These six tracks were indeed all featured in John Peel's Festive Fifty in the early eighties, but I'm not doing this as a John Peel post per se, just fancied sharing some great music wih you, as it makes it from the vinyl to the iPod.
Is there such a thing as the best best-of ever? The Jam's Snap! must surely be a contender...
The Jam - 'Going Underground.' mp3
One of my many, many planned posts for the future is one Pete Wylie and the 7,000 faces of Wah!
Wah! Heat -'Better Scream.' mp3
It's odd to think that goth was once tagged 'positive punk' in NME, and that the tag was only applied to music (there were certainly gothic sounding music long before that, as far back as Mozart's Requiem, IMHO). So often it seems ot be used as a tag of insult or abuse, erroneously as far as I'm concerned. Certainly, many bands who came out of punk seemed to have a foot in the goth camp, to say nothing of a following.
The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette is where they started to get gothic, and where this track comes from, though The Black Album was surprise, surprise, even more so...
The Damned -Love Song.' mp3
The curious-sounding 'Hong Kong Garden' with its' wonderful eastern overtones was a great debut single, even if the lyrics seem a little close to novelty at times.* But it was on their albums that the dark heart of this particularly gorgeous and mesmerising creature lurked, as shown on these tracks from The Scream and Join Hands. Then two years later there was Juju...
Siouxsie and the Banshees -'Switch.' mp3 (from The Scream)
Siouxsie and the Banshees -'Jigsaw feeling.' mp3
Siouxsie and the Banshees -'Icon.' mp3
Enjoy, folks...
xx
* Oh come on: 'Chicken Chou-mein and chop suey...Hong Kong Garden Takeaway.'
8 comments:
my vote for best best of is the best of the damned (surprising huh?), fantastic post tonight with three siouxsie tracks that managed to get past me. the damned always had a goth element, mainly due to dave vanians vampiric image, strangly these days he looks more elvis than dracula
A.J
Ah, some of the finest rock intros are on the bass .... 'No More Heroes', 'Arabian Nights', 'Love Song', 'Ace of Spades' ....
cheers Ed!
A.J. -quite a few Damned best-ofs around, have one called 'The Light At The End Of the Tunnel' which has great tracks and sleevenotes but bizarre sequencing which makes for odd listening experience at time.
Anon- good to have you on board, whoever you may be!
Ed
the one i was referring to was the best of the damned from around 1981 and for once is actually a best of as opposed to a compilation, there are a million damned compilations, light at the end was probably released by MCA to fulfill a contract as they were unceremoniously dumped shortly after its release, the rest tend to be collections of whatever back catatlogue the label in question own, stick to the original and best, i have it on lovely red vinyl
A.J
'Better Scream' is Pete Wylie's first and finest 3 minutes. Still have the pic sleeve...
A.J. Aah sounds like an earlier one, my favourite Damned studio album (though not necessarily anyone else's) is still Phantasmagoria.
Anon -i treasure mine. promise i will do that Pete Wylie/Wah! Post sometime soon...
Ed
Still got the tape from when he played the whole of The Scream without interruption, finishing it with "that's the one, boys and girls, that's the one" - as precious as my vinyl copy.
I can well believe it. Used to tape a lot of stuff off the Peel show then edit out his voice...why?!?!
Ah, three and a half years on, can't get over the sense of loss to the music scene, and cannot even begin to imagine how his family must feel.
Ed
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