Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company ‘Like A Duck To Water’ (Earthquack, 1976)
Imagine a time when, as a concession to your audience, you’d show them cartoons while you were busy repatching your synthesisers between songs.
Bashung ‘Play Blessures’ (Philips, 1982)
Alain Bashung is a tough enigma to crack.
Mount Florida ‘Arrived Phoenix’ (Matador, 2000)
Held every Sunday between 1997 and 2010 at Glasgow’s Sub Club venue, the ferocious hedonism of Optimo Espacio was set off by the non-partisan tastes of DJs Keith “Twitch” McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes.
TJ Lawrence ‘Illuminations’ (Eagle, 1985)
Since you can’t peel back the YouTube algorithm, there’s no telling how we wound up staring at western Canada circa the mid-80s.
The Endless House Foundation ‘Endless House’ (Dramatic, 2011)
You might have wished you were at Glasto 94. Or The Screen On The Green in 77. Or Hyde Park in 69 for that matter.
Tik and Tok ‘Intolerance’ (Survival, 1984)
In the early 1980s, robots were everywhere.
Cut And Paste ‘Come Unstuck’ (Freskanova, 1999)
While tidying out a dark corner of the home office recently, some boxes of old CDs revealed themselves, among them a hillock of promos from the late 90s.
The Magnficents ‘The Magnificents’ (KFM, 2004)
The first time I saw the Magnificents live, in the small, sweaty Wee Red Bar at Edinburgh College of Art almost two decades ago, it was an initiation in both electronic music, and the power of discovering a group that felt like they were truly your own – or at least, shared only with the 50 or so fiercely devoted fellow travellers in the room.
Geinoh Yamashirogumi ‘Ecophony Rinne’ (Invitation, 1986)
Parliament-Funkadelic. Underground Resistance. Wu-Tang. When you’re thinking about the great musical collectives of the past 50 years, your mind may not jump to the Japanese outfit Geinoh Yamashirogumi.
Pete Shelley ‘XL1’ (Genetic, 1983)
When Pete Shelley died in December 2018, a universal acknowledgement of just how much we’d lost soon followed.