lee Whisper Not/Elmer Bernstein Pursuit

Side 2: Lord Buckley Excerpt From The Nazz/Lambert Hendricks & Ross Jackie/Johnny Dankworth Orchestra African Waltz/Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers Sam’s Tune/Billie Holiday Be Fair To Me Baby/Gil Evans Joy Spring/Jon Hendricks I’ll Die Happy/Lou Busch Orchestra Street Scene/Lynn Hope Blues For Anna Bacoa/Dakota Staton The Late Late Show

What’s Happening Stateside

Side 1: The O’Jays Working On Your Case/Bobby Womack Lookin’ For A Love/Jimmy Lewis The Girls From Texas/Garnett Mimms As Long As I Have You/Jimmy Holiday and Clydie King Ready, Willing And Able/Lou Rawls Dead End Street/Aaron Neville I’m Waiting At The Station/Jimmy McGriff All About My Girl

Side 2: Ike & Tina Turner Nutbush City Limits/Little Anthony And The Imperials Better Use Your Head/Charlie & Inez Foxx Mockingbird/Irma Thomas Wish Someone Would Care/The Isley Brothers Who’s That Lady?/Professor Longhair Mardi Gras In New Orleans/Z.Z. Hill Ain’t Nothin’ You Can Do/Homer Banks A Lot Of Love/Bettye Swann Tell It Like It Is

Verdict

From this point on, the NME tapes were solely devoted to archive sets.  The reasons for this aren’t known.  Was it just cheaper to licence tracks for archival tapes?  Had the tension between the Rock camp and the Soul camp at the NME offices reached such extremes they couldn’t agree on what to put on contemporary sets?  Or did they just anticipate that 1987 was going to be the worst year for pop music ever (Hip Hop aside, which peaked then), and couldn’t see the point of doing anything up-to-the-minute?  Well, I’m guessing it’s the money, but whatever the cause, it means you’re spared my musings on the state of music and the state of the NME as the eighties progressed.  It seems right for a slight change in format too: the one-liners that end all of the previous reviews just don’t seem to fit with wholly archival sets. On with the motley, then.

We Have Come For Your Children is a sampler of American garage bands of the sixties, one of my absolute favourite corners of musical history since first acquiring the original Nuggets set late in 1979 when under the strange impression that there wasn’t much going on at the time (The Fall’s Dragnet soon put me right).  Thirty-five years on Nuggets is still unsurpassed as the definitive text for garage-punk (which thankfully failed to go overground when it threatened to do so a few years back), but We Have Come For Your Children is a very good challenger.  This is because – like Nuggets – it reflects the diversity of the era, taking in everything from pre-Beatles party bands (The Premiers) through British invasion imitators (The Knickerbockers, The Shapes Of Things) to uber-garage classics (The Count Five, The Castaways) to I’m-having-a-bad-trip-man psychedelia (The Stereo Shoestrings), imminent hard rock (The Moving Sidewalks, who turned into Z.Z. Top) and a raft of obscurities.  And it actually trumps Nuggets in getting hold of Louie Louie.  Other points of interest include The Lollipop Shoppe inventing The Damned and my favourite track that was new to me at the time, The Balloon Farm’s awesomely crummy A Question Of Temperature, a brilliant example of punks-pretending-to-be-psychedelic by making lyrics about having the hump with their object of desire sound a bit mystical and that.  It also features the least funky bass player you’ve ever heard.  Which is perfect.

The Latin Kick is a Cook’s tour of Latin music, one of my blind (or perhaps deaf) spots. It’s All Africa Radio all over again, I’m afraid, as for the most part I just don’t get it.  In fact, it’s worse than All Africa Radio.  With that, I liked what I heard, I just didn’t remember it the second it stopped.  Here, not only don’t I remember it, I don’t much like it when it’s playing.  For a start, there’s something about hearing a Latin rhythm start that depresses me to my soul.  Too much Latin music makes me think someone is ordering me to enjoy myself.  Nothing is guaranteed to make me enjoy myself less.  It’s shouting too loud that “We’re having a party!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and implying that if you don’t join in, you are a Bad Person.  The minute you put Latin music on, it’s a New Year’s Eve party. And all right-thinking folk hate those.  Oh, and there’s all that shouting.  Too attention-seeking by half.  I speak, of course, as a cold, repressed Northern European who can’t express himself through dance.  So what?  If dancing was the ultimate mode of expression available to us, we’d be bees.

Anyway, rant over.  The tape itself isn’t quite that bad, though as NME tapes tended too, it starts badly. The Tania Maria track is everything I hate most about Latin music, as it’s a jazz trio (so there’s no instrumental colour) indulging in way too much soloing of the worst kind – all technique but no feeling, no story.  And there’s way too much shouting.  And “Ariba!”-ing.  The only time I want to hear the word “Ariba!” is when it’s uttered by a cartoon mouse in a sombrero.  Still, that’s the only track that’s actively offensive.  Most of the rest are just forgettable, though there are some good moments.  Cannonball Adderley was such a naturally joyous musician that it’s impossible to feel anything but happy when listening to him, and the more poppy stuff – War, and the sixties Bugalu tracks (Charlie Palmieri, Ray Barretto and Joe Bataan) – is absolutely fine.  In fact, there used to be a series of compilations on Charly called We Got Latin Soul which explored Bugalu in depth and they were fantastic, so I’m not a total grouch on this front.  But for me, this is one of the least rewarding NME cassettes.

Low Lights And Trick Mirrors, by contrast, is a hidden gem.  It makes no real sense, but it’s lovely.  It covers the poppier end of fifties and early sixties jazz but the theme, if there is one, is elusive.  It may be a failed attempt to cash in on the film Absolute Beginners - ‘failed’ because the movie was such a flop there was nowt to cash in on.  This really seems like an attempt to create the soundtrack for a Cool Jazz World that never actually existed.  It certainly has as much to do with Big Boys’ Hairy-Chested Jazz than all those bars and hairdressers that used to put glossy black and white photos of Charlie Parker on the wall without any idea who he was.  But it’s considerably more charming than those places ever were, because they were just about Jazz as Signifier while the tape is full of jazz people playing pop music that sounds like jazz but isn’t. The most hardcore participant is Art Blakey, but even his track is only three and a half minutes long, and usually with him that’s not even enough time for the drum solo, so there’s nothing to be scared of.  So you get big band stuff (you’ll never hear anything cooler-sounding than The Theme From The Man With The Golden Arm), lots of vocalists (Billie Holiday is in relatively early, and good, form, but it’s the long-forgotten voices like Jeri Southern and Dakota Staton that are most enticing), and lots of catchy stuff, including yet more ridiculously charming work from Cannonball Adderley.  You also get about twenty seconds of the ‘legendary’ jazz comedian Lord Buckley.  And that’s all the Lord Buckley anyone will ever need.

 

What’s Happening Stateside doesn’t so much celebrate the ‘60s Stateside label (an EMI imprint which released pretty much whatever soul records A&R man Guy Stevens liked the sound of) but its eighties revival, covering a broader range of soul which had come to be owned by EMI over the years.  That’s all to its benefit, as the diversity is one of the key reasons this is so ridiculously good; 60s Stateside didn’t have, for example, Lou Rawls (Capitol had that honour) or early 70s classics like the tracks from Ike and Tina Turner and Bobby Womack.  So this is an eclectic and hugely enjoyable mix of soul that encompasses both downhome southern and sophisticated northern styles without any problems at all.  Side one is merely great, but side two will make your head spin, it’s so good.  The best tracks come from Irma Thomas (Wish Someone Would Care is one of the greatest spasms of glorious loneliness and regret in any form of music), Little Anthony and The Imperials (virtually psychedelic in its intensity and complexity), and Bettye Swann, who may have had the most naturally sad voice ever recorded.  So another old soul compilation from the NME, and another classic.  I wonder if the modern NME knows this stuff even exists? 

Catalogue Numbers: NME 020 (Feet Start Dancin’), NME 021 (Pogo A Go Go), NME 022 (C86) and NME 023 (Holiday Romance)

Released: Late spring 1986

Track lists:

Feet Start Dancin’

Side 1: The Sapphires Slow Fizz/Carl Carlton Competition Ain’t Nothin’/Patrice Holloway Love And Desire/The Sons Of Moses Soul Symphony/Jackie Wilson Nothing But Blue Skies/Little Anthony and the Imperials Gonna Fix You Good/Thelma Houston Baby Mine/Chuck Jackson These Chains Of Love (Are Breaking Me Down)/Mary Love Lay This Burden Down/Erma Franklin I Get The Sweetest Feeling/Hoagy Lands The Next In Line

Side 2: Earl Grant Hide Nor Hair/Patti Austin Take Away The Pain Stain/The Marvelows Your Little Sister/The Steinways You’ve Been Leading Me On/Maxine Brown One In A Million/Marie Knight You Lie So Well/The Shirelles Last Minute Miracle/The Cooperettes Shing-A-Ling/Eddie Bishop Call Me/Garnett Mimms Looking For You/Jimmy Radcliffe Long After Tonight Is All Over

Pogo A Go Go

Side 1: Sex Pistols Satellite (Suburban Kid) (Demo)/The Undertones True Confessions/Nipple Erectors King Of The Bop/Television Personalities Part Time Punks/Sham 69 Borstal Breakout/The Damned Stretcher Case Baby/Elvis Costello and The Attractions Watching The Detectives (Demo)/The Stranglers Choosey Susie/Victim Strange Thing By Night

Side 2: The Clash 1977 (Demo)/Johnny Moped Incendiary Device/The Slits Typical Girls/Alternative TV Love Lies Limp/Swell Maps Read About Seymour/The Jam In The City/The Fall Bingo Master’s Breakout/Subway Sect Ambition/Wire Dot Dash/Buzzcocks Orgasm Addict

C86

Side 1: Primal Scream Velocity Girl/The Mighty Lemon Drops Happy Head/The Soup Dragons Pleasantly Surprised/The Wolfhounds Feeling So Strange Again/The Bodines Therese/Mighty Mighty Law/Stump Buffalo/Bogshed Run To The Temple/A Witness Sharpened Sticks/The Pastels Breaking Lines/The Age of Chance From Now On This Will Be Your God

Side 2: Shop Assistants It’s Up To You/Close Lobsters Firestation Towers/Miaow Sport Most Royal/Half Man Half Biscuit I Hate Nerys Hughes/The Servants Transparent/MacKenzies Big Jim (There’s No Pubs In Heaven)/Big Flame New Way (Quick Wash and Brush Up With Liberation Theology)/We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Going To Use It Console Me/McCarthy Celestial City/The Shrubs Bullfighter’s Bones/The Wedding Present This Boy Can Wait (A Bit Longer)

Holiday Romance

All tracks by Billie Holiday

Side 1: Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone/Say It Isn’t So/Comes Love/Strange Fruit/God Bless The Child/Good Morning Heartache/East of The Sun, West Of The Moon/Blue Moon/I Cried For You/What A Little Moonlight Can Do

Side 2: Love Me Or Leave Me/Too Marvellous For Words/I Get A Kick Out Of You/I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm/Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me/Ain’t Misbehavin’/One For My Baby And One More For The Road/There Is No Greater Love

Verdict

1986 was the best year for pop since 1982, but you wouldn’t know much about it from this set of tapes.  Three of them are archival sets; the remaining one, the last NME ‘contemporary’ set, is a curious thing indeed, bearing very little resemblance to any of its predecessors.  Nevertheless, C86 is, with the debatable exception of C81, the most famous of all the NME cassettes.  It’s the only one that has any substantial presence on the web (probably because its content is most attuned to the nerdishness that powers the internet), and it’s the only one whose title came to define a genre of music.  It’s also the only one to inspire a double-CD retrospective (called, reasonably enough, CD86, and featuring many of the same bands – though only a couple of the same tracks – and a lot more in the same vein).  So let’s skip our self-imposed rule of looking at them in catalogue number order, and try to make some sense of this curious item.

A little historical context first.  The dominant voice on this tape, even though not actually present, belongs to The Jesus and Mary Chain, who were the catalyst for a revival in guitar-based bands on independent record labels, which is of course what you get here.  C86 marks a very particular moment in British pop history – it’s the point when “indie” becomes a genre rather than an alternative distribution network, the point at which you can have a pretty confident guess what a band described as “indie” will sound like.  There’s nothing wrong with guitar bands, despite what a number of NME writers had been saying since 1981 or so, but there’s a problem with this scene as a whole, even though a number of the bands involved made some fine music.  After all, Half Man Half Biscuit have remained a strong position among the nation’s leading social commentators for 20 years, Primal Scream’s equally long career has never been less than entertaining and has had magnificent moments, the much maligned (unjustly) Wedding Present became a symbol for a certain kind of bloody-mindedness, and who could not love Fuzzbox or Alex from the Shop Assistants?

The problem isn’t the “twee” accusation often hurled at this music.  “Twee” in pop discourse normally means the person hurling the accusation is worried their dick is too small, and so they feel threatened by anything that doesn’t allow them to hide behind macho bravado.  Check out heavy metal or gangsta rap for music that’s not “twee”.  See how appealing this genre suddenly becomes?  One of the most admirable things about this stuff is the determined refusal of all involved to hide behind macho stereotypes.

Nor is the problem the “amateurishness”.  You don’t have to be a virtuoso to make great pop, nor do you need that most over-valued musical attribute, slick production.  The reddest of herrings, these.

The problem is how inward looking it all is.  A faction of NME hacks tried to say these bands were the most important thing to happen to music since punk, ten years earlier, but it’s simply not true.  Punk bands had a wealth of musical interests – reggae, krautrock, funk, free jazz, and the odd corners of music in general – that made punk and post-punk bands experimental, adventurous and eclectic. The musical reference points here are much narrower – a bit of genre punk, a bit of the Television Personalities (quite a large bit, actually), a bit of Beefheart-lite, Postcard Records, and the Chain.  And that’s about it.  It’s among the whitest music ever made.  Again, that’s not a criticism of any of the bands or tracks in particular – they were all too aware of how bad the faux soul movement of the time had become.  Some of these pieces are lovely, and none are bad, but there’s a troubling lack of ambition.  None of these bands could have gone on to make the equivalent of Unknown Pleasures, Entertainment!, The Correct Use Of Soap, Metal Box, A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, Sound Affects, London Calling or any of the other great things that came out of the post-punk environment.

But it goes further than that.  Timing is all.  Most of these bands were about my age, and the dispiriting experience of an entire generation hangs over this tape.  Born in the sixties, our earliest memories were framed in the colour, optimism, egalitarianism and utopianism of that decade, but by the eighties, all we could do was choke on the ashes of those ideals.  We’d welcomed punk, but been distraught as it proved once and for all that pop music is never going to bring about utopia.  And we’d just seen the miners’ strike collapse, and with it the last chance for this country not to be sold down the river to modern consumer capitalism, which continues to brutalise and crush the human soul to this day.  Yes, these bands lacked the nerve of their immediate predecessors, but who can fucking blame them?  In a way, there was nothing they could do but say “no” to the dominant values of the time.  They did so, and that’s admirable.  But it’s all they did, and that’s sad.

This was the first generation of musicians to realise, even if subconsciously, that pop music as a whole could no longer really be anything other than a branch of light entertainment, though individuals could still produce work of great value.  That’s certainly proved to be the case.  Rave and Baggy proved little more than that hedonism in itself, even when powered by empathogenic drugs, is just a night out.  Britpop had its moments, but it was arch and gutless for the most part, and the shelf-life was very limited.  Most modern bands are utterly empty careerists.  And elsewhere, the promise of Hip Hop and reggae has been thwarted by one of consumer capitalism’s greatest triumphs; it’s sold empty machismo to young black men so effectively the threat they might once have posed to the system has been sublimated so they’re only a threat to each other.

In light of this realisation that Pop In Itself could achieve nothing, the fact that the C86 bands still tried to work as though it could is worthy of affection and respect – sadly, more so than most of the music they made.  But it probably explains why a listen to this tape is a slightly dispiriting, hollow experience, even though some of what’s on it is great.  It was dispiriting at the time, too, for the same reasons.  And don’t expect to learn anything much about 1986 – the year of records as diversely brilliant as The Queen Is Dead, Word Up, Raising Hell, Graceland, Lifes Rich Pageant, Candy Apple Grey, Tutu and Blood And Chocolate – from listening to it.  A “conventional” NME contemporary tape might have given some clues, but not this strange, hermetically sealed thing.

Compare and contrast, if you will, with Pogo A Go Go, released to mark the 10^th anniversary of punk.  It’s not especially diverse, in the way post-punk would come to be, but its sheer spiritedness still leaves you breathless.  Unlike the C86, it leaves you smiling, and with a feeling that better will come.  And it will, eventually.  Anyway, the canny thing about Pogo A Go Go is the way the tracks mix obvious classics (In The City, Orgasm Addict), rarities by leading bands (demos from the Pistols and Clash, a Damned song that was only ever available on a ‘free’ single with the first few thousand copies of their second album), and obscurities you’d almost forgotten.  It does this so well it has the extraordinary effect of making Sham 69 seem lovable.  And hats off to them for including the Stranglers, who were sneered at by both other bands and the press, but who did more than anyone else to ensure punk got to an audience beyond zones 1 and 2 of the Tube map.  If you’re not a great soul, jazz or R&B fan, you’ll enjoy this more than any other NME cassette.

Feet Start Dancin’ raids the vaults of Kent Records – which is to say, Ace Records, who already delighted us with the 1983 Ace Case tape – for a selection of Northern Soul classics.  The NME scrupulously avoided even mentioning Northern Soul till the scene had ended, but let’s forgive them.  This tape proves that Northern Soul isn’t just about people trying to sound like Motown but failing (usually through going too fast, and being slightly too hysterical), though a large part of it is.  It also proves that if you had nothing to listen to for the rest of your life but Northern Soul records, the rest of your life would be just fine.  I could single out the tracks I like best, but what’s the point?  Even the ones I don’t like so much are brilliant in comparison with most other things, ever.  And when you’re dealing with stuff like this, such distinctions reflect nothing more than how certain sounds affect your own physical make-up (it’s what the King of the Back Flips, Roland Barthes, called ‘the grain of the voice’), and no amount of theorising can deal with that.  As they were e’er wont to say at the Wigan Casino.

Holiday Romance, a set of Billie Holiday tracks made for Verve Records in the 1950s, is an anomaly as it’s the only NME cassette devoted to a single artist.  If only they’d picked another one.  Jazz is more than fine by me, but I struggle with Billie Holiday.  She made some magnificent records in the 1930s, before anyone knew she existed, but went on to become a legend of sorts with over-rated self-dramatising hackwork like Strange Fruit, God Bless The Child and Good Morning Heartache in the 1940s.  Remakes of all three are on here, and they’re as bad as ever – Strange Fruit in particular, a song whose corniness is always overlooked because of its laudable sentiments.  By the 1950s, years of alcohol and heroin addiction, and a string of abusive relationships, had taken their toll, and Holiday’s voice was shot to hell.  The records she made in that decade are, to say the least, extremely patchy.  Some, clearly made on good days, are nearly as fine as her best 1930s work.  All too many, however, sound like a tipsy old dame who can’t sing for toffee.  The body of work swings from the brilliant to the profoundly embarrassing without much rhyme or reason, and this tape reflects that.

Sad to say, it’s Holiday’s later work that you’re more likely to hear in general, as for some reason it’s become a popular choice as background music in bookshops, bars and restaurants.  What’s worse, the rubbish tracks are mistakenly considered great and indeed “tragic” by the drama queens of both sexes who seem to form a large part of the Holiday audience (they’re also too fond of that other over-rated old narcissist, Nina “Moose on the Loose” Simone).  Holiday did have a rotten life, and the role of institutional racism and idiotic drug laws in making it a very short life cannot be ignored.  But she milked the misery for every penny she could get (most famously in her largely fictional ‘autobiography’, which many people still take at face value), mainly to buy drugs, and there’s much evidence that she was a fairly stupid woman and this led to many of her troubles being of her own making. Or maybe I just prefer long-lived, non-tragic jazz singers like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Chris Connor and Anita O’Day.  Holiday was great at times, but she’s profoundly over-rated and her work sometimes stinks.  This tape includes both great stuff and stinkers, and the quality of musicians working with her here (including Oscar Peterson, Benny Carter, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and Ben Webster) doesn’t disguise that.  Caveat emptor.

Best Tracks: On C86, Half Man Half Biscuit  - Half Fall, Half Grumbleweeds – tower over the rest, though Stump (a kind of Captain naGopaleen and the Magic Band), The Bodines, and The Wedding Present are all strong.  And on Velocity Girl, Primal Scream not only invent the Stone Roses but give you all that’s best on the first Stone Roses album in less than a minute and a half.  On Pogo A Go Go, side one and side two are the best bits.  Conversely, there’s nothing that stands out as great on Holiday Romance, though as a rule of thumb, the faster songs are better, and the accompaniment will ensure there’s at least a splendid second or two on each track. As for Feet Start Dancin’, every one’s a winner, but I’ve always cared for Mary Love, The Shirelles, Jimmy Radcliffe, Patrice Holloway, Hoagy Lands and the Steinways.

Worst Tracks:  Much of Holiday Romance is hard going, and some of the more grim Marxists on C86 (A Witness, Age of Chance, McCarthy, Big Flame) are a bit wearing.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: See previous answer.

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: The Wolfhounds, Mighty Mighty, The Shrubs, The Servants.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: See previous answer.

How Of Its Time Is It?  C86 is entirely of its time, though it has nothing to do with the 1986 most people lived through at all.

Memories: I took Feet Start Dancin’ to a very knit-your-own-tofu lefty party, knowing it would be the only music all night worth hearing.  I danced to it, which led to a gay bloke chatting me up.  Thankfully, this didn’t lead to anything else.

Still At The Coalface: Primal Scream, Half Man Half Biscuit, John Lydon, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks.  And I saw Captain Sensible not long back, and I’m off to see The Fall in a couple of days.  Who woulda thunk it?

No Longer With Us: Joe Strummer

Best Line:

Catalogue Numbers: NME 017 (Tape Worm), NME 018 (Straight No Chaser) and NME 019 (All Africa Radio)

Released: Late spring 1985

Track lists:

Tape Worm

Side 1: The Juicy Bananas Bad Man/The Fine Young Cannibals Love For Sale/The Pogues The Wild Cats Of Kilkenny/The Robert Cray Band Phone Booth/Champion Doug Veitch Not The Heart (NME Remix)/Paul Quinn Ain’t That Always The Way/The Faith Brothers Stranger On Home Ground/Win Unamerican Broadcasting/Chakk Cut The Dust (Demo)/The Jesus And Mary Chain Inside Me/Frank Sidebottom Anarchy In The UK

Side 2: Wayne Smith Under Mi Sleng Teng/Trouble Funk Drop The Bomb/Shirley Brown Love Fever (Remix)/Savajazz Everything We Do/Simply Red Money’s Too Tight (Dub)/Guadalcanal Diary Watusi Rodeo/The Blasters Common Man/The Beat Farmers Reason To Believe/Los Lobos Volver

Straight No Chaser

Side 1: Cannonball Adderley with Miles Davis Alison’s Uncle/Kenny Dorham Afrodisia/Ike Quebec Loie/Hank Mobley This I Dig Of You/Thelonious Monk Straight No Chaser/Clifford Brown Brownie Speaks/Jimmy Smith I’m Movin’ On/Herbie Hancock Watermelon Man/Johnny Griffin It’s Alright With Me

Side 2: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Mosaic/Bud Powell Blue Pearl (Alternate Take)/Sonny Rollins Wonderful! Wonderful! /Thad Jones April In Paris/Lee Morgan The Sidewinder/Horace Silver Quintet Finger Poppin’/Jackie McLean Let’s Face The Music And Dance/Kenny Burrell Midnight Blue

All Africa Radio

Side 1: Tam Tam Pour L’Ethiopie Tam Tam Pour L’Ethiopie/Bibi Den’s Tshibaye Le Best Ambience/Youssou N’dour Immigres/Toure Kunda Santhiabo Silo/Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited Tondobayana/Mahotella Queens Mabone/Orchestre Virunga Malako/King Sunny Ade and the African Beats Ase/Manu Dibango Pata Piya

Side 2: Souzy Kaseya Monsieur Simon/Sankomoto Mad House/Bosca Together/Fela Anikulapo Kuti Cross Examination/Mandingo Kansale/Somo Somo Mele/Super Rail Band Foliber/Ladysmith Black Mambazo Bakhuphuka Izwe Lonke

Verdict

1985 was a quiet year for NME tapes, with only this batch of three released.

Tape Worm is the penultimate “contemporary” tape, and the last one with an eclectic take on the music world as a whole.  Which is a shame: these tapes may have been prey to modishness and a certain didactic quality, but they were formidably good at opening ears – better, in some ways, than John Peel was.  This is neither the best not the worst of the set – like the all-time low that was Racket Packet, it suffers from an uncertain start (The Juicy Bananas track, from Repo Man, is a tiresome novelty track, and the Fine Young Cannibals, who follow, are as annoying as ever), but it’s full of forgotten treasures, and unlike a lot of the others catches quite a diverse spread of acts just as they were seizing their moment (The Pogues, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Wayne Smith, Trouble Funk and, err, Simply Red).  It includes some truly irritating acts (The Fine Young Cannibals, Win).  Yet again, it includes some pleasing but staid American bands (the last four tracks) but strives to ignore lots of interesting groups from the USA who were active at the time (Sonic Youth, The Replacements, The Meat Puppets, The Minutemen, and the early REM, to name but five).  There’s some marvellous things you’d totally forgotten (like Paul Quinn, Champion Doug Veitch, Chakk and even the Faith Brothers), and some stuff you’ve just forgotten (Savajazz).  The token soul track, by Shirley Brown, is actually stunning.  And then there’s Frank Sidebottom who, in the wake of anarchy coming to the UK, might buy a washing machine.  As the last of its type, it’s quite a good memorial, being as eclectic as these tapes at their best, and including some stuff that represents both how good and how bad these things could be.  It also makes a decent fist of 1985, serving up more good stuff than my memories of a particularly poor pop year could dredge up.

Straight No Chaser is a faultless taster of the jazz treasure trove that is the Blue Note catalogue.  As an introduction to jazz, it’s probably not as good as the earlier Night People set, as it’s not as diverse, but as an introduction to Blue Note, and just as something to listen to, it’s pretty much faultless.  When your only complaint is “They could have picked a better Sonny Rollins track”, you know you haven’t really got any complaints.  A number of genuinely iconic Blue Note tracks are included – Straight No Chaser, Watermelon Man, The Sidewinder and Midnight Blue – but the less celebrated are no less good, and in some cases, like Horace Silver’s Finger Poppin’, they’re better than more lauded titles.  It’s nothing more or less than magnificent.

Then there’s All Africa Radio, from which all proceeds went to the then-current Band Aid famine relief fund.  Laudable stuff, obviously, and it kicks off with Tam Tam Pour L’Ethiopie, on which the superstars of African music created their own charity record, a storming thing which is easily the best of all musical responses to the situation.  As for the rest, well, I struggle, and the reasons I struggle are rubbish.  I just can’t get excited by African music.  When it’s playing, I enjoy it (I have the tape on now, and the sounds coming at me are absolutely lovely), but with rare exceptions, the minute the song ends, I forget it.  I do rather like Ethiopian music from the sixties, which is basically weird (a lot of it sounds like the bands were told to play like The Doors, but had never heard them and were relying on a description), but for the rest I can’t get past that awful, lazy, borderline racist and usually inaccurate comment “It all sounds the same”.  People say that about reggae and jazz too and it’s absolute nonsense, so as an explanation, while it’s the best I can come up with, it’s just not good enough.  I felt bad about this twenty years ago and I still do.  I’m going to have to go off some place and figure this out.

Best Tracks: On Tape Worm, it’s Paul Quinn’s run through an exquisite and forgotten Edwyn Collins song, the astonishing racket that was the early Jesus and Mary Chain (I’d failed to remember just what an exhilarating, mad uproar that was), and Shirley Brown’s preposterously funky Love Fever.  On Straight No Chaser, everything’s great, but I have deepest feelings for two pieces which just sing to heaven in voices that are almost too beautiful to exist, Alison’s Uncle and, above all, This I Dig Of You.  This I Dig is the best thing on any NME tape – and this is where I first heard it.  As for All Africa Radio, as noted, it’s not really my thing, but Tam Tam Pour L’Ethiopie is a mighty work.

Worst Tracks:  Fine Young Cannibals and Win, both exemplars of that awful “We have nothing to do with rock, we’re a soul band” eighties trend.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Debatably, that’s all of both the jazz and the African tapes, but it could also apply to Chakk’s Cut The Dust.  Cut The Dust is actually a rather brilliant soundalike of the Pop Group in 1979, though quite what it was doing in 1985 is anyone’s guess.

Hey, We May Be The NME But We Down With The Brothers: They try to do this with Trouble Funk and Shirley Brown, but Go-Go and soul revivalism never really took off with eighties black audiences.  But for once, they’ve absolutely nailed it with Under Mi Sleng Teng, a great track, a huge hit in the reggae market and of massive significance, as it pretty much turned the Dancehall style of the day into the Ragga that still dominates Jamaican sounds.

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: The Juicy Bananas, Champion Doug Veitch, Paul Quinn, The Faith Brothers, Win, Chakk, Savajazz, Guadalcanal Diary, The Blasters, The Beat Farmers.

Most Misguided Trend-Hopping: The NME bust its balls trying to break Go-Go music, represented here by Trouble Funk, in the UK.  Go-go was a raw, highly percussive variant of Funk.  It was great, but possibly because it was raw, could be accused of being old fashioned, and didn’t translate into hit single material, it never really took off.  But the NME tried and tried, bless ‘em.

NME Hope Springs Eternal Moment: They cannot top this as a way to get us to like African music.

How Of Its Time Is It?  It catches Wayne Smith, the Pogues, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Simply Red all on the cusp of their breakthroughs; it’s hard to be more redolent of late spring 1985 than that.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Savajazz and, let’s face it, pretty much all of the African tape.

Best Title: Watusi Rodeo

Worst Title: Watusi Rodeo

Memories: Hearing This I Dig Of You for the first time – I was in bed at the time – and knowing life had, in a tiny but very real way, changed

Still At The Coalface: The Pogues, Robert Cray, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Simply Red, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Manu Dibango, Youssou N’dour

No Longer With Us: Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Thad Jones

Best Line:

Frank Sidebottom “Anarchy for Timperley, it’s coming some time/But I’m not sure when”

Catalogue Numbers: NME 014 (Raging Spool), NME 015 (Little Imp) and NME 016 (Neon West)

Released: Late 1984

Track lists:

Raging Spool

Side 1: Marc Almond The Pink Shack Blues/The Three Johns Sad House/Everything But The Girl Laugh You Out The House/Bronski Beat Screaming (Demo)/Floy Joy Into The Hot/The Kane Gang Gun Law (Demo)/Zeke Manyika Red Hot International/Manu Dibango Abele Dance/Alterations Hank’s Pantry/Test Department VFM/Cabaret Voltaire Mercy Man

Side 2: The Neville Brothers Fear, Hate, Envy, Jealousy (Live)/The Rebels You Can Make It/Screamin’ Tony Baxter Get Up Offa That Thing/Hugh Masekela Pula En Na-It’s Raining/Black Stalin You Ask For It/Aztec Camera Jump (Loaded Version)/The Daintees I’m A Hypocrite (A Crocodile Cryer)/The Go-Betweens Part Company/Strawberry Switchblade Deep Water/The Long Ryders Final Wild Son/The Skiff Skats Cripple Creek

Little Imp

Side 1: Amos Milburn Chickenshack Boogie (No 2)/Thurston Harris Do What You Did/Jimmy Liggins I Ain’t Drunk/Shirley and Lee The Flirt/Billie Holiday Detour Ahead/Lloyd Glenn with Jack McVea Chick-A-Boo/Earl King Trick Bag/Louis Jordan Messy Bessy/The Showmen Country Fool/Fats Domino I’m Walkin’/Illinois Jacquet Blow Illinois Blow

Side 2: Roy Brown Saturday Night/T-Bone Walker Say, Pretty Baby/Patti Anne Shtiggy Boom/Lynn Hope Miserlou/Amos Milburn One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer/Dave Bartholomew Who Drank My Beer While I Was In The Rear/The Five Keys Serve Another Round/Thurston Harris featuring Rufus Hunter Purple Stew/Fatso & Flaire Rock ‘N’ Roll Drive In/Fats Domino Let The Four Winds Blow/Charles Brown Merry Christmas Baby

Neon West

Side 1: Jimmie Rodgers Blue Yodel No 1 (Excerpt)/Waylon Jennings Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way/Vince Gill A Victim Of Life’s Circumstances/Dolly Parton A Gamble Either Way/Jerry Reed Honkin’/The Judds John Deere Tractor/Earl Thomas Conley Don’t Make It Easy For Me/Ronnie Milsap She Loves My Car/Gus Hardin After The Last Goodbye/Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson The Year That Clayton Delaney Died/Jimmy ‘C’ Newman Daddy’s In His Pirouge/Alabama Green River/Jimmie Rodgers Blue Yodel No 1 (Excerpt)

Side 2: Hank Williams Jr Family Tradition/John Anderson Black Sheep/Gram Parsons Return Of The Grievous Angel/Karen Brooks Tonight I’m Here With Someone Else/The Whites You Put The Blue In Me/Rodney Crowell Stars On The Water/Shelly West Somebody Buy This Cowgirl A Beer/David Frizell I’m Gonna Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home/Emmylou Harris Feelin’ Single, Seein’ Double/Guy Clark Homegrown Tomatoes/David Frizell & Shelly West You’re The Reason God Made Oklahoma

Verdict

The 1984 quality surfeit continues.

Raging Spool is the inverse of the earlier Department of Enjoyment, in that the balance veers away from Student Music (represented here by second-tier campus cults like The Three Johns, Aztec Camera and Go-Betweens – none of yer big hitters like The Smiths or Billy Bragg) and towards soul, other black music and a smattering of Arty Stuff. As with its predecessor, it’s a smooth listen, though it does have a few egregious moments.  The worst track, by a very wide margin, is by Floy Joy, who represent that most mid-eighties of phenomena, white folks trying desperately to dissociate themselves from “rock” by all too obviously embracing black styles.  There’s also a sticky moment from Everything But The Girl, on which an otherwise averagely dull outing by the Myrmidons of Mope becomes actively offensive due to unnecessary use of cocktail jazz piano.  It exemplifies that “Oh, rock music, it has no rhythm and guitars are so reactionary” discourse that was so prevalent in the mid-eighties (fact: on his BBC Radio London show, Robert Elms is still peddling the same line; an anachronism so striking it should have a Blue Plaque put up).  Those alarming reminders of Racket Packet aside, though, and excluding a dull workout by the permanently dull Manu Dibango, there’s nothing else here that will spoil your day, and much of it is rousing.  On rehearing, the arty patch at the end of side one, beginning with The Alterations, is surprisingly engaging, full of invention and not in the least self-indulgent.  The Cabaret Voltaire piece, which directly addresses the “I wish I was black” tendency in mid-eighties white folk’s music and basically flays it to death, is very fine indeed.  Plus Aztec Camera’s brilliant reinvention of Van Halen’s Jump as though it was by the Velvet Underground, one of the mighty Go-Betweens’ best songs, a truly lovely offering from Hugh Masekela, a camp riot from the Dear Old Queen herself Marc Almond, the much loved (by me, anyhow) Long Ryders’ brilliant tribute to Jerry Lee Lewis, and a reminder of the existence of Glaswegian love goddesses Strawberry Switchblade, and you’re talking one of the very finest “contemporary” sets.

Little Imp is yet another exploration of a classic R&B label catalogue, this time the Imperial and Aladdin archives.  It focuses more closely on a shorter time period (basically, the fifties) than some of the other tapes (giving a less eclectic, more integrated feel).  That, along with so much of it coming from New Orleans, the fact it has more uptempo and more blatantly silly tracks than the others, and – above all - because so much of it is about boozing, gives it the most sustained party atmosphere of any of the NME R&B cassettes.  It is, basically, an absolute riot.

Neon West was, in its day, as bold a challenge to readers as the NME had ever come up with.  It’s a country compilation, taking in music from the RCA (side one) and WEA (side two) vaults, all of it (ironic Jimmie Rodgers snippets apart) from 1973 onwards and most of it from the early eighties.  In 1984, Country music was far less acceptable to even the most I Like My Rock And That’s It Thank You Very Much reader than blues, soul or jazz.  Country was considered corny, reactionary, and naff, for the most part.  Much of it was (as is true of every musical genre on earth, of course), but the prejudice against it was – and sadly still is – deeper than most.  This tape sets out to prove that country can be as diverse, inventive, soulful, funny, mournful, physically exciting, romantic, spiritual, and even – in Gram Parsons’ achingly lovely surrealist road trip – mind-expanding as anything else.  It certainly succeeded for this listener; prior to this, I had no country music in my collection.  Ever since, it’s been a small but treasured and steadily growing section, and one I turn to more often than many others.  That’s largely due to the work done by this excellent compilation.

Best Tracks: The loveliest and greatest thing on all three tapes is Gram Parsons’ Return Of The Grievous Angel, which couples heartbreaking romanticism with an amazing reinvention of the American heartland as a weird psychedelic playground and a sense of spiritual redemption.  All while sounding like nothing more than an update of the Louvin Brothers. An astonishing piece of music, and this tape was the first time I’d ever heard it – or indeed anything by Gram Parsons.

On Raging Spool, the quality is pretty good throughout, but Cabaret Voltaire, Screaming Tony Baxter’s besotted and wild James Brown tribute, Aztec Camera, Hugh Masekela, The Go-Betweens and the Long Ryders are all worthy of your love.  The quality on both other tapes is ridiculously consistent, but both have a three-in-a-row run of songs about drinking on their second sides that are hard to resist.

Worst Tracks:  We’ve already mentioned Floy Joy and Everything But The Girl.  No harm in mentioning them again.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: There’s not a lot of that going on, though some might say it applies to all of Neon West.  On Raging Spool, there’s a slight hint of NME “improving” us with The Neville Brothers, the African acts (Manyika, Dibango, Masekela) and the hitherto unveiled world of soca (the splendidly named Black Stalin) but apart from Dibango’s five minutes of nowt happening, there’s no pain in this.  Ditto, and surprisingly, the arty inclinations at the end of side one.  Of course, this whole notion is preposterous in the face of Little Imp.

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: Floy Joy, Zeke Manyika, Alterations, The Rebels, Screaming Tony Baxter, Black Stalin, The Skiff Skats.  And I would have said Test Department till they started all the building work outside my office.

Most Misguided Trend-Hopping: The Skiff Skats continue the dalliance with Cowpunk, while Cowpunk of a different sort comes from the Long Ryders, one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen but old-fashioned in comparison to many American bands of the time.  It’s odd to have the Ryders, love ‘em as I do, as the only representative of the Left of the Dial generation.

The Robert Wyatt Award for Persistent Management: Cabaret Voltaire put in their fourth appearance on an NME tape

NME Hope Springs Eternal Moment: They’re still still trying to get us to like African music.

Thinking Very Bad Thoughts: Strawberry Switchblade, and, even worse, mother-and-daughter duo The Judds.

How Of Its Time Is It?  It’s just popped out to buy a replacement Coal Not Dole badge.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: At least until replaying for the purposes of this review: Floy Joy, The Alterations, Test Department, Fatso & Flaire, Gus Hardin

Best Title: Who Drank My Beer While I Was In The Rear, I’m Going To Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home, You’re The Reason God Made Oklahoma

Memories: General associations with the girl who was The Reason God Made Number 11, The Avenue, Durham City

Philosophical Observation: At the time this came out, I had a degree of visual flair.  These days, it’s all fatso.

Still At The Coalface: Marc Almond, Jon Langford, Manu Dibango, Sid Griffin, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and probably a good many more

No Longer With Us: Grant McLennan, Waylon Jennings
Best Line:Runner-up: The Long Ryders "I'm sorry, Mr Philips, 'bout Presley and the rest/But as you know I'm Elmo's boy, I'm different, I'm the best".  First prize: Jimmy Liggins "I ain't drunk - I'm just drinking!'

Catalogue Numbers: NME 011 (Department of Enjoyment), NME 012 (Chess Checkmate) and NME 013 (Night People)

Released: Spring 1984

Track lists:

Department of Enjoyment

Side 1: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Perfect Skin/The Smiths Girl Afraid (Live)/Orange Juice A Place In My Heart Dub Mix 2/The Boothill Foot Tappers Get Your Feet Out Of My Shoes/Paul Young and the Royal Family I’ve Been Lonely For So Long/The Cocteau Twins Millimillenary/The Waterboys A Pagan Place/Wah! Come Back/Nick Cave and the Cavemen I Put A Spell On You/The Prisoners Reaching My Head/The Moodists Some Kinda Jones/Husker Du Real World

Side 2: Robert Wyatt & Hugh Hopper Amber and the Amberines/The Redskins Kick Over The Statues/Billy Bragg Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend/Bourgie Bourgie Little Red Rooster/Dr John Dorothy/Wynton Marsalis The Star-Spangled Banner/African Connexion C’est La Danse/Papa Levi Mi God Mi King/Timezone The Wild Style/The Art of Noise Beatbox Diversions 3&4

Chess Checkmate

Side 1: Howlin’ Wolf Smokestack Lightning/John Lee Hooker Walkin’ The Boogie/Little Walter Juke/Muddy Waters I Just Want To Make Love To You/Lowell Fulsom Reconsider Baby/Jimmie Rogers Chicago Bound/Sonny Boy Williamson Help Me/Willie Mabon I Don’t Know/Don & Bob Good Morning Little Schoolgirl/Chuck Berry Almost Grown/Bo Diddley Bring It To Jerome

Side 2: Ramsey Lewis Trio Wade In The Water/Tony Clarke Ain’t Love Good Ain’t Love Proud/Koko Taylor Wang Dang Doodle/Sugar Pie DeSanto Soulful Dress/Billy Stewart Summertime/The Radiants Voice Your Choice/Fontella Bass & Bobby McLure Don’t You Mess Up A Good Thing/Bobby Moore & The Rhythm Aces Searchin’ For My Love/Maurice & Mac You Left The Water Running/Etta James Tell Mama/Little Milton Feel So Bad

Night People

Side 1: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Ping Pong/Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker Carioca/Chet Baker Do It The Hard Way/Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond This Can’t Be Love/Thelonious Monk Epistrophy/Mose Allison Eyesight To The Blind/Sonny Rollins Will You Still Be Mine/Bill Evans How Deep Is The Ocean/Art Pepper Mambo Koyama

Side 2: Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie Salt Peanuts/Red Rodney Quintet Rhythm In A Riff/Sonny Stitt Cool Mambo/The Modern Jazz Quartet Concorde/Steve Lacy Reflections/Miles Davis I Could Write A Book/Eddie Jefferson Mercy, Mercy Mercy/John Coltrane I Love You/Wes Montgomery Trick Bag

Verdict

1984 was the peak year for NME cassettes.  They released six and while that figure was exceeded in 1986 and 1987, with eight each, the consistent quality of the two 1984 sets was unrivalled.

Department of Enjoyment, the year’s first “contemporary” set, was indicative of a sea change in the NME and its audience.  The paper’s hacks started to divide more clearly into Rockers and Soulies while the Arty types with a foot in each camp (sort of) gradually disappeared.  The Rockers, of course, were advocates of what’s usually considered NME music and that consolidated in 1984 after a year or two in which things had been very fluid.  A generation of students – always the core NME readership - had turned over completely since the C81.  The C81 generation of students – my lot – had loved the bands who weren’t punk but who had come directly out of it – the likes of Joy Division, The Banshees, the Bunnymen, the Teardrops, and the Two-Tone groups.  By 1984 a new set of student favourites had arrived, with much weaker links to punk, if any (and, correspondingly, less sense of collective purpose and, for the most part, much less creative ambition).  Department of Enjoyment, more than any NME tape before it, blatantly allies itself to Student Favourites – emphatically so, kicking off with new Hall of Residence idols Lloyd “I’ve read more than four books, you know” Cole and The Smiths.  Other campus faves found here include The Cocteau Twins, The Waterboys, and Billy Bragg, plus Robert Wyatt and The Redskins for the Student Union politicos.  There are notably fewer black artists than the preceding tapes and when non-student music finally arrives (with Dr John, halfway through side two), it’s such an abrupt shift it feels like a different compilation entirely.  Overall, though, Department of Enjoyment is a much smoother listen than most of the earlier tapes.  The overall quality is more consistent, but while there are fewer depressing lurches into the tedious and/or pretentious, there are fewer flights into the empyrean too.  Which – genius creators like The Smiths and Nick Cave notwithstanding - is indicative of its less ambitious era.  Ironically, the USA was the home to the most creative music of the era, but this tape only hints at that with the inclusion of Husker Du.  Note also, if you will, the graphics, which in their juxtaposition of Soviet constructivism and fifties-style advertising mascots say “mid-eighties” more effectively than anything on the tape itself.



 

You’ve already spotted Chess Checkmate as the latest trawl through a classic R&B label catalogue, and it does the job as well as any of its predecessors.  Side one is the electric blues Chess were most famous for, while side two looks at its less celebrated but in some ways more engaging soul output.  I have no problems with anything here – and Howlin’ Wolf is just one of the greatest talents of all time, in any field – but there’s something about the image of Chess Records that depresses me.  I think it’s because the early seventies version of rock history, which I grew up with, never mentioned any form of blues but the Chess variety, and then mainly in connection with the repertoire being adopted by a legion of ugly, tedious and earnest boogie bands.  I ended up associating Chess with everything joyless and drearily macho that came out of blues in the pre-punk years, and resenting the fact that so much joyous blues (the type you get on the earlier NME R&B tapes!) was overlooked.  But that really is my problem – this is a great tape, and every second of it is priceless.  I just like side two more is all. 


 

Night People, in its perfectly apposite Miro packaging, cherry-picks the various small jazz labels that by the eighties had fallen under the “Original Jazz Classics” umbrella.  This includes Prestige, Riverside, Fantasy and New Jazz, so it’s quite an extraordinary archive to pick from – as the list of artists above indicates.  Consequently, Night People is probably the best sampler there’s ever been for what used to be called “modern” jazz – the jazz that arrived between 1945 and the early sixties, which was fiercely independent, fiercely exploratory and profoundly rebellious.  Indeed, as rebel music goes, jazz of this era makes punk seem like S Club 7.  What makes this tape so good a sampler is its variety – it’s anything but the stereotyped image of track after track of macho tenor players running up and down the scales.  You get everything from Blakey’s seismic rhythm through the airy, slightly disorientating space of the Mulligan quartet’s counterpoint to Mose Allison’s seemingly effortless urban and urbane blues to the MJQ’s ability to swing like crazy in the middle of an 18^th century baroque form to the fascinating contrast of Miles Davis and John Coltrane when the latter is a sideman to the former.  It’s pretty fair to say that if you don’t like at least one thing on here, you’re not going to like any jazz at all, ever.  And if you don’t like Chet Baker’s singing on Do It The Hard Way, well, you don’t like music.

Best Tracks: On Department of Enjoyment, Dr John’s lovely Dorothy, a solo piano instrumental dedicated to his mum, is so beautiful everything else is in its shadow (though don’t, as I did, seek out the album it comes from, Dr John Plays Mac Rebennack, which is very dull for the most part).  I’m also very fond of Billy Bragg’s version of John Cale’s Fear.  On Chess Checkmate and Night People, you’re spoilt for choice, and it’s really down to how you feel on any given day.

Worst Tracks:  On Department of Enjoyment, it has to be the seven minutes of studio- wank by the Art of Noise.  It’s no coincidence that around this point in time I shed my long-term fear that Paul Morley was stood behind me judging all my record shop purchases.  If this was the great man’s own output, I no longer felt any qualms about handing over a few of our English pounds for St. Dominic’s Preview or a Steely Dan compilation.  The Redskins’ smug and bullying lecture about how we should join the Socialist Workers Party is also very annoying (fact: both the Art of Noise and the Redskins feature NME writers).  There’s nothing bad on the other two, though the Wes Montgomery track isn’t that strong an ending for Night People and Art Pepper, though grand, is a bit out of place as his track was recorded over a decade after everything else.

Fact I Am Obliged To Point Out:  Little Milton is the only blues legend to share his name with a village in Bedfordshire.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: I’d obviously disagree, but I bet a few people would think that applies to the whole of Night People.  For me, the inclusion of Wynton Marsalis’ understated version of The Star Spangled Banner does hint at NME anti-rock types trying to tell us this is much better than that loud, undignified version by Jimi Hendrix.  It isn’t (though it’s perfectly fine in its own right).

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: The Boothill Foot Tappers, The Prisoners, The Moodists, Bourgie Bourgie, African Connexion, Papa Levi.

Most Misguided Trend-Hopping: The Boothill Foot Tappers represent the short-lived “Cowpunk” movement, in which a couple of Camden pubs briefly embraced a punk-country hybrid.  Other bands included the Skiff Skats, The Long Tall Texans, Pink Peg Slacks and the Shillelagh Sisters.  It was good fun, but too light-hearted to ever be anything but a diversion (rock and pop can’t handle laughter).  It did help The Pogues come to prominence, though.  The Trappers track itself is a sweet, witty and tuneful song about the end of a relationship and doesn’t deserve obscurity.

The Cabaret Voltaire Award for Persistent Management: Robert Wyatt puts in his third appearance on an NME tape

NME Hope Springs Eternal Moment: They’re still trying to get us to like African music.

Best Title: Tie: Epistrophy, Bring It To Jerome

Worst Title: Amber and the Amberines

How Of Its Time Is It?  It’s just popped out to buy a Coal Not Dole badge.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: The Moodists, African Connexion

Memories: My long-lost friend Lindsay once slept with Paul Young, and found the experience underwhelming.

Still At The Coalface: Many of the Department gang, notably Lloyd Cole, Morrissey and Marr, Nick Cave, Dr John and Wynton Marsalis.  Both Edwyn Collins and Bo Diddley are in recovery from strokes, and Chuck Berry is alive though retired. See also below.

No Longer With Us: All the bandleaders on Night People, except for Dave Brubeck and Sonny Rollins, both still active despite being very, very old indeed.  I don’t think anyone from Department of Enjoyment has died, but have no idea about the Chess gang (many of whom were already long gone before the tape came out) apart from John Lee Hooker.

Worst Line:

Papa Levi: “Maddest comedian a Kenny Ev’r’att/Dracula turn into a vampire bat”

Best Line:

The Boothill Foot Tappers: “Get your hands out of my drawers”

Catalogue Numbers: NME 008 (Mad Mix II), NME 009 (Ace Case) and NME 010 (Smile Jamaica)

Released: November 1983

Track lists:

Mad Mix II

Side 1: James Brown Bring It On… Bring It On/Aretha Franklin Get It Right/Eurythmics Satellite Of Love/Sandii and the Sunsetz with David Sylvian Living On The Front Line/Frank Chickens Shellfish Bamboo/Kas Product Pussy X/The Kane Gang Small Town Creed/NYC Peech Boys Don’t Make Me Wait/The New Black Montana Magumede/Yellowman Who Can Make The Dance Ram?

Side 2: U2 Two Hearts Beat As One/You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath Halo Flamin’ Lead/Xmal Deutschland Sehnsucht/The Associates Aggressive and Ninety Pounds/Bonsai Forest The Great Escape/Prefab Sprout Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone)/The Special AKA Lonely Crowd/JoBoxers Crime Of Passion/JB’s All Stars One Minute Every Hour/Cabaret Voltaire Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself)/The Style Council Party Chambers/Tom Waits Frank’s Wild Years

Ace Case

Side 1: Etta James Good Rockin’ Daddy/Charles Brown & Amos Milburn Educated Fool/Young Jessie Hit Git and Split/Bobby Marchan Quit My Job/Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns Don’t You Just Know It/Arthur Alexander Anna/Irma Thomas Time Is On My Side/Benny Spellman Fortune Teller/Richard Berry Oh! Oh! Get Out The Car! /The Chanters She Wants To Mambo/Alvin “Snake Eyes” Tyler The Peanut Vendor

Side 2: Ike and Tina Turner I Can’t Believe What You Say/Shirley Ellis The Nitty Gritty/The Olympics Baby Hully Gully/Mary Love You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet/Bobby “Blue” Bland Call On Me/B.B. King Ain’t Nobody Business/Johnny “Guitar” Watson She Moves Me/ Little Richard Directly From My Heart/The Jive Five Rain/The O’Jays Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette)/The Impressions Keep On Pushing

Smile Jamaica

Side 1: Lord Creator Independent Jamaica/Jimmy Cliff Miss Jamaica/Eric Morris Solomon Gundie/Don Drummond Man In The Street/Delroy Wilson Dancing Mood/Soul Vendors Swing Easy/Desmond Dekker 007 (Shanty Town)/Toots and the Maytals 54-46 Was My Number/The Melodians Rivers of Babylon/Scotty and Lorna Skank In Bed/The Heptones Book Of Rules/Augustus Pablo King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown

Side 2: Jacob Miller Tenement Yard/Burning Spear Slavery Days/Junior Murvin Police And Thieves/Culture Two Sevens Clash/Bob Marley and the Wailers Smile Jamaica/The Wailing Souls Bredda Gravillicious/Sugar Minnott Hard Time Pressure/Dennis Brown Sitting and Watching/Gregory Isaacs Night Nurse/Black Uhuru Slaughter

Verdict

Three tapes this time round, with a contemporary one and an old R&B one accompanied by an exploration of another musical genre.  Mad Mix II is a return to the form of Mighty Reel, even to the extent of the quality tracks being so good and so memorable you forget how poor t’other half is.  Of course, starting with The Last Great James Brown Record and finishing with a legendary Tom Waits track doesn’t exactly harm the cause.  Elsewhere, the ailing body of post-punk adventure has a few attempts at coming back to life with a spectacular track from Cabaret Voltaire (the finest of their “commercial” moments), Jerry Dammers’ sonic vision, Jim Thirlwell doing his Foetus thing, and the arrival of Prefab Sprout’s oblique, literate worldview.  Yellowman’s toast is fantastic, and the NYC Peech Boys track makes me wonder why anyone ever thought House music was so new when this sounds exactly like it, several years earlier.  Even U2 are still in their pre-shite phase.  However, it’s not all good news: there’s too much retro-soul from punk era people losing their nerve (none of it is unpleasant on the ear, but it’s gutless), there’s a lot of self-indulgent crap, and the Aretha Franklin track (identikit early 80s pop soul on which the abdicated Queen of Soul doesn’t so much phone in her performance as get her secretary to make the call) is emblematic of the 80s NME tendency to applaud soul records because of who made them rather than because they’re any good.  Which this one isn’t.  Overall, though, this does a pretty good job on extracting a lot of decent music from one of the worst years in pop history.

Ace Case trawls the vaults of R&B reissue specialists Ace Records much as Pocket Jukebox did for their rivals Charly and produces just as much pleasure.  If I think Pocket Jukebox is better – and I’m not sure I do – it’s only because Pocket Jukebox came first.  It’s as diverse, as funny and as accessible as the earlier tape and judiciously mixes relatively familiar songs with the more obscure to great effect.

Smile Jamaica celebrates twenty-one years of Jamaican independence with one reggae track per year from 1962 to 1983 (confusingly, that’s twenty-two tracks), all from the Island back catalogue. As a condensed history of reggae it’s virtually faultless and unrivalled by anything except Island’s own Tougher Than Tough – which had the luxury of 4CDs, rather than one cassette, to tell the tale.  You could make minor criticisms – it doesn’t really put enough emphasis on the deejay/toaster, and ending with Black Uhuru’s conscious stylings rather than the emerging dance hall sounds of the era seems wrong, with hindsight – but that’s churlish in face of such a superb tribute to the compiler’s art as well as to the music it contains.

Best Tracks:  On Mad Mix II, it’s tied between James Brown, Tom Waits, Prefab Sprout and Cabaret Voltaire.  On the others, it’s impossible to say anything is “best”, but my favourites are (Ace Case) Huey “Piano” Smith and (Smile Jamaica) Culture, both of which make me come over all unnecessary.

Worst Track:  Mad Mix II contains two absolute stinkers.  The Eurythmics, awash in the stench of self-regard, desecrate one of Lou Reed’s greatest songs.  Actually, that’s not fair on desecration.  As for Kas Product, their “knowing” dialogue between a girl and her cat is physically painful to listen to – ne’er was the phrase “These people need a slap” more apt.

Fact I Am Obliged To Tell You: The Cabaret Voltaire track takes its title from a line in Hancock’s The Rebel – specifically, an existentialist girl at a party is outlining her philosophy to Hancock.  The girl is played by existentialist icon and Fairy Liquid pimp Nanette Newman.

Another Fact I Am Obliged To Tell You: I was once interviewed by one of the Kane Gang for a story in the Sunderland Echo.

Sadly Not The Song You Know:  Madness spin-off Bonsai Forest’s twee little pop song is not Blur’s Great Escape, and to my endless disappointment David Sylvian isn’t guesting on a cover of Eddy Grant’s Living On The Front Line but helps out Sandii and the Sunsetz with some tedious Japanese electro rubbish of their own making.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Sandii and the Sunsetz, Kas Product

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: See previous answer, plus The Frank Chickens, NYC Peech Boys, New Black Montana, Foetus, Xmal Deutschland, Bonsai Forest, JoBoxers and JB’s All Stars.  And quite possibly Yellowman.

The Beat Award For A Persistent Manager: Whoever managed to get Cabaret Voltaire onto their third NME tape.

Most Unabashed Imitation Of Another Band: Xmal Deutschland sound so much like The Banshees that Siouxsie could have put them on her tax return as dependents.

NME Hope Springs Eternal Moment: New Black Montana, for marking the fourth contemporary tape in a row in which the grand old rag is trying to make us love African music.

Best Title: Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself?)

Worst Title: Pussy X

How Of Its Time Is It?  It feels like an attempt to celebrate good stuff that was being lost at the time, so it’s totally of its time but doesn’t feel like it at all.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Sandii and the Sunsetz, New Black Montana, The Associates

Still At The Coalface: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, U2, Paul Weller, Tom Waits

No Longer With Us: The Godfather

Best Line:

James Brown (“You’re so bad you gotcha OWN thang”) comes close, but how could it be anything other than:

“Never could stand that dog”
Graphics:

Catalogue Numbers: NME 006 (Racket Packet) and NME 007 (Stompin’ At The Savoy)

Released: April 1983

Track lists:

Racket Packet

Side 1: Everything But The Girl English Rose/Heartbeat Spook Sex/Madness Grey Day (Live)/Gregory Isaacs Love Is Overdue (Live)/Curtis Mayfield Dirty Laundry/The Republic My Spies/Shriekback Mothloop II/Palais Schaumburg Hockey/Benjamin Zephaniah Dis Policeman (Is Kicking Me To Death)/Eric Bogosian Live At The ICA (Extracts)

Side 2: Orchestre Jazira Love/The Mighty Diamonds Lucky/Imagination Follow Me/Prince Charles and the City Beat Band Cash (Cash Money)/Animal Nightlife Shark Fin Soup/Lene Lovich Never Never Land/The Box Out/The Corporation Hard Times/Eddy Grant Hello Africa (Live)/The Bluebells Aim In Life

Stompin’ At The Savoy

Side 1: Errol Garner Stompin’ At The Savoy (Excerpt)/Little Esther T’Ain’t What You Do/H-Bomb Ferguson My Brown Frame Baby/Sam “The Man” Taylor Midnight Rambler/The Three Barons The Milkshake Stand/Big Joe Turner Howling Winds/Art Pepper Brown Gold/Tiny Grimes Romance Without Finance/Little Esther & Mel Walker Cupid’s Boogie/Gatemouth Moore I Ain’t Mad At You/Johnny Otis All Nite Long

Side 2: Fats Navarro Spinal/Babs Gonzales Ornithology/Eddie Jefferson The Birdland Story/Charlie Parker Another Hair-Do/Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart The Jam Man/Miss Rhapsody Sweet Man/Helen Humes Rock Me To Sleep/The Ravens Write Me A Letter/Sam Price Rib Joint

Verdict

They lost the plot with Racket Packet.  It starts in an excessively mopey manner with Everything But The Girl (mopey by definition, and covering one of Paul Weller’s most annoying songs to boot) and never really gets going.  Only five tracks in, with Curtis Mayfield’s last masterpiece Dirty Laundry, is there anything worth listening to (the normally sound Madness and Gregory Isaacs being in very tired live form).  The rest of side one is a waste of time apart from – debatably – the excerpts from comedian Eric Bogosian’s one-man show at the ICA, right at the end.  Side two has more that’s worth hearing, but the bad stuff on side two is really bad, unlike on side one, where it’s mostly just dreary.  With hindsight, it’s a strong indication that the spirit of post-punk adventure is just about extinct – and when it surfaces, it’s become overly whimsical and self-indulgent (check The Republic, stinking the place out).  This adventure was replaced among many musicians and journos by a guilt-driven and misguidedly uncritical embrace of all black music, good or bad, and that led to an awful lot of rubbish.  Racket Packet, then: the crap starts here.

I’d condemned Stompin’ At The Savoy out of association with Racket Packet, remembering it as almost as dreary as its partner, but on re-hearing it’s actually very good indeed.  It’s not as poppy or diverse as the earlier Pocket Jukebox, which may be why it seemed a disappointment at the time, but for the most part it’s a pleasure.  The last four tracks on side one let it down – four dreary bits of routine R&B (there’s early Charlie Parker on the Tiny Grimes track, but the historic interest doesn’t compensate for the overall dullness) – but that aside, it’s splendidly entertaining and uplifting.  And it means that within the same forty minutes I heard such titans as Big Joe Turner, Art Pepper, Fats Navarro, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and Slim Gaillard for the first time.  That’s got to be forty of the greatest minutes of anyone’s life.

NB a modified version of this tape is available on CD, under the title Still Stompin' At The Savoy, on the Giant Steps label.  You can get it for around a fiver on Amazon, though it's probably harder to find on your local high street.  Good news: six additional tracks (two from Johnny Otis, Charlie Parker's legendary Now's The Time, and one each from Stan Getz, Paul Williams and Wild Bill Moore) and liner notes from original compiler Roy Carr.  Bad news: three of the best tracks from the original tape (Little Esther, Sam "The Man" Taylor and Sam Price) have vanished, but the four dull ones have survived.  That said, the sound quality is much improved, and they don't seem so dull anymore.  Pointless change: the relatively obscure Charlie Parker tune Another Hair-Do has been replaced by the relatively obscure Charlie Parker tune Barbados.  Still a good way to spend a fiver, mind though but.
 

Best Tracks: On Racket Packet, it’s Curtis Mayfield, with the silver going to – of all people  - Lene Lovich and a desperately sad song by The Bluebells in third place.  On Stompin’, the quality is very consistent, so it’s harder to decide, but the Three Barons’ close harmony, Big Joe’s primal moan and Art Pepper’s miniaturist vinegary elegance form a one-two-three punch of rare charm and power.

Worst Track:  Sad to say, Benjamin Zephaniah.  He’s a top bloke who thoroughly deserves the MBE he declined, if you get me.  Unfortunately this sets a poem on a very serious topic – racist police brutality – to an almost childish rhythm and it all comes across as a bit Overly Earnest Theatre For Schoolkids.  Other people here are more annoying, but this is more depressing as it’s someone good under-achieving.

Most Unlikely Act Ever To Appear On An NME Cassette:  Imagination, most famous for dressing like gladiators and writhing on the floor on Top of the Pops.  Their camp soul is unique in that it’s as far as you can get from anything the NME has ever endorsed, even at its most contrary.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Heartbeat, Shriekback, Palais Schaumburg

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: See previous answer, plus The Republic, Animal Nightlife, The Box and The Corporation.

Old Even Then: Lene Lovich, who had vanished in mid-1979 and not been seen since.  Great track though, full of Nuggets echoes.

Most Misguided Trend-Hopping: The NME embraces “Hard Times”, a short-lived hype started by Robert “Bobby Helmet” Elms in which pampered media types acted poor by ripping holes in the knees of their jeans and pretending to like soul music.  Represented here by Prince Charles (a US funkateer whose Cash - admittedly a fine track – led earnest NME types to think he was a Marxist when in fact he was a complete breadhead), Animal Nightlife (with excruciating “sophisticated” lyrics and some of the flattest singing you’ll ever hear) and The Corporation – said media types making a shocking attempt at a funk track.

NME Hope Springs Eternal Moment: For reasons no-one ever fathomed, they put a lot of effort into trying to get the world to think of amiable but minor talent Eddy Grant as a genius.  Here he is, amiable but minor.

Best Title: My Brown Frame Baby

Worst Title: Spook Sex

How Of Its Time Is It?  It doesn’t reflect the charts, but it’s an all too depressing snapshot of how music was going in the eighties.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Heartbeat, Shriekback, Palais Schaumburg

Memories: Nothing much apart from generalised impressions of revising for my finals.  I still have anxiety dreams about them, which may worsen my view of Racket Packet.

Still At The Coalface: Everything But The Girl, Madness, Benjamin Zephaniah.

No Longer With Us: Gregory Isaacs, Curtis Mayfield.

Best Line:

Joe Turner:

“You know I love you

Cause the rain wrote it on my window pane”
Graphics:

Catalogue Numbers: NME 004 (Mighty Reel) and NME 005 (Pocket Jukebox)

Released: November 1982

Track lists:

Mighty Reel

Side 1: Elvis Costello and the Attractions Town Cryer/ Haircut 100 Calling Captain Autumn (Live)/Kid Creole and the Coconuts Loving You Made A Fool Out Of Me/Weekend A Day In The Life Of…/Elfas Zondi Umkumbane/Brother “D” And Collective Dib-Be-Dib-Be-Dize (How You Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise)/Fashion White Stuff/Yello Sensation/The Honeymoon Killers Petit Matin/Billy MacKenzie and the British Electric Foundation The Secret Life Of Arabia/Mari Wilson Are You There With Another Girl

Side 2: King Sunny Ade and the African Beats Kita Kita O Mo La/ Ornette Coleman Sleep Talk/Robert Wyatt Round Midnight/The Ravishing Beauties Futility/The Three Courgettes Now Dance/Rockers Revenge Walking On Sunshine/Fun Boy Three The Alibi/Cabaret Voltaire Loosen The Clamp/Liaisons Dangereuses Dancibar/UB40 Forget The Cost/Michael Smith Trainer

Pocket Jukebox

Side 1: Nina Simone My Baby Just Cares For Me/T-Bone Walker Too Much Trouble Blues/The Spaniels I Like It Like That/Jimmy Reed Take Out Some Insurance/Jerry Lee Lewis Big Legged Woman/Julia Lee Can’t Get Enough Of That Stuff/Betty Lavette Let Me Down Easy/The Prisonaires Don’t Say Tomorrow/Gene Chandler Duke Of Earl

Side 2: Robert Parker Barefootin’/Lee Dorsey Ride Your Pony/John Lee Hooker This Is Hip/Little Junior’s Blue Flames Feelin’ Good/The Dixie Cups Iko Iko/Betty Everett Getting Mighty Crowded/Jerry Butler He Will Break Your Heart/George Perkins Crying In The Street/Aaron Neville Hercules

Verdict

The template for a contemporary tape plus an archive tape (as set by Jive Wire and Hit The Road Stax) continues, though Mighty Reel is a good deal more left-field and less obviously populist than its predecessor.  The overall feel is quite grown-up and eclectic, and, rightly or wrongly, that suited my mood at the time it came out (I was all of 21).  I had fond memories of Mighty Reel, remembering it as my favourite among all the contemporary tapes.  However, when I tried to play it yesterday the cassette was so mangled that both the tape decks I tried gave up on it, though not before I’d got an idea of what Kid Creole would sound like if you were absolutely out of your head on psychoactive fungi.  Unable to check everything out, I had to fall back on memory, and found that about half of the tracks I can remember incredibly vividly, but the rest I can barely remember at all.  This suggests that Mighty Reel is not necessarily (as I’d thought) the best of the contemporary tapes, but may be the most schizoid.  And I’m very pissed off my copy is FUBAR, as two of the best tracks (Mari Wilson and Hackney pub jukebox favourite Ornette Coleman) are completely unavailable at the moment.

As for Pocket Jukebox, it’s debatably the best old R&B compilation ever, and almost certainly the most joyful.  Even Nina Simone, who spent most of her career sounding like a pissed-off moose, sounds playful.  This sense of fun may be due to its diversity, as all tracks came from Charly Records, who had rights to pretty much everything at that point in the eighties.  With only 18 tracks, it leaves you begging for more, and it induces more ear-to-ear grins of pleasure per minute than can be considered wholly safe.  This is partly because so many of the tracks set out to make you laugh – NME reissued it on CD in the mid-nineties, and, while it was expanded to 28 tracks, they dropped two of the funniest ones from the original (Julia Lee, T-Bone Walker) and it just wasn’t the same.

Best Tracks: On Mighty Reel, Brother D’s raging political hip-hop tramples on everything. Though Robert Wyatt, Mari Wilson and Ornette Coleman do outstanding work too.  On Pocket Jukebox, every one’s a winner, but at a push, Crying In The Streets, an astonishingly bereft tribute to Martin Luther King, gets the honours.  Its tone isn’t particularly consistent with the rest of the tape, but the sheer beauty transcends the dissonance.

Fact I Am Obliged To Point Out:  Unlike most rappers, Brother D is so politically committed he refused to re-release this for over 20 years until he found a sufficiently ideologically sound label to lease it to.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Elfas Zondi, The Honeymoon Killers, Liaisons Dangereuses

Old Even Then: Haircut 100, who’d somehow become archaic in less than six months

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: Weekend, Fashion, The Ravishing Beauties, The Three Courgettes

Best Title: Tie: Take Out Some Insurance Baby/Big Legged Woman

Worst Title: Calling Captain Autumn

Most Cabaret Voltaire Title Of All Time: Loosen The Clamp

Did I Really Hear That Right?  Michael Smith’s track is dub poetry delivered in such thick patois it's impossible to work out what he’s on about.  Except for one point when the music stops and all you can hear is him saying “Kiss me aaaaaaarrrrsssse”.

How Of Its Time Is It?  Mighty Reel is reflective of the NME at the time but probably not of the wider world.  Pocket Jukebox is truly timeless.

Oh Dear That’s Not Aged Well: Kid Creole.  Some of his work still stands up, but not this one.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Deep breath: Weekend, Elfas Zondi, Yello, Honeymoon Killers, The Three Courgettes, Cabaret Voltaire, Liaisons Dangereuses, UB40.  And it took ages before the Fun Boy Three track came back to me too.

Memories: My flatmate at the time, Mr Sheehan, took a great shine to Don’t Say Tomorrow and Duke of Earl.  Walking home drunk from the centre of Nottingham, on numerous occasions, we took great delight in singing these to the populace.  How they must have loved us.

Still At The Coalface: Elvis Costello, Kid Creole (assuming he hasn’t drowned in the Sheffield floods), Mari Wilson, Ornette Coleman (who’s about 120), Robert Wyatt, Kate St John from The Ravishing Beauties (she was heavily involved in the Syd Barrett memorial show at the Barbican last month), Barb Jungr from The Three Courgettes, various Fun Boys and – astonishingly, from the Pocket Jukebox – Jerry Lee Lewis, Aaron Neville and Jerry Butler.

No Longer With Us: Most of the Pocket Jukebox crowd, and, from the Mighty Reel, Billy MacKenzie and Michael Smith.

Best Line:

Julia Lee’s verdict on dancing:

“I like to do the tango

Sometimes I like to truck

But what I like the best is…

…when we hucklebuck"
Graphics:

Catalogue Numbers: NME 002 (Jive Wire) and NME 003 (Hit The Road Stax)

Released: May 1982

Track lists:

Jive Wire

Side 1: The Thompson Twins In The Name of Love/David Gamson No Turn On Red /Leisure Process Love Cascade/Buzzz Tonight’s Alright/Pig Bag A Live Orangutango/Aswad Ghetto In The Sky/Scritti Politti Asylums In Jerusalem/The Beat Get A Stand Down Job Margaret (Live)/Gil Scott-Heron B-Movie

Side 2: Suicide Dream Baby Dream/Kraftwerk Das Model/Altered Images Happy Birthday/Theatre of Hate Dreams of Poppies/The Gun Club Ghost On The Highway/Tav Falco’s Panther Burns Ms Froggy/ Black Uhuru Happiness/Defunkt Illusions/Rip Rig and Panic Billy Eckstine’s Shirt Collar/Carmel Storm/Vic Godard and the Subway Sect Just In Time/Pablo Madeleina

Hit The Road Stax

Side 1: Booker T &The MGs: Green Onions, Red Beans and Rice/Carla Thomas B-A-B-Y/Arthur Conley Sweet Soul Music/Eddie Floyd Raise Your Hand, Knock On Wood

Side 2: The Mar-Keys Last Night, Philly Dog/Sam and Dave You Don’t Know Like I Know, Hold On I’m Comin’/Otis Redding Respect, Try A Little Tenderness

Verdict

1982 was a great year for chart pop – possibly the last one there ever was.  Student faves like Echo and The Bunnymen, Fun Boy Three, Altered Images and Simple Minds (still quite good at that point) broke into the charts.  Oddballs like The Associates, Soft Cell and Dexy’s had huge hits.  Black American musicians as diverse as Grandmaster Flash, Kid Creole (who’d been very irritating as an NME hack cult figure the year before but who made a great Pop Star) and Marvin Gaye made a huge impression.  Mainstream teen pop was dominated by characters like Boy George, Nick Heyward, Martin Fry, Adam Ant and Phil Oakey – genuine eccentrics, the likes of which could never become pop stars these days.  And The Jam and Madness simply ruled the world.

There was something in the air that seemed to inspire the NME.  If C81 had been too much like living in a feminist squat eating nowt but brown rice, and Dancin’ Master too much like driving round Essex with furry dice hanging from your rear view mirror, they finally nailed it with Jive Wire and  Hit The Road Stax (accompanying the contemporary stuff with an archival tape for the first time).  These two formed the template for a further six sets of tapes all of which, with only one exception, truly delivered.

It seemed like they stumbled across four key facts and built the tapes around them:

• Our target audience consists of students
• Throw in existing student faves (Thompson Twins – still campus pets at that point -  The Beat, Altered Images) for most of ‘em, and upcoming ones (Rip Rig and Panic, Pig Bag) for the self-consciously hip, and we’re onto a winner
• Students don’t like smooth, mainstream contemporary soul and funk, but they’ll melt for something funky that’s abrasive (Defunkt) and/or political (Gil Scott-Heron) and/or from the Third World (Pablo, Black Uhuru and, let’s face it, it doesn’t matter that Aswad were from Ladbroke Grove, students think all reggae comes from Jamaica)
• White people in the UK like old black American music more than anyone else in the world except the Japanese 

Jive Wire addresses 1-3 brilliantly and Hit The Road Stax nails number 4.

Jive Wire, as a result, is the first of the NME tapes that really works.  It’s an absolute gem.  Even the bad bits aren’t that bad.  And as for Hit The Road Stax, highlights from the 1967 Stax-Volt tour of the UK, it’s one of the most exciting things ever made by anybody.  I played them both a lot at the time, but I must have played Hit The Road Stax five times as often as Jive Wire.  And I spent the whole summer buying old soul albums.

Best Tracks: On Jive Wire, Gil Scott-Heron, by a ridiculously wide margin.  If modern hip-hop was one-hundredth as eloquent, cutting and engaged with things that actually matter as this, I’d never listen to anything else.  On Hit The Road Stax, everything’s great, but Sam and Dave probably edge it.

Fact I Am Obliged To Point Out: Gil Scott-Heron’s dad played for Celtic.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Carmel, Rip Rig and Panic

Someone’s Manager’s Doing A Grand Job: The Beat.  It’s a great recording, but more to the point it ensures they and they alone were on all three NME tapes to date

Old Even Then: Suicide. Great, but already several years old

Hey, We May Be The NME, But We Down With Da Brothers: Doesn’t apply.  This time round, nothing feels like tokenism.  That said, the Pablo track does make you think someone at the NME is thinking “Okay, you think you’ve caught up with us about funk, so here’s some African music, bet you don’t know anything about that, na-na-na-NA-na”.  Great track mind though but.

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: Leisure Process, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns

Best Title: Billy Eckstine’s Shirt Collar

Worst Title: A Live Orangutango

Most Pleasant Surprise: Pablo.  Who knew African music sounded this good?

Did I Really Hear That Right?  Vic Godard singing an old Dean Martin hit, and Tav Falco, which sounds like rockabilly performed by drunken tramps.  My Mum thought it sounded like the theme tune to Hi-De-Hi.

How Of Its Time Is It?  It’s supporting Northern Ireland in the World Cup

Oh Dear That’s Not Aged Well: Leisure Process, though perfectly listenable, are very much of their day, probably because the track has a long Gary Barnacle sax solo, as did every other record in 1982.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Buzzz

Memories: None in particular, apart from playing Jive Wire at home once and my Dad’s utterly random question “Is there a bass player on that?” (“that” being Rip Rig And Panic).

Still At The Coalface: Scritti Politti, The Beat, Joe Bowie from Defunkt, Andrea Oliver and Neneh Cherry (TV chefs!) from Rip Rig and Panic, and the very lovely Clare Grogan, blessed be the earth she walks upon.  And Joe Boyd, Defunkt producer, was the organiser of the recent Syd Barrett tribute show at the Barbican.

No Longer With Us: Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club, Puma from Black Uhuru.  And Gil Scott-Heron, though still alive, has fallen on very hard times.

Best Line:

Well, the first thing I want to say is “Mandate, my ass”.

Graphics:





Both by the great French cartoonist Serge Clerc, no less

Catalogue Number: NME 001

Released: October 1981

Track list:

Side 1: Tom Browne Funkin’ For Jamaica/Linx I Wanna Be With You/Grace Jones Feel Up/Talking Heads Cities (Live)/Elvis Costello and the Attractions Big Sister/Beggar & Co Laughing On/Funky 4 + 1 That’s The Joint/Ian Dury and the Blockheads Inbetweenies (Live)/Kid Creole and the Coconuts There But For The Grace Of God Go I (Live) /Lounge Lizards Stompin’ At The Corona (Live) /The Polecats Rockabilly Guy (Dub)/Lloyd Coxone Zion Bound/Madness Shadow On The House

Side 2: The Beat Hit It! /Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five The Birthday Party/Junior Giscombe Mama Used To Say/B52s Give Me Back My Man (Instrumental)/Susan 24,000 Kiss/The Jam When You’re Young (Live)/Dennis Bovell Better /The Plastics Last Train To Clarkesville/James White And The Blacks Contort Yourself/The Teardrop Explodes Traison (C’est Juste Une Histoire)/U2 An Cat Dubh – Into The Heart

Verdict

Has anything ever looked less like it came from the NME?  Play the C81 all the way through and then put this on.  You go directly from an unreleased Subway Sect outtake from 1976-7 to a slick piece of New York jazz-funk that was a major chart hit on both sides of the Atlantic.  They’re both great, but it’s hard to think of two things which are further apart.  That’s indicative of the change that came over the NME in 1981.  They were haemorrhaging readers as youngsters flocked to Smash Hits, and art students to The Face, where they could look at pictures of other art students in comical clothing without being distracted by anything as old fashioned and boring as words.  The NME’s bizarre response was to deliberately alienate its few remaining readers by focussing attention on funk, Kid Creole and French post-structuralist critical theory.  There was a point in late 1981 where it seemed the target audience consisted only of philosophy students with an abiding fear that every time they went into a record shop, Paul Morley was lurking behind them to pour scorn on their purchases.  In fact, for two hours one Tuesday in November that year, I was indeed the only NME reader in the country.

A slight exaggeration, but the beloved old rag had certainly changed.  Conscious of the need not to alienate the readers too much, this tape is actually full of “NME acts” (Elvis C, Talking Heads, Dury, Madness, The Beat, The B52s, The Jam, The Teardrops and the young U2) but it sure didn’t feel like it at the time, as us poor old fashioned guitar-loving readers recoiled in shock at all the reggae, rap and, above all, funk.  Like, I suspect, many people, I mainly bought this because I didn’t want Ian Penman coming round and calling me a rockist.

Listening to it these days, after years of exposure to all sorts of music, it’s hard to see what was so shocking about it, and it’s a mostly enjoyable listen.  It also set the template for the eclecticism of the subsequent NME “contemporary” cassettes. But they were never quite so eclectic as this again.  Over-slick funk rubs up against core New Wave idols, deep reggae, early hip-hop, New York No Wave Skronk, horrid pre-teen Japanese electropop and a dub version of a rockabilly revival “classic”.  And I still don’t believe anyone at the NME ever really liked Beggar & Co.

Best Tracks: Elvis Costello is the winner, with a version of a track from Trust that outstrips the original by miles and is so different it’s barely the same song.  Good work also from Dennis Bovell, Junior Giscombe (Best.  British Soul Record.  Ever), The Teardrop Explodes’ French language version of Treason, and the Lounge Lizards with what they themselves called their “reptilian fake jazz”.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: It’s four tracks in before you even get to “an NME act”, and it pretty much stays that way.  But the worst, by far, is “NME act” The Beat, whose Hit It! – a nine-minute attempt at Real Reggae – is unspeakably tedious.  Honourable Runner-Up: Susan’s 24,000 Kiss, teeny electro-pop from Japan which even a Kyoto paedophile would consider unbearably childish.  Bronze medal: Beggar & Co, with a joyless piece of forced "fun" only too typical of most jazz-funk; verbally emphasising "good times", but failing to deliver them in its grim professionalism and lack of humour.

Someone’s Manager Got These Terrible Old “Rarities” Released To Make A Fast Buck: Pretty much all the “NME acts”, but in particular The Beat. Most of them aren't that terrible, but they tend not to be the "proper" versions, with live tracks particularly common.  And Madness aren't a great country band. 

Terrible Old Rarity That’s Actually Quite Good: Elvis

Hey, We May Be The NME, But We Down With Da Brothers: Where do I begin?

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: Beggar & Co, The Funky 4 + 1, The Lounge Lizards, The Polecats, Susan, The Plastics

Best Title: Traison (C’est Juste Une Histoire)

Worst Title: 24,000 Kiss

Most Pleasant Surprise: The early hip-hop, which is as open-hearted, good-natured and uplifting as 1940s R&B songs about drunkenness.  And the young, pomp-free U2 sound good too.

Did I Really Hear That Right?  The dub version of Rockabilly Guy

How Of Its Time Is It?  It’s definitely the NME’s October 1981, but I don’t think it’s anyone else’s.

Oh Dear That’s Not Aged Well: The Dury track sounded ancient even then but now has classicism in its favour.  The Kid Creole one sounds most creaky these days, and James White sounds quite arthritic too.

I Have No Memory Of Ever Hearing This In My Life: Lloyd Coxone

Memories: Quite a few: happy recollections of my appallingly lazy second year at University in general, but, more specifically, talking to the Much Beloved But Frequently Difficult Old Flame about the U2 track the night we met; for some reason, this tape also reminds me of reading the Frank Miller Daredevils as they came out; and a vivid memory of hoping no-one in my hall of residence would hear Funkin’ For Jamaica, and consequently laugh at me, every time I played the tape

Still At The Coalface: I think Kid Creole now lives in Sheffield and does the Phoenix Nights circuit, and David Grant, as noted in the previous post, has a Career of Shame.  Elsewhere, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Madness, The Beat, The B52s, Paul Weller, Julian Cope and U2 are all still active.  Basically, the NME acts.  Funny, that.

No Longer With Us: As with the C81, the much-missed Lord Upminster.  I think Tom Browne may now be funkin’ for St Peter too.

Best Line:

It nearly went to Cope’s “Juste qu’est-que vous voyez/C’est juste une histoire”, but it’s got to be Elvis’ “She is the blue chip/That belongs to the big fish”.  Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!  Out! Out! Out!
Graphics:

Catalogue Number: COPY 001 (NME/Rough Trade co-release; later released through shops on Rough Trade)

Released: Spring 1981

Track list:

Side 1: Scritti Politti The “Sweetest Girl”/The Beat Twist and Crawl Dub/Pere Ubu Misery Goats/Wah! The 7000 Names of Wah!/Orange Juice Blue Boy/Cabaret Voltaire Raising The Count/DAF Kebab Traume/Furious Pig Bare Pork/Specials Raquel/Buzzcocks I Look Alone/Essential Logic Fanfare In The Garden/Robert Wyatt Born Again Cretin

Side 2: The Raincoats Shouting Out Loud/Josef K Endless Soul/Blue Orchids Low Profile/Virgin Prunes Red Nettle/Aztec Camera We Could Send Letters/The Red Crayola Milkmaid/Linx Don’t Get In My Way/The Massed Carnaby Street John Cooper Clarkes The Day My Pad Went Mad/James Blood Ulmer Jazz Is The Teacher Funk Is The Preacher/Ian Dury Close To Home/The Gist Greener Grass/Subway Sect Parallel Lines

Verdict

Sometimes called “the start of indie”, but it’s actually the end of an era: the last hurrah of post-punk puritanical eclecticism associated in particular with the early days of Rough Trade, who provide around half the tracks from their own catalogue.  Six months later the NME was obsessed with what Alexei Sayle called “shiny new yellow pop CACK!” as its most high-profile hacks sneered at the type of stuff to be found here.  The signs are there, if you look hard enough: Scritti Politti’s decision that a tune is ideologically acceptable after all, the romanticism of Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, and above all the Linx track, which made everyone ask “What the fuck is this doing on here?”.  Most of what was meant to “challenge” is simply irritating these days, and what once seemed impossibly demanding (Ulmer) now sounds rather amiable.

So, this seemed incredibly vibrant at the time, but it’s archaic now.  You’d never think of sitting down to play it unless you were a hopeless nostalgic.

Best Tracks: Scritti edge it, closely followed by all the Postcard stuff, the Blue Orchids, Wyatt, and, surprisingly, the Buzzcocks, with the last thing they recorded before their long rest period.

Don’t Think You’re Here To Enjoy Yourself, We’re The NME And We Know What’s Good For You: Cabaret Voltaire, Furious Pig, The Red Crayola, Virgin Prunes

Someone’s Manager Got These Terrible Old “Rarities” Released To Make A Fast Buck: Specials, Ian Dury, Subway Sect

Terrible Old Rarity That’s Actually Quite Good: Subway Sect

Hey, We May Be The NME, But We Down With Da Brothers: Linx

Groups You Haven’t Thought Of In Twenty Years: The Gist, Furious Pig, Virgin Prunes

Best Title: Kebab Traume

Worst Title: Bare Pork

Most Pleasant Surprise: Buzzocks

How Of Its Time Is It?  If it was any more Spring 81, it would go off to form the SDP

Most Dated Concept: Sending letters (Aztec Camera)

Special Memories: None in particular, though I saw the Blue Orchids around this time and they were phenomenal

Still At The Coalface: Scritti Politti (who made my favourite album of 2006), Pere Ubu, The Buzzcocks, Robert Wyatt, Roddy Frame (presumably), John Cooper Clarke, David Grant (a voice coach for “talent” show contestants!)

No Longer With Us: Lord Upminster.  Thankfully, Edwyn Collins continues to recover.

Best Line:

The kitchen had been ransacked, ski-marks in the hall

A chicken had been dansacked and thrown against the wall

Graphics:

It's here because, as far as I can see, it's nowhere else.

"It" being a definitive directory of the cassettes produced by the NME back in the eighties.

What a strange world it was.  To gain access to new music, you had to clip coupons from a magazine for three weeks and then send them off with payment - with payment! - and, if you were lucky, four weeks later, your cassettes would turn up in the post.  Yup.  Snail-mail.

No downloads.  No cover-mounted CDs.  Indeed, in the early days, no CDs at all.

But those tapes, because you had to pay for them, because you had to wait for them, and because they came from what was then the most authoritative pop mag in the world, were loved and venerated in a way that just might not happen anymore.  They also opened eyes and ears to sounds you might never have heard otherwise.

They were great.  Or at least they felt that way at the time.

They seem to have vanished from the collective memory, though.  There doesn't seem to be anywhere on the net that gives you the details of what was on them, and whether or not it was any good.  Maybe no-one but me gives a damn.  But, just in case, I'm going to be providing details on all 37 of them, starting in spring '81 with the C81 (whose cover image is the blog icon here), and working through to 1988's Indie City.  The reviews will come in batches, as the cassettes did.  The first two, C81 and Dancin' Master, were stand-alone items, but for the next few years, a tape of contemporary stuff would be accompanied by one or more buddies exploring archive items, usually looking at a particular label or genre.  After a while, they ditched the contemporary ones, and just went archival.

We'll be covering them all.

Brace yourselves.  We're about to press "play".