Liberating Vinyl Since 1995
In Manchester, Christinzio managed to resurrect his music career and signed to Brighton based Bella Union a couple of years after the move. People started to take notice. He enjoyed increased exposure and reached many more listeners than he had ever done in the USA.
I have been meaning to write up the notes I had on this mini album for quite some time. I love small run, self funded …
The 101 Club in Clapham, South London, was a hugely popular and influential venue for music in the 70s and 80s and a lot of up and coming bands found their way on to the stage here. Alas, as can be seen below, it has long since closed down.
I absolutely love this record – I have only played it through twice but I am really impressed. This is avant-garde experimental at its best and it is either a wonderful accident or, as I suspect, these boys know what they are doing all too well. Either way this one is a keeper and I am going to shout it from the rooftops until it gets the attention it deserves.
The interviewer was incredulous that an ambitious concept album, let alone a rock opera of all things, had been considered a good idea for release in these modern times. I think he used the word ‘brave’ a lot.
“Who better to deliver a tribute to the greatest rock opera of all times? Who? The D! That’s Who!! We’ve been working on this medley …
Forget Come On Eileen and Too-Rye-Ay, forget dungarees and floppy hair. Dexys Midnight Runners underrated classic is a raw, lyrically brilliant, musically innovative masterpiece, and a debut album that deserves wider recognition and acclaim.
The album has elements of all the best of early Roxy Music, but never quite captures the same brilliance. Manifesto starts well, the intro is appealing, but it quickly fails to live up to the promise. A fairly tame, middle-of-the-roader really. Not the phrase you would normally associate with 1970s Bryan Ferry. Listening through again I can’t emphasise enough how much Trash sounds like the Mod Revival records of this era.
Who’s Missing is undoubtedly the better of the two, and side two of that album contained some of my most played Who tracks back then. Fast forward 10 years and the ‘Great Vinyl Cull’ of 1995, as I like to call it, was the last time I saw that record out in the wild. I needed the money and vinyl was dead, right? So I took all my vinyl to Selectadisc in Nottingham and they bought almost all of it, but that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say it wasn’t that long before I was earning proper money, had seen the error of my ways and started re-collecting all my old LPs, and lots of new ones!
The first thing to mention is this was written after Nicky Wire lost both of his parents just before the pandemic, and continuing into lockdown the album, or at least its lyrics, reflects sadness, insecurities and loneliness. The loneliness of being an orphan is real even well into middle age. Been there myself. But more than that it makes you reflect on and see the world altogether differently, probably due to the heightened sense of your own mortality.
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