Category Archives: All Vinyl Apocalypse

1,111 greatest records you probably haven’t already heard

647. nothing is everything

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“When the Who did it, they called it Let’s See Action, but a title like Nothing is Everything was far more profound to my thirteen year old mind. I remember taping Pete Towsend’s version direct from FM radio (microphone jammed up against the tinny speaker, my little brother and sister being told to ‘Shut Up’ in the background). It got a lot of play for a while, like all my handmade cassettes. Then a couple of decades intervened and I pretty much forgot all about it. What eventually hooked me again (late 1990s now) was the lyrics and how eloquently they riffed on all the revolution everyone was amping for back in those barely post-60s days, and how doomed it all was. Rumour has it / minds are open / then you must fill them up with lies …” (Philip Random)

PeteTownsend-leap

648. indication

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The story on the Zombies is that they’d broken up before their best stuff was ever even released. A classic case of being too far ahead of the curve as a track like Indication indicates, a pumped up ride with some killer keyboards at the heart of it all, and all months before the Beatles had gotten around to releasing Revolver. The upside being that we’ve never really grown tired of it.

Zombies-1966

649. gouge away

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“The Pixies were nothing if not fresh when I first heard them, which was pretty much as they hit. All the rage and bile of punk and hardcore applied to a smart, tight pop sense.  But I’d be lying if I said I was entirely blown away. Because there was something a little too obvious about it. Like, why had it taken so long for somebody to put this formula together? Also, you had all manner of other stuff erupting at the time, all kinds of cool futures getting invented. It was only maybe five years later, (after they’d broken up) that I realized just how strong and good a band they were, with Doolittle the album they’d never top.” (Philip Random)

Pixies-1989

650. tell me something good

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3 Teens Kill 4 only ever released one album, but it was a good one, very much in synch with the temper of the increasingly nasty times. In the case of Tell Me Something Good, that meant grabbing some audio from the TV coverage of John Hinkley‘s attempted 1981 assassination of Ronald Reagan, laying it over some mutated funk and turning it into a cover of that Rufus song. And nobody complained really. Homeland Security were not called. Nobody got stuck on a no-fly list. Welcome to the 1980s when such a thing as an art underground actually existed, a dark and mysterious place that was genuinely hard to get to, and once there, get out of.

3teensKill4

652. Old England

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Old England being the grimmest track found on the Waterboys‘ otherwise mostly uplifting 1985 masterpiece This is the Sea. Because what value empire when it’s children are giving up, choosing instead the kingdom inherent in refined opium? You can see it in their heroin eyes. The sun is most definitely setting. And just to make it clear he wasn’t messing around, main Waterboy Mike Scott would soon be relocating to Ireland with (again) almost entirely uplifting results.

MikeScott-1985

653. this big hush

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Come the mid 1980s, Shriekback were doing two things very well. Dark and funky rave-ups that could seriously move a dancefloor, and dark and smooth little dreamscapes, that felt equal parts seductive and apocalyptic, rather like the world in general. Like looking your loved one in the eye and hearing a serpent hiss back. Creepy stuff.

shriekback-1985