Tag Archives: Guadalcanal Diary

446. Watusi rodeo

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Track one, side one of the first Guadalcanal Diary album is pumped up, countrified fun. Philip Random is pretty sure it’s about a movie he saw as a little kid. “Something to do with American cowboys going to the Congo (or wherever), killing natives, other fun stuff. By which I mean, horrific. Which unfortunately was pretty standard in my early days of TV watching (the 1960s). White men killing non-white men, served up as rousing adventure. Anyway, it’s a great song from a highly overlooked so-called jangle-pop outfit.” (Philip Random)

GuadalcanalDiary-1984-live

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632. Kumbayah

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“In which the band known as Guadalcanal Diary take a campfire singalong about God (or whoever), apply rock and roll thunder and voila! a glimpse of what might just be heaven (or whatever). From 1984’s Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man, which is the first thing I ever heard from them, and the last thing I really needed to. The whole album’s a gem.” (Philip Random)

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945. ghosts on the road

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“Guadalcanal Diary generally got compared to REM back in the day, because they were also from Georgia and their guitars had a tendency to jangle. But their songs always felt more direct to me, less concerned with being Art, more with melodies that tended to get stuck in your head for days afterward. Their first release, In The Shadow Of The Big Man, was jammed with such stuff.” (Philip Random)

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