I hate Primal Scream, with their dreary posturing pretend rock ‘n’ roll. It’s designed for people who drive a Vauxhall Insignia and think that Later with Jools Holland is the foremost of cutting edge music programming.

Led by the stick insect-like and professional jammy bastard that is Bobby Gillespie, who despite being shit in the Jesus and Mary chain and singing like a wheezing, going down balloon, can still talk the talk, walk the walk and never fails to show everybody how fantastic his album collection is.

So how come this show was the best gig I’ve seen all year?

Let’s look at the evidence. There was a remarkable support band called Bo Ningen, a mysteriously hairy four piece from Japan but who all coalesced in London a few years back. They cook up some intense boil in the bag sonic soup; there are elements of Sonic Youth and Acid Mothers somewhere in there but boy do they take it one step further. Theirs is a gratuitous and glorious overload of a rock racket.

Visually they are compelling. Guitars are mere acrobatic accessories and they sound like Godzilla with a severe migraine destroying Tokyo. Best support band of the year, no question.

As for Primal Scream, they have transformed themselves from fucked up indie wasters into a sleek, silver machine that exudes confidence, power and utter concentrated Rockness!

Tonight Bobby is a serious stubbly grim faced man on a mission. He owns the stage, not an easy thing to pull off when you’re sporting a pink jacket and rubbish trousers.

Guitarist Andrew Innes is a total riff machine. His precision chordage was immense on Loaded and Trippin’ on your love.

At times his playing reminded me of the great Tony Iommi (peace be upon him). The new songs from the fabbo new album Chaosmosis sounded great. None more so than Where the Light Gets In, which is destined to become a classic.

They work through Movin’ On Up, Accelerator and Shoot Speed/Kill Light with irresistible majestic prowess.

Higher Than The Sun, despite a false start got the crowd into gear.

We went crazy apeshit doolally for Swastika Eyes. I expected the roof to levitate by the time they got to Come Together. For Rocks I needed a defibrillator.

The next is a ridiculous statement I know, but the more I think about this the more I’m convinced this was the best ‘rock’ show I’ve personally witnessed at Rock City since Nirvana at the same venue many, many, many years ago.

It pains me to say this but Bobby, ‘I was blind, now I can see, you made a believer out of me’.

By John Haylock

In some ways it’s easy to see why Close Lobsters didn’t match the success or acclaim of their contemporaries in the 1980s UK indie scene

The Scottish Indie pop band were among those to appear on NME’s classic cassette compilation C86 but while their track Firestation Towers was among the best, it was not an elite track of the kind that propelled others featured such as  Primal Scream to success.

While Firestation Towers’ guitars were certainly jangly, they didn’t have the intensity of The Wedding Present’s version of This Boy Can Wait on C86. And while there was a quirkiness to the lyrics and style, that sense of originality was already being triumphed on C86 by Half Man Half Biscuit’s I Hate Nerys Hughes.

This comparison with others was to typify their short career. Despite being a good indie pop band they could never quite push themselves beyond the indie charts as others managed to, although for a brief period they did enjoy some small success in the American College Radio scene.

Lloyd Cole, who Close Lobsters singer Andrew Burnett bares a close vocal resemblance to, is another contemporary who enjoyed far greater success. While Cole too had a similar focus on quality guitar pop, his far greater awareness of mainstream appeal carried his heard above the parapet in ways the Close Lobsters couldn’t.

Nearly 30 years on its reappraisal time for the band, which reformed in 2012 to settle into the indie heritage circuit, through this huge 39 collection featuring their two albums Foxheads Stalk This Land’ and Headache Rhetoric’ as well as ‘Forever, Until Victory! The Singles Collection’.

Listening to many of these tracks for the first time I feel a little guilty for letting them pass me by at the time. While I was busying myself collecting the latest by Half Man Half Biscuit album I simply failed to notice The Close Lobsters. That was a shame as here they were a quality act, with some great tracks that arguably deserved more acclaim outside their indie charts home.

Nature Thing, on Foxheads Stalk This Land and also released as a single ,would have been just about my favourite song of 1987 had I heard it back then. And on Got Apprehension, from the same album, there are some fantastic guitar arrangements that deserved a wider audience.

As the collection progresses I was pleased to finally here their original version of Let’s Make Some Plans, which thanks to the Wedding Present covering it for the B-side to their Top 20 single California, was their highest charting song.

Astonishingly across its 39 songs there is not a single duff track, even their cover of Neil Young’s Hey Hey My My has merit.

Given the fierce competition for attention amongst the UK’s 1980s indie scene it is a shame Close Lobsters were missed by many, which is why this latest chance to hear them again is so important.

8/10

by Joe Lepper

Festival number 6 must be one of the last large musical gatherings of a year in which the UK weather dominated and indeed ruined many like minded ventures.

To hold the inaugural Festival number 6 in Wales, which has more rain per day than Rangoon does in its monsoon season, seems like a damp and sodden suicidal  invitation to the rain dogs. Thankfully though the September weather failed to prevent the multitudes from revelling in one of year’s most gloriously surreal weekends of diverse entertainment.

First up let’s talk about the location, Portmeirion, a large sprawling fake Italian village constructed years ago, embedded on the tumbling down to the sea Welsh coastline, made famous globally as the set of cult sixties TV show The Prisoner, with its distinct  houses, towers, verandas and bandstands. It’s an inspired choice of venue for a festival as the village was taken over, the local woods turned into mini raves, the bandstands into tiny venues and the large lawns atop the village holding a huge 7,000 capacity marquee. It was magnificently and meticulously organised.

King Creosote

The line up as well was superb, leaving our jaws agape as we tripped the light fantastic with Spiritualized, got our rocks off with Primal Scream, who in middle age have turned into the leanest of  kick ass rock machines. Their track Loaded never sounded more apt as the sights at the festival went from the sublime to the ridiculous as we witnessed three ladies in twenties bathing suits swimming in a tiny, tiny pool, a semi clad fire dancer doing her stuff to a dubstepped up version of War Pigs, Stuart Maconie interviewing Simon Day, King Creosote and one of our favourite live acts Stealing Sheep stealing our hearts with their skewed sideways folk rockery.

Stealing Sheep

We dined on Brains bitter and Italian fancies, met no VIPS in the VIPs tent and stood slack jawed at the awesomeness of Oldham’s The Whip, who used lights and one of the best sound systems I’ve ever heard all to great effect. We witnessed The Wedding Presents’ David Gedge thrashing out Brassneck, poets both good and bad and…. coming to a large venue near you soon, Tony Law rocking the comedy tent.

On Saturday night I wasn’t the only one moved to tears when a large male voice choir bizarrely covered ‘Blue Monday’ and went on to dedicate ‘You’ll never walk alone’ to the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster. It was absolutely incredible. New Order, themselves were also on the bill and continued to reduce grown men to tears. To put it bluntly this was simply one of the best festival I’ve ever been to as the withdrawal symptoms continue. We understand that all being well this could be a fixture in the festival calendar for another three years at least.

Rain gods you cannot defeat us. To paraphrase New Order, we were touched by the hand of god…or it could just have been Prisoner star Patrick Magoohan?

Words by John Haylock, pictures by John Haylock and Arthur Hughes.

The Godfather Part Two is one of the finest films ever made, even better than the excellent first film in the series. The Godfather Part Three is not a terrible film, but after seeing the first two films in the series it is a pretty miserable way to spend more than two and a half hours of your life. In music hearing a bad album is no big deal, you put it aside and forget about it, but hearing a favourite act follow up a classic album with a bad one is a dispiriting experience.

Here we present our Top 10 Disappointing follow-ups.

10. Pavement – Terror Twilight

Up until this point Pavement had a pretty much blemish free copybook, a set of challenging singles and four brilliant albums to their name. Brighten The Corners in 1997 was as good a set of off-kilter indie guitar pop as any released in the decade and looked close to breaking the band to a bigger audience.  The quirky charms of ‘Carrot Rope’ two years later raised my hopes for the follow-up, sadly these were dashed on hearing the full product, Terror Twilight. There are good songs on the album, notably the singles ‘Spit On A Stranger’ and ‘Major leagues’ but it is a strangely flat record. The production by Nigel Godrich is cold and lifeless, something that can be said about the majority of the songs here. Spiral Stairs never wrote songs as great as Malkmus, but the lack of any of his songs here is another missing piece of the Pavement puzzle. The band would break up after touring this album, but they had started to give up even before it was recorded.

9. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder

In 2005 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah looked like they could be a real band to watch. Their self-titled debut was over hyped but it contained some brilliant songs and was one of the most promising debuts of the year. Two years later they released Some Loud Thunder and proceeded to rain on the musical parade. The album was produced by Dave Fridmann and it is hard to tell if it is his fault or the bands for the first song on offer, which is pretty much impossible to listen to. I tolerate a lot of difficult production from a band, but the remaining songs on the album, whilst perfectly well produced, are just not very good at all. The band play around musically all over the place, but they seem to have forgotten that a good song needs to be the basis of their instrumental indulgences. The band wisely retreated after this and it would be another four years before they released another album.

8. The Strokes – Room On Fire

How do you follow up an album that throws you on the cover of every music magazine and spawns half a dozen instant indie-disco classics? The answer The Strokes had for this question seems to be producing the same album again, but with worse songs and the vocals mixed absurdly low in the mix. There are a couple of half decent singles on Room On Fire, but beyond that I can’t think of one interesting thing to say about it.

7. The Pixies – Bossanova

Including the Pixies in this chart is going to seem like sacrilege to some readers, this is after all one of the most beloved of all the 1990s acts. The thing is, I love the Pixies and even love a number of the songs that are featured on this album. The surf-rock instrumental stuff is cool, ‘Dig For Fire’ is a great single and several of the other tracks are as interesting and exciting as anything else that was released that year. The thing is though that this album followed Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, two of the best records ever released. In that context it couldn’t fail to disappoint, it is just nowhere near as good a record as either of its predecessors. It also differs from these two classic albums in that it is quite dull in parts, it just feels a bit flat and lacking in the excitement I’d come to expect from this most singular of bands. Trompe Le Monde would step things up a bit a year later and (without any sign of a new album) Bossanova remains the worst record in their back catalogue.

6. Elastica – The Menace

The five years Elastica took to release The Menace was longer than the post-punk period they thrived to emulate and marked them as millennium’s first has beens. Their album Elastica was the fastest selling debut ever, spearheading a savvy guitar pop which oozed suave lo-fi and visceral sophistication. It was urban and reinvigorating, an essential classic. The Menace, however, is drowned in the fug of brown sugar, banker talc, scrapped recordings and litigation.  When it’s not pandering to Casio bedsit clichés Justine Frischmann rejects angsty vocals for shouting “Your Arse My Place”, relying on Mark E Smith to add oral quality. It’s a disjointed album, much of which had already appeared on an EP, from a one trick band sacrificed to drugs, arguments and time.

5. Blur – The Great Escape

Parklife was a brilliant era defining guitar pop record, a huge leap forward for a band that had started life as an identikit baggy outfit. It was witty, melodic, and despite being heavily influenced by classic British pop (XTC, The Kinks, Madness and Julian Cope all spring to mind) it was a record that was very of its time. If you were to have described the album to a set of suited music executives and asked them to reproduce the record what they would have come up with would be The Great Escape. The same ground is covered, the same style of songs are featured and the same tricks are trotted out, but in all cases they are not as successful. On Parklife Phil Daniels provides guest vocals, on The Great Escape it is Ken Livingstone. On Parklife the videos are colourful and fun, on The Great Escape the colourful video for ‘Country House’ is embarrassing (Graham Coxon looks filled with self-loathing in that one). Albarn is too good a songwriter to produce a total stinker, and there are some good songs on here, but on the whole it is a pretty charmless record.

4. REM – Monster

REM are one of the most important bands ever, it is as simple as that. They enabled many alternative acts to make the popular crossover and  produced music that influenced more bands than almost any other act. In 1994 they were at their commercial and critical peak, thir last album, Automatic For The People, was their most popular yet and the reviews were uniformly positive. Two years later their response to this was to produce their worst album to date, an album of murky rock that failed to play to any of their musical strengths. ‘What’s The Frequency Kenneth?’ was a brilliant lead-off single, but a misleading example of the overall quality to expect. The album as a whole is murky, underwhelming and seldom rises above being ordinary. People may listen to the album and wonder why I’m making a fuss, it is a decent set of melodic alt-rock right? But to me it was the sound of a band moving from essential to irrelevant in the space of twelve songs.

3. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

For Emma, Forever Ago was a good album with an interesting back-story. Frustrated love-lorn musician Justin Vernon retreats to a cabin and records a sparse, haunting and subtle album with beautiful yet simple arrangements. The critics went wild for it and a new hero of American music was born. It seems that the critics were so enamoured that when it came to reviewing Vernon’s self titled second album they chose to ignore what a bad album it was, perhaps they had written the reviews in advance of receiving the album. These same critics were clearly too embarrassed to admit their mistake and forced to include Bon Iver high up in their end of year charts. Our review of the album damns it with faint praise and comparisons to Toto and Enya are accurate, this is an album that is overproduced and uninteresting.

2. Primal Scream – Give Out, But Don’t Give Up

When Bobby Gillespie’s Primal Scream released Screamadelica it shocked the critics by not just being a great album but by perfectly marrying rock and dance music in a way that no other artists had managed to achieve up to that point. So, how best to follow up this feat? A by-the-numbers rock and roll album that is the aural equivalent of a pasty faced man in leather trousers dancing out of rhythm. The playing is fine, the music passable with some pretty terrible lyrics and vocals all adding up to a truly mediocre album. You are left wondering whether the success of Screamadelica was really down to Primal Scream at all or more to do with the various DJs and producers who peppered the album. A subsequent career veering between the average and the un-listenable has done little to quell this notion.

1. Stone Roses – The Second Coming

Listen up and listen good Stone Roses fans. Your adored band are crap. There I’ve said it. Yes of course their debut, self titled album (one of our top ten indie/alt albums of all time ) was remarkable. But that is less to do with The Stone Roses and more down to the direction of producer John Leckie (our top alternative music producer of all time) , who expertly mixed the band’s ballsy Mancunian live style with a 1960s experimental feel, some great tunes and wonderful guitar arrangements.  Under Leckie the band’s  major deficiencies were also masked, most notably singer Ian Brown being complete pants and  chief song writer and guitarist John Squire being some kind of megalomaniac, guitar riffing version of Mr G from Summer Heights High. On Second Coming, their atrocious second and final album, they parted company with Leckie and with it any sense of direction. All they were left with were their glaring deficiencies.  Ten Storey Love Song is probably the only track that emerges with any credit. Love Spreads, with its depressingly long guitar intro sounds like the kind of tired rock U2 were churning out on  Rattle and Hum. Begging You sounds a little like U2 Achtung Baby era but a whole lot more like Bobby Davro doing a bad impression of Primal Scream.

by Dorian Rogers, David Newbury and Joe Lepper

We are entering the home straight and edging ever nearer the Top 10 best indie and alternative albums of all time.

We have been releasing this list ten at a time every Friday. We hope you enjoy this sixth instalment. The rest of the Top 100 can be found here.

40. Dismemberment Plan – Emergency & I

Pitchfork’s 9.6/10 score followed by the words “if you consider yourself a fan of groundbreaking pop, go out and buy this album right now. Now. Get up. Go,”  perfectly sum up the brilliance of 1999’s Emergency & I. The third album by this Washington DC band is packed full of creativity. As  another of the city’s key bands Fugazi did a decade earlier Dismemberment Plan took punk and pulled and stretched it this way and that.  Songs about growing up, about finding work and love in the city are strewn across the album but it’s the  song construction that is perhaps the most intriguing aspect. Across each track there’s a sense of chaos in the verse that eventually explode into the tightest bunch of anthemic choruses you will ever hear. As Pitchfork said in 1999, what are you waiting for, get out and buy this.

39. Devo – Freedom of Choice

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After their punky debut and scatter-shot second album Freedom of Choice showed Devo creating an album with a cohesive feel and a strong band identity. The guitars are still evident (especially on the genius pop opener ‘Girl U Want’) but this is the album where they became a predominantly synth based act. The thumping drums and pulsing synth bass-lines propel the album along at pace and add order behind Mark Mothersbaugh’s vocals and the effects heavy lead lines. Devo are a much more literate band than people give them credit and the lyrical themes of the human experience of life and relationships run through the album. ‘Whip It’, their best known song and biggest hit, looks at the relationship side and the title track explores people’s reluctance to exploit the freedom that modern life has gifted us. Devo are a band whose image and style has served to distract from their qualities as musicians and songwriters, if you want proof that there is more to them than radiation suits and flowerpot hats (or, to give them their correct name ‘Energy Domes’) then give this album a listen.

38.  Blur – Park Life

“For me, Parklife is like a loosely linked concept album..it’s the travels of the mystical lager-eater, seeing what’s going on in the world and commenting on it,” says Blur frontman Damon Albarn of the band’s third  and best album. We almost see what he means. The album does indeed feel like a journey through London, meeting its characters and experiencing their moods, from the synth pop hits of ‘Girls and Boys’ to the whirly gig instrumental ‘The Debt Collector’ through to the soulful ‘To The End.’ Nearly 20  years on it remains one of the finest English pop albums ever released, to be ranked alongside some of the best work of those that influenced them, most notably The Kinks and XTC.

37. Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend

Singer-songwriter Matthew Sweet was following a similar path to Teenage Fanclub in 1991 with his power-pop release Girlfriend, very much influenced by the jangle-pop of The Beatles, The Byrds and Big Star. Backed by an all-star band that featured (among others) Television’s Richard Lloyd and Lloyd Cole on guitar it is an album that is classic and timeless all at once. The melodies on the album are classic pop and work brilliantly against his slightly grizzled vocals, ‘I’ve Been Waiting’, ‘Looking At The Sun’ and ‘I Wanted To Tell You’ all stand out as instant classics. It is also very much a guitar album and he isn’t afraid to let the band rock when it suits, such as on the opener ‘Divine Intervention’ and ‘Evangeline’. It was a big hit for Sweet, despite having been dropped from his major contract prior to its release, and led to a string of successful albums in the 1990s. The 2006 release is worth seeking out for a host of bonus tracks and demo versions.

36. The Strokes – Is This It

Sometimes keeping it simple can be the most effective policy in music. The Strokes did this superbly on their stunning 2001 debut Is This It. Like a dirty punk Velvet Underground this is track after track of hook laden, simple guitar rock. It reinvigorated a genre of indie rock that was looking for a new set of faces and The Strokes were certainly that. With singer Julian Casablancas they were the personification of cool, street smart young punks belting out raw tunes all at around the perfect pop three minute mark. Since then they have failed to capture that sense of youth and energy, with even their comeback album Angles receiving lukewarm reviews. While ‘Last Nite’ is a particular highlight of Is This It, this is exactly the kind of album you can bask in from start to finish, marvelling at how effortless it all sounds.

35.  Felt – Forever Breathes The Lonely Word

When Lawrence Hayward (known only as Lawrence) formed Felt he announced  they would release 10 albums, 10 singles and spilt-up after 10 years, and that is exactly what they did. Their 6th and best album, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, showcases a perfect indie-pop sound, a sound that epitomises the C86 era (although Felt weren’t featured on that particular compilation). You can hear the influence of the band on artists as varied as Belle and Sebastian, The Manic Street Preachers and The Tyde, and their sound is captured perfectly on the 8 songs here.The music is catchy pop perfection, and Lawrence’s vocals and lyrical themes are interesting enough to make it something just a little bit special. Any album that includes a song titled ‘All The People That I Like Are Those that Are Dead’ demands just over 30 minutes of your time surely?

34. Radiohead – The Bends

Back in 1995 when Radiohead were just starting out on their road to stadium pomposity they produced this gem of an album. It came almost out of nowhere for this at the time barely passable indie rock act, who had previously only mustered one half decent single in ‘Creep’.  Clearly they’d been storing up their best stuff for The Bends. From start to finish it is packed with some of the most epic tracks in indie rock as the band revelled in discarding the grunge influence on previous album Pablo Honey and finding their own sound. It is no surprise that John Leckie, who so far is this list’s most prolific producer, was at the helm. He deserves high praise for The Bends, which features highlights including ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ and ‘High and Dry’. The Bends impact on the band also cannot be underestimated. It gave them the focus to produce OK Computer, which is widely regarded as their masterpiece, and propel them to their current position as one of the UK’s biggest rock acts.

33. Yo La Tengo – I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One

By the time they released I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One in 1997 Yo la Tengo were firmly established as a trio with James McNew’s bass supporting the guitar/vocals of Ira Kaplan and the drums/vocals of Georgia Hubley. Yo La Tengo are the quintessential geeks indie rock band and it might surprise new listeners to hear what a varied and playful record this is. The dreamy instrumental opener ‘Return To Hot Chicken’ is followed by the funky ‘Moby Octopad’ before moving to the Sonic Youth meets shoegaze feedback and squalling guitars of the ‘Sugarcube’. The album features the usual selection of cover versions with the Beach Boys ‘Little Honda’ being a particular success. McNew throws in the acoustic gem ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, nicely breaking up the album at the mid-way point. It is an album of so many high points that it is hard to pick a favourite track, so I’m going to sit on the fence and pick two. The organ lead ‘Autumn Sweater’ is dreamy, melodic and evocative, ‘Center of Gravity’ is a lovely piece of kitsch bossa-pop with some great vocal interplay between Georgia and Ira. This album is an example of just how inventive, fun and exciting American indie rock can be.

32. Primal Scream  – Screamadelica

So many  indie bands, from The Soup Dragons to That Petrol Emotion, attempted to embrace dance music and the emerging acid house scene during the early 1990s. But while most failed Primal Scream’s Screamadelica was a shining example of success. With DJ Andrew Weatherall behind the desk for much of the album Bobby Gillespie’s Scottish indie rockers were transformed. ‘Loaded’ and ‘Come Together’ are among the most successful dance music influenced singles, but the album has so much more than simply merging acid house with indie rock. 1960s Psychedelia, gospel and blues are among other striking influences. Among our  favourite tracks is the band’s excellent version of The 13^th Floor Elevators ‘Slip Inside This House’. The album deservedly won the 1992 Mercury Music Prize and brought success for the band that has continued to this day despite numerous line up changes.  Screamadelica was re-released in 2011 with a whole bunch of extras that are worth checking out.

31. Giant Sand – The Love Songs

The Love Songs was Giant sands 3rd album and stands as a high watermark for Howe Gelb’s oft-changing desert rock band. The band was made up of Green On Red’s Chris Cacavas on keyboards, future Calexico member John Convertino on drums and former Go-Go (and Gelb’s then wife) Paula Jean Brown on bass. Matched to Gelb’s dischordant guitar and husky vocals they produce a great sound that is constantly walking an attractive fine line between order and chaos. Listeners more used to Gelb’s recent output may be surprised by how rocky and catchy the songs are here. The bar room jazz elements are present but the guitar work wouldn’t be out of place on a J Mascis record. ‘Wearing The Robes of Bible Black’ (a world away from the version featured on ‘Sno Angel Like You) kicks things off perfectly and the songs thunder along nicely right up until the closing track, a wistful take on Lieber and Stoller’s ‘Is That All There Is’. An essential record for anyone who wants to hear how good country rock can sound.

Compiled by Joe Lepper and Dorian Rogers