Today I grabbed a 2CD compilation that I haven’t listened to for years for this morning’s listening on the way to the chocolate teapot factory – The Very Best of Sun Rockabilly, which features gems by the likes of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, early Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, plus many long-forgotten one-not-quite-hit wonders like Billy Riley & His Little Green Men doing “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Marvellous stuff. Almost enough to make you want to grow a quiff.

While at the chocolate teapot factory I listened to:

  • The Stooges’ Jukebox – a Mojo magazine giveaway. The opening track on this was The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird. I listened to it four times before I could get past it to the rest of the album…
  • Echo and the Bunnymen – Siberia
  • Inspiral Carpets featuring Mark E. Smith – I Want You (CD single) – “The ‘ole fuckin’, errr, kitchen sink-ah!”
  • Morton Feldman – Voices and Instruments (Barton Workshop/Fulkerson) – includes Journey to the End of Night (1941), Between Categories (1969), Intervals (1961), Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (1971), Four Songs to e.e. cummings (1951), Four Instruments (1965) and The O’Hara Songs (1962). A fantastic disc of some very varied Feldman works.
  • Inch featuring Mark E. Smith – Inch (CD single) – priceless phone call recording of conversation between MES and Kier Stewart (producer) at the beginning of this. “What yer best gettin’ ‘im to do, Kier, is fuckin’ gerrim to sit at a fuckin’ table, an’ play the fuckin’ drumbeat.”
  • D.O.S.E. featuring Mark E. Smith – Plug Myself In (CD single) – the best of the non-Fall MES 90s collaborations, for my money. I seem to remember D.O.S.E. being described fleetingly as “hardfloor” dance music. Whether that was a real genre or not, I have no idea. It pounds along nicely though. Droplets-ah! Space-bag!

I then had to go and unbung one of the chocolate teapot manufacturing machines, and as a consequence listened to nothing further until I was in the car driving home, for which my chosen sonic accompaniment was, once again, The Infotainment Scan by The Fall. It’s hard to believe that that album is now 16 years old – strangely, for something with such a large amount of programmed electronics, it still sounds remarkably fresh to these ears. And, of course, it hails from a time when Mark E. Smith was still writing lyrics that were laugh-out-loud funny – “Balti and vimto and spangles were always crap/regardless of the look-back bores…”