0026 - ABBA

Come on now, I don't have to tell you about ABBA, do I? I am glad of having a whole album to listen to here though (even if it is just greatest hits compilation ABBA Gold and not Arrival, or something), after so many bands where I have just one or two songs.

0025 - A.P.P.L.E.

I suppose I'm something of a musical magpie - I'm always buying, downloading, listening, but I've never really been part of a scene and I'm not really an expert on any particular music. I've been reflecting on this because until now, A.P.P.L.E. have been to me just a band with a song on a compilation that I might not even have ever listened to when I should be perhaps revering them as anarcho-punk trailblazers. I suppose that's why we have Google...

0024 - A-Heads

Another one-song wonder, No Rule is some absolutely textbook punk from A-Heads. It starts out sounding like it's going to be a bad school band cover of the Jam's That's Entertainment, but quickly gets the ironic intro done before clattering to the end with a sound that, were it recorded in 2002 and not 1982, would be uncomfortably close to Elastica's.

0023 - a-ha

Let me take you back to an earlier, simpler time.  Sunday 22 May, 2005, to be exact. 

It was the last day of the Scottish football season and I went to the pub with two friends - we'll call them Andy and Ronan, since that's their names - to watch the exciting, pulsating climax to another entirely predictable two-horse race in the SPL.

0022 - A-Gen 53

Another band I have just one track by are Austrian punks A-Gen 53. I know next to nothing about them and I'm indebted to YouTube member MikeyRemembers for what little I do know about the band and the song, Stalingrad-Stumpfsinn:

0021 - A Weather

I don't know much about A Weather, other than that they're from Portland, Oregon.  Portland is cool - not that I've ever been there, but their football team is called the Timbers, it's where Clark Gable, Stephen Malkmus and Chuck Palahniuk are from, Linus Torvalds lives there and the city flag is awesome.  That's cool enough for me.

Portland's excellent flag.

0020 - A Taste Of Honey

I have a profound lack of knowledge of the music of the 70s which, to be fair, is not entirely my fault, as I was very young at the time.  I always thought, though, that the one area where I did know the 70s classics was disco.  So I was surprised to discover that the one song I have by A Taste Of Honey, Boogie Oogie Oogie, is not some obscure minor hit of the era, but is actually a bona fide classic that I was entirely unaware of - a US number 1 single in 1978, it also made number 3 in the UK.

0019 - A Smile And A Ribbon

Swedish popstrels A Smile And A Ribbon are the first band on the blog I've actually had some personal dealings with - I offered to loan them a tent in the summer of 2007 when they were playing the first Indie Tracks festival at the Midland Railway Center in Derbyshire, a scenario that could perhaps have led to amusing tales of rock & roll camping excess had they not declined the offer.

0018 - A Silver Mt. Zion

Ever since I bought Spiritualized's Medication EP some time in the early 90s, I've been, if not quite obsessed, then certainly very enthusiastic about big build-ups in songs. I didn't realise at the time I first heard Angel Sigh and Feel So Sad that I was discovering post-rock (even if Spiritualized aren't really a post-rock band, what are genres for if not bending?), but they were songs that changed my tastes in music.

0017 - A Produce

A Produce is the name under which southern Californian trance pioneer Barry Craig, er, produced his music. Active for nearly 30 years since the early 80s, he was fairly prolific, releasing nine albums, an EP and a couple of compilations between 1988 and 2011.

Naturally, given this substantial back-catalogue, I have exactly one A Produce track.

0016 - A Noise Agency

So what was it I said in my post about 20/20 - "whenever I hear or read of something as being post-punk, I expect it to either sound like Dead Kennedys or Wire." So it's a big hurrah to A Noise Agency for reinforcing my preconceptions.

0015 - A Flock Of Seagulls

Mention A Flock Of Seagulls to anyone old enough to remember the 80s (and a lot of people who aren't) and they'll think of hair.  Frontman Mike Score's ridiculous barnet is perhaps the most mocked, parodied and generally laughed at hairstyle of all time, although, in fairness, at least it means we remember him and his band.

The Numbers

So that's the numerically named bands out of the way. One thing that's interesting to me is that had you played me each of these before I started the blog, even had I recognised the songs you were playing, I think I'd have been able to identify only 4 Non Blondes and 50 Foot Wave out of the fourteen (and 50 Foot Wave were the only band by whom I actually had a full album, rather than a few songs from a compilation).

There's nothing here that I hate so far, which is nice, and that's despite prog-rock - a genre I have no love for - rearing its head in the shape of 5uu's. I thought they were pretty good though, although not good enough for me to re-evaluate my feelings on prog, admittedly.

On the positive side, I liked 17 Pygmies and 3D Picnic enough to buy an album by each and I'll probably pick up some sort of best-of 10CC at some point. It would be great if I can keep up that sort of strike rate throughout the alphabet (although my wallet might disagree).

On we go to A...

0014 - 8088

I was commenting recently on the lack of information online about 3D Picnic. Relative to 8088 though, the interwebs hold a veritable 30-volume encyclopaedia of 3D Picnic knowledge. The only certain info I can find are the listening stats on Last.fm for the one 8088 song I have, which are, I think (and this is part of the problem), credited to a different, more recent, 8088 (I think, in fact, that there might be three 8088s - this one from the mid-80s, another from the late 90s and yet another from the early 2010s, as well as a DJ 8088).

0013 - The 6ths

Another band of whom I have only the one song [actually, I have two - see update below].  The song is As You Turn To Go and it's not, as I thought before today, by the Magnetic Fields, but by the 6ths.

0012 - 5uu's

It's almost too easy to mock prog-rock/avant-rock/experimental-rock/whatever you want to call it, so I'm going to try not to. However, if we have a look at the track listing from 5uu's first album, Bel Marduk & Tiamat:

1. Theme From Marduk & Tiamat
2. Birth Of The Scale Of Life 
3. Birth Of The Compromisation 
4. Birth Of The Loyalty To Creation 
5. The Birth Of Ancient Internationalism  
6. Birth Of The Fear Of Life  
7. Birth Of Contemporary Global Friction 
8. Birth Of Sporting 
9. Birth Of Magic, Dogma And Faith 

There really isn't much needs to be said - as the old joke goes: Pretentious? Moi? I've got three of the tracks from the album - 2, 3 and 5 - but before I talk about them, a bit of background.

0011 - 5000 Volts

5000 Volts are another one-song-wonder from my collection, the one song being 1976 UK top-10 hit, Doctor Kiss Kiss.

0010 - 50 Foot Wave

Around 8 or 9 years ago, I worked as a freelance IT guy.  I'm not sure I was particularly well cut out for the life of a freelancer - I didn't put enough time into finding new work, so while I was happy with having lots of time to do "my own thing", I also never really had quite enough money to be comfortable.

Part of my problem was one specific website: epitonic.com.  It looked a bit different back then - a lot less web 2.0 (god, how I hate that term) than it does today.  On days when I wasn't working, and a lot of days when I ought to have been, I'd go to Epitonic, pick a band I liked and then just spend the day clicking on links they suggested to similar bands and downloading whatever mp3s were offered for free, to burn them to CD and listen to them at my leisure.  It was a great way to find new music and all legal and above board, which was nice.

0009 - 45 Grave

Another band I have only the one track by are 45 Grave. Riboflavin Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Poly-Unsaturated Blood is the first song the band released, on the compilation album Darker Skratcher, released by the Los Angeles Free Music Society in 1980.

0008 - 4 Non Blondes

The one-hit wonder is a funny thing.  If I asked you to name three off the top of your head, I bet I could argue that at least two of them weren't, in fact, one-hit wonders.  Just have a look at the ludicrously convoluted Questions of Definition section on Wikipedia's One-Hit Wonder page and you'll see where I'm coming from here.

In short, Carl Douglas had two hits besides Kung Fu Fighting, the Buggles had a second top-20 hit, Edison Lighthouse are no more one-hit wonders than The Timelords and if you honestly think that the Boomtown Rats, Dexys Midnight Runners or a-ha count, you need to look up 'parochialism' in a dictionary.  I'm tempted to argue, though, that in 4 Non Blondes, we may have a winner*.

0007 - 3D Picnic

3D Picnic (also known as 3-D Picnic and Three D. Picnic) aren't the first band I've written about that I didn't know anything about beforehand, but they are the first about whom there seems to be very little information readily available.  What I believe I know is this:

They were active in LA in the late 80s and early 90s and released 3 albums, Dirt, Sunshine & Cockroaches and covers collection New Wave Party;

They were fronted by Dallas Don Burnet, who at some point was also a member of the rather better known (albeit still obscure) Thelonius Monster.

0006 - 20/20

I know that post-punk isn't exactly a genre and I do like a lot of music from that immediate post-punk era - in fact, I think that the period from the late-70s to mid-80s represents the pinnacle of pop music in my lifetime. So it's a bit odd that whenever I hear or read of something as being post-punk, I expect it to either sound like Dead Kennedys or Wire. Of my recent post-punk-pop-postings, 100 Flowers fit that mould reasonably well, but 17 Pygmies' jazz and synth-pop couldn't be much further removed. 20/20 are something else again - classic 80s power-pop.

0005 - 1910 Fruitgum Company

The first victim here of my hard-drive wiping disaster; a single mp3 file, shorn of any ID tags - goodygoodygumdrops.mp3 - it's the one song I have by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.  Presumably it was at some point part of a larger 60s compilation, but it now lies orphaned and lonely, friendless amongst hundreds of gigabytes of cold, hard drive platters that just don't care!

On the other hand, there can be no better way to illustrate my (lack of?) purpose here and it allows me to establish my dull music geek credentials early on, by referring to early-90s Teenage Fanclub b-sides.

0004 - 17 Pygmies

More post-punk from LA, but a pretty stark contrast from the last lot - where 100 Flowers were fairly straightforward punk, 17 Pygmies are much more of a mixed bag.

0003 - 10CC

I found just the one 10CC song squirreled away in a hidden corner of my laptop, their biggest hit (I'm so mainstream), I'm Not In Love.

0002 - 100 Flowers

100 Flowers are a post-punk three piece from Los Angeles who started life in 1978 as The Urinals, changed their name to 100 Flowers in 1981, disbanded in 1983, reformed (after some members spent time in Trotsky Icepick), again as The Urinals, in 1996, changed their name to Chairs Of Perception (which is a great name) some time after 2003 and then back to The Urinals in 2008. Awesome.

0001 - Mystery Artist...

I suppose I knew when I decided to start this musical odyssey that I was taking on a fairly herculean task. If you'd asked me at the time, though, how many different artists I had in my music collection, I'd probably have guessed at about three or four hundred, which is only about one thousand short of the actual total...

What's all this then?

A while back, I was attempting to reformat a flash drive and I accidentally wiped the external hard drive containing all my digital music files.I was able to recover most of the files, but some are incomplete, some are corrupted, some are simply not there. The only way I can find out what needs replacing is to listen to it all, so that's what I'm going to do, in alphabetical order, artist by artist, and I'm going to blog about it.

Afghan Whigs

Sometimes, timing is everything. There are plenty of bands whose heyday was in the late-80s or early-90s who managed to pass me by and who, had I known them at the time, I may well have fallen in love with. Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Sebadoh, Afghan Whigs - bands whose work I was aware of on a fairly superficial level, but who never connected at the time in the way that, say, Buffalo Tom, Soundgarden, Sugar or Belly did.

I've got one Afghan Whigs album, 1990 release Up In It, and I suspect that had I owned it back in, say, 1992 I would now be writing about the Afghan Whigs in the glowing, fond terms I will one day use when writing about about Buffalo Tom.