The Pop Open Group A - PASSION

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This week's group has as its theme PASSION! The usual rules apply - listen to the tracks, pick your favourites of the ones' you didn't know, vote for them before noon on Monday.

Unfortunately due to home internet issues I've not got the sendspace file sorted out - just the streaming tracks on FT: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/07/pop-open-week-6/

Piratemoggy has put the individual tracks up here: http://www.box.net/shared/fvduhkv3af

I will try and zip them tonight.

[Poll #1022950]

Thanks to this week's players - atommickbrane, cis, credoimprobus, mcatzilut and ms_bracken.

Comment away! (And - what would YOU have submitted?)

Do you remember when MC meant 'tape'?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

So we're moving house. This means a) that I'm spending a week painting a black ceiling white; b) that I ought to slim down my collection of 'cassettes'. I do this every time I move, and the last time was two years ago. In that time I have listened to precisely... 1, count them, 1 cassette (Dogs D'amour, In the Dynamite Jet Saloon, thanks for asking). Anyway I thought I'd combine both tasks and listen through my old tapes while doing the decorating, and share the results with YOU, the people of poptimists, while I do so. (Tom -- if this is a bad idea, I'll take it over to my own journal!).

So far I have listened to:

Brian Eno, More Blank Than Frank, Songs from the Period 1973-1977.
Still love this -- I like the rock with odd angles, the affected voice, the gimmicks, the sound and feel of it. I got this just when i was starting university I think (1993) and I can remember listening to it while working down to Sainsbury's Savacentre at Cameron Toll on a Monday afternoon after classes to domy weekly food shop. (This level of organisation lasted about a month, I think). I think I felt... sophisticated, maybe, for liking it. Not sure if that's quite the word, but it seemed a long way from the last things I been mad for, and which I was cooling rapidly on -- grunge, and early Britpop (in the form of Modern Life is Rubbish-era Blur) which I hated. But I can see how Eno has more in common with the bands I did still have time for -- Pixies, Pavement, Pulp -- than Nirvana or Blur.

The Orb, Blue Room pts 1 & 2.
I think this is about 40 mins long, but because the tape player has auto-reverse, this was just going round and round last night. Also great, still, although for some reason I totally stopped listening to the Orb. I can remember buying the Ultraworld album a bit later than the rest of the world and his wife, but never really devoting much time to it. Because I had this on tape I heard it a lot more -- I just find it... absorbing, I guess.

Mark Germino, Caught In the Act of Being Ourselves.
Totally uncharacteristic of my taste then or now, this must be one of the first four or five tapes I owned. It's dated 1987, which is the year I started at boarding school, and just after I started 'getting into' music (at 13 -- I've confessed before to being a late starter). I think I heard this on one of the rock shows -- Tommy Vance or Fluff Freeman -- I listened to. I liked the ballads, pretty standard singer-songwriter fare, with the usual trite sentiments (you can't put a price on the truth; everything you read in the papers is propaganda; people live lives of fear and loneliness). I can remember listening to Michelle Shocked and Suzanne Vega about the same time, and maybe this reminded me of Springsteen, but I think I may have heard them the other way around (I can definitely remember buying my first Springsteen album, in WH Smiths in Winchester, early 1988). Another track I remember from those radio shows was Roland the Headless Thomson Gunner by Warren Zevon which I only just found again (having a) misheard the title as 'Ryan...' and b) forgetting that I was looking for it) on a free CD with a magazine. Hurray!

To be continued...

Mercury Shortlist

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare
Basquiat Strings featuring Seb Rochford's Basquiat Strings
Bat for Lashes' Fur & Gold
Dizzee Rascal's Maths & English
Jamie T's Panic Prevention
Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future
Maps' We Can Create
New Young Pony Club's Fantastic Playroom
Fionn Regan's The End of History
The View's Hats Off to the Buskers
Amy Winehouse's Back to Black
The Young Knives' Voices of Animals and Men

go on then.