Pop

My timings are now all messed up for this year but since I have come up with a Top Twelve albums list I might as well press on regardless of any general lack of interest, technical problems or disruptions to be caused by the festive season...

#12. ‘Pop Fiction’ by the Popguns 

A bit of a late entry this one, particularly since I was loathe to fall prey to accusations of pure nostalgia. It’s a fact that I was very fond of the Popguns back in the early 90’s. Beck bought me their first album proper, ‘Snog’, I recall, whilst she was doing her finals at Uni In the summer of 1991, presumably because they were the first band I’d seen live when I moved to Nottingham in 1990 (at the long-defunct Venus club on Stamford Street, fact fans) and maybe because she was fed up of the heavy rotation the compilation of their first few singles, ‘Eugenie’, had seen on the cassette player already.  I saw them again in Birmingham, presumably in ’92, and the fatigue of trawling round the clubs to little acclaim had already set in (they were great but the crowd was sparse and when we interviewed them afterwards for a fanzine I was involved in at the time their frustration was clear.) Not that I was any help, becoming somewhat disillusioned with the British indie scene at the time for a few years (or, alternatively, lured away by the brash noisy guitars of our friends across the pond ) and completely missing out on the delights of the group’s third album, 1995’s ‘Love Junky’ (the dodgy title and pink cover didn’t help, of course.) Anyway, they’re back with a fourth and it’s just like they’ve never been gone – timeless, indie guitar music in the classical mould which could come just as happily from the mid 90’s or twenty years later, heartache and nostalgia to a cracking tune and a big yearning chorus. I’ve no idea whether their timing will be any better this time round (certainly they would seem to be up against it in commercial terms at least – you can now buy the album direct from Bandcamp but when it first came out some weeks ago British fans who wanted physical product were faced with paying out the same again in postage to get Matinee Records to ship it from the States and even now Amazon seem to be unsure of what the release date actually is, I don’t know if there are problems at the pressing plant) but one can only hope that they’re older and wiser enough not to bothered with all that by now.

(The only track I could find a link for)