Category Archives: Songs from 1992

Album: Hey Babe, 1992

Justification: This was Ms Hatfield‘s first solo single after the Blake Babies split up, and remains one of my favourite of her songs – not least because of that awesome riff/bassline which I still play almost every time I pick up a guitar. And, of course, like every other lover of indie rock in 1992, I found myself thinking “so, which person on the planet is turning Juliana Hatfield down, exactly?”

So, doing anything later?

Of course, around this time she was also telling the press that she was still a virgin in her mid-20s and didn’t see what was meant to be so great about the whole grubby “sex” thing, which may or may not have been a joke but was still the first time that I’d ever seen someone publicly announce that desire wasn’t really a thing for them, which I now know is called “asexuality” but then I only knew as “some sort of total crazy talk”.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure that it was the cover to Hey Babe that helped fuel my next decade or so of exclusively fancying people with dyed hair.

Ms Hatfield was also the one that played bass on the Lemonheads‘ It’s A Shame About Ray, although Nic Dalton joined for touring purposes and did all the videos. Hatfield and Evan Dando are touring later this year, incidentally, and my prediction is that half that night will be great.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: none, so let’s go for the day before and Thomas Dolby’s ‘Hyperactive!’

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME I 2011: Again, missed it: but on the 26th it was the Magnetic Fields and the magnificent ‘Strange Powers’, so let’s have that.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

505: The Stairs: Mary Joanna (8 Aug)

506: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: I Put a Spell on You (10 Aug)

507. Iggy & the Stooges: Search & Destroy (13 Aug)

508. The Jazz Butcher: She’s on Drugs (15 Aug)

509. Boards of Canada: ROYGBIV (22 Aug)

Album: Mexican R’n'B, 1992

Justification: One of the ways that I choose my songs for this is sticking my iTunes playlist entitled Andrew P Street’s Awesome Kickass Playlist Of Awesome on shuffle and seeing what’s there that hasn’t already been done. And because the last few songs have been a bit emotionally fraught, I was pretty keen to pick something that had no baggage attached – no sentimental childhood moments, no memories of holding lost loves at life-changing gigs, no wound-licking songs by chastened men learning that, y’know, sometimes love, it is the river, that drowns the slender reed…

Real rock’n'rollers slouch and are grumpy.

So, with that in mind I present ‘Mary Joanna’: a fucking glorious barn burner of a song.

I remember buying the CD single of this for 50 cents knowing nothing about it other than that I liked the font on the cover in a massive warehouse CD sale at Wayville Showgrounds, where someone or other was offloading literally hundreds of thousands of CDs (also found and bought: several They Might Be Giants and Tori Amos CD singles; found but not bought and always regretted, Vic Reeves’ I Will Cure You). And I was in a playful mood, and the prices were insane, so I basically bought anything under a dollar that looked good. That’s why I own singles by Bettie Serveert, Pooka and The Widdershins, and also this incredible slice of raw garage rock.

The Stairs were from Liverpool and lasted barely three years (lead singer/bassist Edgar Summertyme, aka Ed Jones, has played with Ian McCulloch in his post-Bunnymen band, and was later to be the original bassist in Johnny Marr’s band The Healers) with one album and a few singles and EPs. Yes, they were obviously trying to ape the Nuggets-era garage rock vibe. Yes, it’s derivative as hell and they wear their influences on their sleeve (the b-sides were covers of Bo Diddley’s ‘Bo’s Bounce’, renamed ‘Squashed Tomato Stomp’ for some reason, and Them’s ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’). But this song is two minutes and 40 seconds of thumping, raw, glorious rock’n'roll, and has never failed to bring joy into my life over the last 20 years.

For a song that no-one knows, I will also say this: I’ve dropped it in about half of my DJ sets over the years and it has never failed to fill the floor. I assume everyone assumes it’s an early Stones song they don’t want to be seen to not recognise for the first 20 seconds, and after that they don’t care.

And it’s recorded in mono, for fuck’s sake! Turn it up, dance around the room and share this with everyone you care about. It’s that good a song. The world needs to be reminded.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Primal Scream stop giving a shit with ‘Rocks’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

500. The Smiths: This Charming Man (19 July)

501. The New Pornographers: Sing Me Spanish Techno (26 July)

502. Franz Ferdinand: Ulysses (27 July)

503: The Animals: We Gotta Get Out Of The Place (31 July)

504. Luna: Superfreaky Memories (6 Aug)

Album: Pure Guava, 1992

Justification: OK, I need to come clean here: I never liked Ween. I got what they did, but I always thought they were a bit too self-consciously zany.

Well, it’s impressively rich in vitamin C.

Now, I appreciate that anyone who’s actually traipsed through this blog will be coughing gently into their handkerchief and saying “Really? Ween a little too kooky for you, were they? Not maintaining the lofty, artsy po-facedness of, oooh, They Might Be Giants and Oingo Boingo and Devo and the B-52s and Wall of Voodoo and Timbuk 3 and Fountains of Wayne, would you say, let alone the arch seriousness of the Banana Splits and the Bloodhound Gang and Tom Lehrer and Weird Al fucking Yankovic? Hmmm? What’s that? I can’t hear you from your ivory tower where you’re working on your Masters in the Glorious Seriousness of Proper Music That’s More Richly Cerebral Than Ween, Professor Doctor Serious McWankington.” And that’s all delivered in a toffee-nosed cartoon British accent, naturally, because that’s the voice what intellectual sarcasm talks in.

But yeah, that’s pretty much right. I understand novelty songs, I understand bands with a sense of humour about what they do, but bands that just appeared to get baked and then home record never appealed to me, fun though the process sounded. That’s more or less why it took me so long to get into Sebadoh, to be honest.

So why is this song here? Well, it’s partially because it’s catchy as hell. And it’s partially because Ween have been in the news of late with Aaron Freeman, aka Gene Ween, announcing that he was retiring the name and leaving the band in order to… um, make a solo album of songs by Jacques Brel translator and universally loathed poet Rod McKuen. As you do.

But the main reason is that two of my dearest friends loved Ween with a fierce passion, and I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately as I’ve been rehearsing old songs for an upcoming gig, several of which they played and/or co-wrote with me in the Undecided and the Career Girls. In fact, it’s only because of the influence of Todd and Jeremy that I have anything approaching a knowledge of Ween (mainly from hearing The Mollusk played in their cars). And those were happy times.

This song must have been a nightmare to play live, unless Freeman had a helium tank on stage.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: The Wonder Stuff were enjoying their greatest success with the jaunty ‘The Size of a Cow’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: NZ’s mighty JPS Experience were dropping mad 90s shoegaze with ‘Into You’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

483. Beck: Nicotine & Gravy (19 June)

 484. Teenage Fanclub: What You Do To Me (20 June)

485. Blur: Beetlebum (25 June)

486. The Passions: I’m in Love with a German Film Star (26 June)

487. Sly Fox: Let’s Go All The Way (28 June)

Album: Our Time In Eden, 1992

Justification: …because I thought that if someone was a REM fan, they were obliged to be a fan of 10,000 Maniacs.

It's not particularly funny, but god I hate this album cover. Just sayin'.

There were a bunch of bands that I got into because members of REM mentioned them in interviews, played on their records or took them on tour. Many of these bands were amazing – REM was my entry point for enduring favourites like Robyn Hitchcock, Grant Lee Buffalo, Love Tractor, Magnapop, and a combination of REM-approval and a desperate, friendship-ruining crush in about 1991 is why I know how to play a hell of a lot of Indigo Girls songs.

But 10,000 Maniacs were like REM’s weirdly prim younger siblings, giving off a  smalltown puritan vibe in contrast to REM’s collegiate art-cool during the 80s. And I found that kind of hard to stomach for a long time, despite listening intently to In My Tribe and the Hope Chest compilation of early material and trying to develop a fondness for Natalie Merchant’s ill-enunciated mouthful-of-honey delivery.

This song, however, needed no effort from me. It was big, bold and brassy, had a political metaphor that was unusually effortless and unlaboured, and was just catchy as all get out. Merchant co-wrote it having told the band that she was leaving two years hence, and its parent album Our Time In Eden was the last studio album she made with ‘em, leaving for a fitfully successful solo career while the band plodded on with new singers because that always works.

I’ve reconciled the fact that this band will never be more than a footnote to an old passion for me, but this still has a soft spot in my heart.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: The glorious genius of Talking Heads and the still incredible ‘Once in a Lifetime’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: It was a weekend, so let’s go for the 6th and ‘Lock It’ by the Falling Joys.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

463. Beulah: Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand (26 Apr)

464. Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park (27 Apr)

465. Weezer: Undone – The Sweater Song (30 Apr)

466. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Heart in your Heartbreak (1 May)

 467. Paul Simon: The Boy in the Bubble (2 May)

Album: Cracker, 1992

Justification: After mainstream success got too close and scary for Camper Van Beethoven, David Lowery embraced his white-trash heritage with the smart-arse-edly named Cracker – a band that took CVB’s country-rock aspirations to new heights. Their big hit was ‘Low’, which is also great, but this was the song that I heard first and which made me realise, with great relief, that sometimes there are second acts for great American bands. In your face, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fish: for when biscuits would be a bit too damn literal.

According to a YouTube commentator, the farm (and dilapidated barn) in the clip is the very same on that was featured a few years later in the video for Sparklehorse‘s ‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’. The reason for this, apparently, is that said property is where Mark “Sparklehorse” Linkous grew up, and he was Cracker’s guitar tech during this period. In fact, that’s allegedly him on one of the minibikes.

Cracker still exist, incidentally, alongside the reunited Camper Van Beethoven and Lowery’s surprisingly recent solo career. His debut album The Palace Guards is really, really good (especially ‘Baby, All Those Girls Meant Nothing To Me’. Go listen to it now).

Fun fact #1: Lowery’s an academic these days, lecturing in the music business program at the University of Georgia.

Fun fact #2: Cracker’s bassist at this point was Davey Farragher, later to become Elvis Costello’s bassist in the Imposters. Isn’t this blog fun? Man, the pointless things you find out…

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: No 16th, but the 15th was Ride’s masterpiece: the glacial, gorgeous ‘Vapour Trail’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Again, no 16th – maybe it was haunted? – but here’s Ash’s ‘Girl from Mars’ from the 15th.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

454. Martha & the Muffins: Echo Beach (5 Apr)

455. The Smiths: Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before (10 Apr)

 456. Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper: Elvis is Everywhere (11 Apr)

457. Jens Lekman: You Are The Light (12 Apr)

458. The Magnetic Fields: Andrew in Drag (13 Apr)

Album:Let’s Knife, 1992

Justification: You need to remember that in the early 90s rock was oh-so-damn-ironic. All the bands of the time were either expressing their inner angst (Nirvana, Soundgarden), being defensive or over-the-top tongue-in-cheek about their secret, genuine love of rock (Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill) or being goffily artsy with their new major label dollars (Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth), And then three day-glo wearing women turned up from Japan to remind everyone that rock could be, y’know, fun.

The band had come to the attention of ultra-cool Washington label K Records but were eventually signed to Sub Pop, touring with labelmates Nirvana – because songs about cats and food were the perfect accompaniment to Nevermind – and being championed by John Peel. This album was mainly re-recordings of old songs of theirs for the Western world, and this single was the first thing of theirs that I ever heard. A lot of people I knew at the time thought they were a joke, but I owe them much: were it not for the Knife making me realise there were weird things going on in Japan (which I’d already been vaguely aware of thanks to Sandii & the Sunsetz) there’s be a hell of a lot less great music in my collection: no 5678s, no Belters, no Limited Express? (Are Gone), no Ni Hao, no Guitar Vader…

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011:

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE… Carn, let’s look at 1992: there was so much good stuff.

425. Cheap Trick: Surrender (9 Feb)

426. Bluejuice: The Reductionist (13 Feb)

427. Absentee: We Should Never Have Children (14 Feb)

428. The Johnnys: Injun Joe (15 Feb)

429. Depeche Mode: Wrong (16 Feb)

Album: Angel Dust, 1992

Justification: As I watched Mike Patton perform a bunch of Italiana pop songs from the 50s and 60s with Mondo Cane last night – and had my mind comprehensively blown – I tried to recall when I first went “hey, this man’s pretty damn interesting.” I knew I was already on board as an admirer of his glorious diverse work circa Loveage (with Daniel Merriweather, aka Dan the Automator), and I recall seeing Fantomas play at Heaven when they toured for The Director’s Cut, and most importantly I absolutely hated Faith No More’s ‘Epic’ when everyone I knew was losing their shit over the band. And then it hit me: it was when my friends and bandmates Todd and Jeremy first played me Angel Dust, probably around 1995.

Up until that point I’d dismissed Faith No More for the same reasons I’d dismissed Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, because a funk influence does not turn jock-rock to gold. However, the sheer scope of the album made me realise I’d underestimated the band generally and Patton in particularly, and this became a grudging favourite. I still never got on board with them completely, at least not until discovering keyboardist Roddy Bottum’s post-FNM band Imperial Teen.

Incidentally, last night one of Patton’s few asides to the audience was noting that he was on stage with “about 20″ keyboard players (OK, three and a dude with amazing sideburns playing theremin and other electronic things – and 24 other players). “If anyone’s thinking of forming a band,” Patton quipped as two of them swapped positions, “just stick to the one.”

“Roddy!” howled some voice in the crowd. Patton said nothing, but gave a grin that was downright lupine.

Glorious.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: How apt, given that I finally saw The Muppets on the weekend: it’s Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem with ‘Can You Picture That’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

407. Murray Head: One Night In Bangkok (9 Jan)

408. Black Kids: I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You (12 Jan)

409. The Folk Implosion: Natural One (13 Jan)

410. The Kinks: Apeman (16 Jan)

411. New Order: Bizarre Love Triangle (17 Jan)

Album: single, 1992

Justification: Blur thought they were so damn big when they released this single. They’d been quite the darlings of the UK shoegaze scene, thanks mainly to the radio success of ‘There’s No Other Way’, and they were off on a tour with Dinosaur Jr and the Jesus & Mary Chain. So popular did they think they were that they’d recorded a single all about what sheep people who bought records were and how terrible radio was, secure in the knowledge that terrible radio was going to play it and those stupid sheep were going to buy it. Even the fact that the last Blur single, the tepid ‘Bang’, had flopped hadn’t dulled their firm conviction that they were big enough to bite a big ol’ chunk out of the hand that fed them.

Oh, how wrong they were.

‘Popscene’ isn’t bad – it’s one of my favourite Blur singles – but it’s about five years early. Blur weren’t anywhere near popular enough to be smug about how popular they were, and stylistically Britain had no interest in a rockin’ Blur (and wouldn’t for another few of albums, until ‘Song 2′). Importantly, though, it gave Damon Albarn a good solid dose of doubt and gave their record company head honcho Dave Balfe (ex-Teardrop Explodes, fact fans) the ammunition to tell them to lift their fucking game.

Balfe’s lift-game-fucking influence would later lead to ‘For Tomorrow’, the song that saved Blur from being a footnote alongside the Mock Turtles and the Farm. It also meant that the band didn’t release the proposed ‘Popscene’ follow up, the truly dire ‘Never Clever’ but instead started on the path of self-discovery that lead to Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife.

So much was ‘Popscene’ associated with the band’s long night of the soul that they deliberately left it off Modern Life is Rubbish altogether – although it did get slipped onto the US version (which also has the demo version of ‘Chemical World’ in place of the final version, which has a Graham Coxon guitar solo in the middle and which I prefer to the single), making it their only non-album single. Their opinion of it rose later on, though, as it started creeping back into their sets. it was also included on the Midlife compilation, which was more than ‘There’s No Other Way’ was.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Oh, looks like I took a day off – hey, this time of the year is a bit hit and miss. Look at the 1992 archive instead. LOOK AT IT.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

401. Jean Michel Jarre: Oxygène (part IV) (15 Dec) 

402. The Damned: Smash It Up (19 Dec)

403. Echo & the Bunnymen: Bring on the Dancing Horses (21 Dec) 

404. Not From There: Frisco Disco (23 Dec)

405. Shake Some Action (4 Jan)

Album: Stick Around for Joy, 1992

Justification: The final Sugarcubes album was strong, but it was also clear that the Icelandic combo had explored all the ground they were going to. Life’s Too Good was a legitimate classic, suggesting a band that could go anywhere at all; Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week saw them trying out new things and failing interestingly, and Stick Around For Joy was the band realised what they did best and all going “eh, this doesn’t especially interest me.” Still, it contained this, their biggest (ahem) hit and was one of few times when Björk and Einar’s competing vocals actually works, with the latter effectively dropping a rap verse in the middle of the song in an impressively prescient manner. You were a hype man ahead of your time, Einar Ørn.

Carter USM covered this as a b-side (for ‘Lean on Me, I Won’t Fall Over’, if memory serves, and did a pretty average job of it – unless you feel that the song really should have sounded like a Happy Mondays demo.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: An undeniable dancefloor classic in Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

389. Porno for Pyros: Pets (25 Nov)

390. MGMT: Kids (28 Nov)

391. Blake Babies: Out There (29 Nov) 

392. Jona Lewie: You’ll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties (30 Nov)

393. Sugar: If I Can’t Change Your Mind (1 Dec) 

Album: Copper Blue, 1992

Justification: Oh, we all had such high hopes for Sugar. Hüsker Dü were the cool name to casually drop in indie rock circles, thanks mainly to the Pixies*, and now its former guitarist/co-singer/co-songwriter Bob Mould was back with a new power trio and awesome songs like this and and ‘Helpless’ (which could so easily have been the subject of this post). Mould was writing great songs, the new band was really gelling, the mood of the time was perfect – major labels were going nuts for Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips etc – and now one of the key figures without whom the entire indie-overground couldn’t have happened was finally going to get his due.

And then nothing happened.

Well, that’s not entirely true. This album did very well – it was the NME’s Album of the Year and it sold respectably around the world, but after a fair whack of touring the band hit a massive slump caused, if memory serves, by Mould hitting a serious writer’s block. He’d been overflowing with songs for Copper Blue (a bunch of offcuts were released six months after this as the Beaster EP, which is also awesome) but album number two was like pulling teeth. One session was begun and then aborted, and by the time File Under: Easy Listening turned up, the novelty had worn off – and much as I’d like to think that we indierock fans are a caring, intelligent bunch, it’s hard not to suspect that Mould being outed around the same time didn’t harm the band’s commercial prospects. 1994 was a whole different country, you know.

Sugar finally split in 1996 when bassist Dave Barbe quit, leaving Mould to embark on a frustratingly uneven but often brilliant solo career. Still, what a fucking great song this is. Not even the cover by Train can ruin it. Well, not completely.

*While the Pixies were very open in how much they’d been inspired by the Dü, they may have felt the ledger was perhaps back in the red after Mould basically retitled ‘Debaser’ and called it ‘A Good Idea’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Urge Overkill were being totally rad with ‘Sister Havana’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

388. Adam & the Ants: Stand & Deliver (24 Nov)

389. Porno for Pyros: Pets (25 Nov)

390. MGMT: Kids (28 Nov)

391. Blake Babies: Out There (29 Nov) 

392. Jona Lewie: You’ll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties (30 Nov)