C90

  Making compilations is a bit of a hobby for me. Most of them I make for myself, to listen to when driving, working or cooking; when given the opportunity, I make them for other people too. I do make an effort to spend some time listening to complete LPs in the right order (as a quirky little new year's resolution, I did nothing but that throughout January and February this year), but it does seem that people do so less and less these days. As Paul Hanley said to me when I interviewed House of All , 'nobody listens to albums any more, do they?' Often, my compilations focus on a specific artist , genre (e.g. jazz or prog ) or era . But I also enjoy compiling based on set criteria, especially something linguistic. For example, I have spent many an hour constructing playlists where the last word of each song title is the first word of the next one (there'll undoubtedly be a post or two in the future taking this approach). This might seem like a rather pointless and rando...

Inspiration for the next C90 theme came from watching David Bowie's  performance of 'Five Years' on The Old Grey Whistle Test - what is the five year period that has produced the greatest music? Before I launched into compiling my own answer, I asked online what other people thought. Given that the majority of musical connections I have come via my writing about The Fall, it was no surprise that the responses were heavily weighted towards the punk / post-punk era. Over half of the selctions fell somewhere between 1977 and 1983, with 1979, 1980 and 1981 being the years that - by some distance - featured the most often. One interesting feature of the responses was that 85% of them included the turn of a decade, when statistically an even spread would have only seen only 40% do so. I'm not sure that this tells us anything profoundly significant, but there might be something culturally/historically notable going on there... Now, I certainly don't dispute that the perio...

  This is not an attempt to do a 'best of' The Fall. That is an undertaking fraught with risk (although that's not to say that I won't attempt it at some point). Instead, this is a C90 aimed at what you might describe as the casual listener: someone who knows all the famous Fall songs and probably owns half a dozen or so studio albums (most likely from the 80s/early 90s) and/or a few of the more well-known compilations such as  458489 A Sides . Given that evidence such as online polls and social media groups suggest a heavy bias towards material from the first third of the group's career, it was tempting to include lots songs from their later years. However, I think the work of the final line-up may well be worth a seperate compilation at some point, so instead I have aimed to compile the best of the 'lesser-known gems'; the b-sides, alternative versions, bonus tracks, etc. that may be new to those people who have a decent if not necessarily detailed knowled...

(Index of posts below) If, like me, you've been around for long enough to be classed as middle-aged or older, you will undoubtedly be familiar with the 'I'll do you a tape' scenario. You're discussing music with someone and the conversation turns to an artist that you love but the other party is unfamilar with or ambivalent about. Feeling evangelical, you promise to 'do them a tape'.  Without wishing to get overly nostalgic, there was a particular joy about making someone a C90 compilation for the purposes of proselytization, wasn't there? Sitting with a stack of records, carefully transcribing the song titles onto those narrow lines... Making a Spotify playlist isn't quite the same somehow. These C90 compilations are not intended to be a definitive 'best of': they will be an attempt to capture a worthwhile overview of the artist in question; a balanced representation of the broad sweep of their work. They will, where possible, include someth...