Some people apparently start revolutions from their beds. I, in times gone by, have built space station forts from pillows and duvets and imagination. Charlotte Lindèn Ercoli Coe aka Charles has created an awesome album of considerable dream-pop classics that not only perfectly suit our format of choice - Cassettes! In case you weren’t listening - but feels like it was made for it. Now I’m not saying producing ‘That’s What Baby Learns’ from the comfort of some wood and linen is any more of an achievement than my pillow space fort, but it’s probably a lot easier to drop into everyday conversation.
As you have become accustomed, and before I wax on about this gem of an album, have a little listen and come back when you’re convinced:
Effing great huh? It’s the kind of album I can sit back and close my eyes and let it wash over me with it’s dreamy layered super pop. It also feels like reading someone’s diary (specifically Charlotte’s!) but a diary written with Ariel Pink stationery (why isnt there Ariel Pink stationery?). It’s getting some good hype at the moment and you can read one such review over at Gorilla vs Bear.
Charlotte is playing with POST/POP favourite, Neon Indian on Feb 24th (tomorrow, day of release!) so if you are in Hollywood and have a ticket to the show, you can buy this tape from the lady herself, or from POST/POP using any of the links that points to “SHOP” on this site.
I can’t recommend CHARLES enough, but I am incredibly biased as I am trying to get you to listen/buy so don’t tale my word for it, check her out in these other places too and make your own mind up!
Hope you like this album as much as I do gang. stay tuned as I have some BIG releases out in the next few weeks! Also you might see me pop up in all kinds of cool places (more on that later!)
“Jed, have you heard the new Daphne & Celeste song? You’d love it!” said Dave Cronen, manager of ASH/Johnny Marr. I hadn’t at the time, but went home that night and watched the video. “Woah! Max Tundra produced this? Woah! Daphne & Celeste can really sing! Woah, there’s a Twin Peaks reference? Woah! its all about cassette tapes?” Yes Dave, I LOVE IT! So then I set about speaking to Mr. Tundra about releasing the cassette and this is it below!
There are so many reasons why I love this band. First of all just look at the photo below. Any band who actually got to hang out with Joey Ramone is okay in my book, but look, one of them is wearing a classic ASH tshirt, which makes this quite possibly, the greatest photo of all time.
POST/POP is at the Hackney Record Fair @ Dalston Epic in london, this Sunday April 12th. What’s on the POST/POP stall this time? Well the new double a-side tape (about to make a new post about it) from ISLAND FOX (aka Jess from Treasureseason) which is just lovely indeed. I will also have any ASH tapes I have leftoever (all the Subways ones are gone I think) and a selection of the POST/POP discography you may have missed. Also tshirts for £10 on the day and free badges!
Hope to see you there. I will be the one with the POST/POP wolf on my sweater, surrounded by tapes and boomboxes. Actually, there are a few tape labels there, so I will be the one buying other label’s tapes and VHS!
Timeout has listed it as one of the must-see events this weekend (mostly to do with POST/POP being there I am sure) and there is also craft beer and fanzines and other east london staples.
One of the main reasons of owning a record label is to release the music you absolutely love. The music that makes you feel like you can take on the world and win. The music that when you listen, the universe stops and waits patiently until you say its okay to move again. For many of us, that is ASH in a nutshell. The quintessential UK band that does that rare thing of simultaneously lifting you out of the dolldrums, and at the same time being the soundtrack to your heart breaking into a million tiny pieces. It’s all good though. ASH are the one constant in my musical collection over the years, and I hope for many to come.
It was a normal day. I did my usual sound-dump of songs I’ve been recommended, sent, found, onto my phone (yes, I know, not exactly the way audio should be heard for the first time) and made my way home across london. For those of you not from our beautiful capital city, you may not know the particular sense of dread you get from stepping onto a tube at approx 5.30pm in Canary Wharf. It’s like that film ‘The Warriors‘ but the only gangs are ‘The Suits’ and their weapon of choice? Brylcreem covered Dre Beats. Now I have nothing against this particular brand of headphone, but the sound escape is incredible. It’s like being in a rainforest, as you just don’t quite know where the sound is coming from, but the nearer you get, the worse you feel. So I’m surrounded but the gentle tinny hiss of a thousand identikit guys who have just discovered Drake and I set my phone to shuffle. This is a mildly dangerous thing, as the music I tend to listen to is eclectic to say the least, but I suddenly realised that today wasn’t going to be like any other, today is the day I discovered OH VILLAGE. And so you can interact with this memory, listen to that very track ‘Give They Fears’ right now as you read on!
This album needs no introduction, but I will try anyway. NME’s C86 (1986) tape was an album that you had to send away for via mail order in an advert somewhere in the pages of NME. You know, like Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs. Instead of getting the greatest powder-based life form/friend ever, you got a little cassette tape that launched a barrel of bands that defined a genre for the next 30 years. Look at this tracklisting!
Side one
Primal Scream - “Velocity Girl”
The Mighty Lemon Drops - “Happy Head”
The Soup Dragons - “Pleasantly Surprised”
The Wolfhounds - “Feeling So Strange Again”
The Bodines - “Therese”
Mighty Mighty - “Law”
Stump - “Buffalo”
Bogshed - “Run to the Temple”
A Witness - “Sharpened Sticks”
The Pastels - “Breaking Lines”
Age of Chance - “From Now On, This Will Be Your God”
Side two
The Shop Assistants - “It’s Up to You”
Close Lobsters - “Firestation Towers”
Miaow - “Sport Most Royal”
Half Man Half Biscuit - “I Hate Nerys Hughes (From The Heart)”
The Servants - “Transparent”
The Mackenzies - “Big Jim (There’s no pubs in Heaven)”
Big Flame - “New Way (Quick Wash And Brush Up With Liberation Theology)”
Fuzzbox - “Console Me”
McCarthy - “Celestial City”
The Shrubs - “Bullfighter’s Bones”
The Wedding Present - “This Boy Can Wait”
Yeah, I know. Incred! So the good people at Rough Trade, saw how popular it was becoming and released it properly in 1987 and the rest is history. An instant classic, which means alot of people loved it, but of course there were haters. Now I’m going to cut and paste some stuff from Wikipedia so you can see what I mean…
Ex-NME staffer Andrew Collins summed up C86 by dubbing it “the most indie thing to have ever existed”. Bob Stanley, a Melody Maker journalist in the late 1980s and founding member of pop band Saint Etienne, similarly said in a 2006 interview that C86 represented the:
“beginning of indie music . . . It’s hard to remember how underground guitar music and fanzines were in the mid-’80s; DIY ethics and any residual punk attitudes were in isolated pockets around the country and the C86 comp and gigs brought them together in an explosion of new groups.”
Martin Whitehead, who ran the Subway label in the late 1980s, develops on this line of thinking to suggest that C86 had a political influence: “Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band; I think C86 changed that - there were women promoting gigs, writing fanzines and running labels.”
Some are more ambivalent about the tape’s influence. Everett True, a writer for NME in 1986 under the name “The Legend!”, called it “unrepresentative of its times . . . and even unrepresentative of the small narrow strata of music it thought it was representing.” Alastair Fitchett, editor of the music site Tangents (and a fan of many of the bands on the tape), takes a polemical line: “(The NME) laid the foundations for the desolate wastelands of what we came to know by that vile term ‘Indie’. What more reason do you need to hate it?”
Now, I haven’t read NME since my boy Conor left, so I don’t know how many sub-genres they’ve made-up and painfully tried to shoehorn into their pages recently, but this was one of my faves. (That reminds me, at some point I’m going to write a little story about how Melody Maker paid some friends of mine to fake being a band so they could justify a genre they just invented - including multiple photoshoots, interviews and fake song names - I shit you not)
C86 has influenced countless thousands of bands across the world and that leads me to Cherry Red Records, who are one of the best record label I know of, re-releasing C86 on CD. Not only that, its a 3 CD spectacular with 2 extra CDs of bands and songs inspired by the original album. Read all about it (and I think you can preorder it) here: http://www.cherryred.co.uk/shopexd.asp?id=4616
Cherry Red asked me if I could re-issue the original tape for them and I said “YES I LOVE YOU CHERRY RED” which is a happy coincidence. Here’s the catch, and its a big one… You won’t be able to buy the C86 re-issue on tape, as they are only being used for promo purposes. If you are a music hack, you might get one in the post from Cherry Red (email them and ask!) but I am gonna make a few extra to give to some Tapeheads (who will chop my hands off for this!), one to the British Library, and every now and then, throw one in with an order of 4 tapes or more (while stocks last, and obvs they wont).
This is the most limited tape I will probably ever do, so apologies in advance if you don’t get one, but please please please buy the CD boxset from Cherry Red because they truly are KINGS.
I know this is a bit of a tease, but POST/POP completists will want to know this exists Sticking the POST/POP logo on this record felt like I was drawing a beard on the Mona Lisa, but everyone loves beards.
Read more about the album and watch videos from all the bands: http://nmecassettes.wordpress.com/nme-022-c86-1986/
You can listen to the whole thing on youtube too:
UPDATE: Here are the tapes!!
jed
p.s. I adore the NME Cassettes. I want to reissue ALL of them.
a london record label // a genre // a jed shepherd project
Sticking the POST/POP logo on this record felt like I was drawing a beard on the Mona Lisa, but everyone loves beards.