Tapes (6)

More tapes: the one poking out of the bottom there is 'Fade Out' by Loop - blank cover (well, title and band name, black on silver), blank riffs, blank stares. You'd think their kind of monolithic, slow-paced, looping and repetitive riffs topped with screes of psychedelic guitar-noodling would have dated more than most late eighties tropes but I think you can pick up it's traces in lots of the current neo-psychedelicists - think Toy, Follakzoid or Tame Impala - albeit often tied to a more motorik, krautrocking beat. That said, it's still a pretty heady brew, though tinged with built-in obsolescence - you don't really need more than one Loop album in your collection, though it might be fun choosing your favourite. Incidentally, Loop were about the loudest band I've ever seen live (I was going to add "so far..." but it seems to me that either live bands these days are getting quieter or I'm getting deafer - and I speak as someone who has recently seen Flipper!) You literally had to peel yourself off the back wall of Leeds Poly at the end of the gig and shake yourself off like a stunned dog. Only My Bloody Valentine really ran them close in the 'wall of sound' stakes. Speaking of which, the box with the odd import stickers is one of theirs: it's called 'Feed Me With Your Kiss' but is actually three quarters of the 'Feed Me...' EP and three quarters of 'You Made Me Realise'; a 6 track cassette released under licence from Creation by Mercury Records for the American market. A strange release, really, but I think it was pretty cheap and obviously a godsend for those of us lacking the means to deal with vinyl (I've got a Mercury cassette of the 'Glider' EP somewhere, too, though I seem to recall that one's not missing any tracks...)

I also have quite vivid memories of seeing the Chills live. Beck and I had only been in the big city (Leeds) for a few weeks, callow and innocent 18-year-old students that we were (actually Beck was probably 19 already as she's a couple of months older than me, but I digress...), when we went to see 'Velvet Underground chanteuse' Nico at the Astoria. Obviously time has told me that there's a great deal more to the deep black pool that is the musical legacy of Nico than her very famous early guest appearance but at the time that's the legend that had attracted a slice of our grant money (oh my, Student Grants, remember those...!?) She was backed by a weird, sub-North African group called the Bedlamites and supported, in a very odd bit of scheduling, by this fairly uptempo jangly New Zealand indie band, the Chills. They were on Flying Nun, who again I knew nothing of at the time but my older-and wiser-self now knows rank alongside Creation, Sarah and 4AD as one of the great eighties-indie lynchpin labels. Anyway the Chills were a brilliantly unexpected gem of a discovery. I went out and bought the 'Kaleidoscope World' compilation from Jumbo Records the following a week as it was the only release you could get of theirs at the time - it's a compilation of early singles released by Homestead (an American indie who put out the famous 1987 'The Wailing Ultimate' compilation of US bands like Dinosaur (pre-Jr.), Big Black and Naked Raygun) - and pretty much at all until the 'Submarine Bells' album (which was a bit shiny for my tastes at the time, to be honest) came out a few years later on. Their 'Heavenly Pop Hits' compilation is a great album that deserves to be filed next to 'Tallulah' and 'Feral Pop Frenzy' by Even As We Speak in the small-but-tasty antipodean-indie-pop section of your record collection. Anyway, the Astoria was a brilliant venue with all the faded glamour of a down-at-heel ballroom (I saw the Psychedelic Furs there a couple of years later) but it was in Leeds 8 in the notorious Red Light District - of course, we were fresh from the sticks and raised on the idea that cabs were a luxury and an indulgence so we just trogged back on foot to student land, blissfully unaware until later of our brush with the underbelly!

And then, just to ruin an otherwise impeccably cool selection of mid/late 80's Alternative gems, there's a Genesis album in there too. I've always had a sneaking regard for these fellers and, what's more, I prefer the deeply uncool early eighties stuff when they started letting that balding hobbit come out properly from behind the drum kit. '3 Sides Live' was my teenage favourite and it still sounds great now (believe me, I was listening to it just the other day!) This one's got a bit more vestigial prog (from 1975, I think it's the first album proper after Peter Gabriel left) and is worth the price of entry for the magisterial 'Ripples' on it's own...