773. sickle clowns

“As the story goes, The Pretty Things never got around to Invading America properly and thus they stand as the one essential Brit band of the swinging 60s that never really made it into the so-called Classic Rock canon – the upside being that I never got remotely sick of them. Sickle Clowns comes from 1970, and as with many of the better records from that year, you can feel the change that must’ve been in the air, the flower power well on the wane, the shadows growing, the sparkle fading as the drugs wore off.” (Philip Random)

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807. White man in Hammersmith Palais

Speaking of bass culture, (and contrary to popular belief) it needs to be said that White Man in Hammersmith Palais was neither The Clash‘s first reggae song (that was Police + Thieves), nor its best (probably something from Sandinista). But it was the first one they actually wrote, Joe Strummer to be specific, slipping out of his punk mindset long enough to wax poetic on politics and music, Robin Hood and Hitler, black and white, everything really.

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917. sometimes

Rousing anthem of resistance from the Midnight Oil album that finally put them over the top somewhere outside of down under. Philip Random recalls being ambivalent to both song and album until one day in London, “… a long way from home, out of money, lonely as hell, but it’s a nice day so I’m out walking the Strand, and Sometimes pops up on a friend’s mixtape and holy shit, it suddenly says it all. Let the powers-that-be unleash their violence, push us to the wall, beat us to a pulp, we won’t give in. And then I’m looking up at all these centuries old monuments and statues of respected gentlemen who no doubt did their bit to crush the poor, the meek, the hungry, the foreign, all for the greater good of EMPIRE, and then I’m laughing because I realize they’re all covered in pigeon shit.”

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1012. problems

“You don’t truly own the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks unless you’ve stolen it.  Such was the logic of a guy who called himself Limey Len, an English ex-pat who I remember for chiefly two things. 1. the marijuana he sold was always underweight. 2: he’d never shut up about how he’d been there, actually seen the Pistols in a small club in London, which was probably a lie, he lied about everything else. So anyway, one night, at the dog end of some shitty New Years party when he was passed out on his kitchen floor, I stole his copy of Never Mind The Bollocks. I’m not even sorry.” (Philip Random)

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1073. The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EC6MrPVwr0

“The Pogues were exactly what the mid 1980s needed. The original London punks had finally blown all their fuses, with the Clash’s inglorious meltdown being the most recent notable calamity. Enter a bunch of guys (and sometimes a girl) with way too much Irish blood in their veins, grabbing their parents old instruments off the wall (and a few of their tunes), and thrashing away like it truly f***ing meant something, which in the case of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, it did. Because as the wise woman said, the universal soldier, he really is to blame.” (Philip Random)

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