“I heard the Pixies pretty much right out of the box. I even liked them. But for some reason, I just didn’t care that much. Blame hip-hop, I guess, which was kicking seriously hard at the time, ripping shit up all over. Guitar based rock music just didn’t seem that relevant anymore, regardless of how tight, explosive, intense, poetic, funny it was. I was wrong, which I finally figured out once Doolittle showed up.” (Philip Random)
Two Stone Roses tracks presented as one because they really are – just played in different directions. Or as some genius put it at the time, “You know the drugs are good when songs are changing direction and you don’t really notice.” And the drugs were very good in Manchester at the time of that first (and only really) Stone Roses album.
By 1989, Public Image Ltd weren’t exactly redefining the zeitgeist anymore. In fact, it’s arguable they weren’t really a band anymore – just John Lydon‘s personal project. Which, in the case of Warrior, seemed to be about proving that he could rock at least as big as U2 (or whoever) and succeeding, with the best version a remix that’s now almost impossible to find, probably because of the sample of Old Lodge Skins himself laying down his humble but fierce warrior prayer.
The Stone Roses hit like a fresh breeze in 1989 with a self-titled debut album which they’d never come close to matching. The lyrics may have worked a dark edge but the sound was all cool light, a powerful pop that was also ethereal, expansive, exploding with the sort of complex colours that the decade in question had mostly forgotten even existed. The future looked vibrant, maybe even good.
This one (from Pop Will Eat Itself’s 1989 mega-brain-exploder of a masterpiece, This is the Day … This is the Hour … This is This) concerns the legal problems of James Brown whose beats everyone was happily stealing at the time. 1989 being one of those years in which EVERYTHING seemed to be happening all at once, mainly because hip-hop was finally, officially here to stay, and with it sampling (everything ever recorded really) setting folks free in ways they could never have imagined possible. At least until the lawyers got involved.
“”Back in the day, I generally thought of The Cure as more of a pop band than anything else, and a damned good one. Which perhaps explains why I didn’t listen to Disintegration that much. My loss, because it’s a solid album all the way through. Though to this day, the track I keep coming back to is Lullaby which, it turns out, was their biggest ever hit in the UK. Though not so much here in the Americas, thankfully, because I’m not sick of it. Reminds me of spiders for some reason. In a good way. I mean, they’re our friends, aren’t they?” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 