This London Pop band have put out several very popular CDEP's between 96 and 98. This disc has all the songs except the main song from each of their EP's. The main songs are being saved for the debut LP which should be coming out this Winter. This band has the Pop-love of FreeBoy, but the feel for production of The Wannadies. Really great songs, too.

Named after Twink (of the Pink Fairies), this SF band was part of that cities 1979 trilogy of great bands, along with The Suspects (who became Dream Syndicate), and The Mumbles (who became True West). Some of these songs are amazing, but some suffer from poor studios. There's 21 songs (6 live ones at the end).

Lo-Fidelity Allstars, Tiny Too, Chest, Ultrasound, and Kidnapper do covers of (respectively) Shirley Bassey singing "Diamondsare Forever", A-ha, BeeGees, Neil Young, and the Shangri-Las. Lo-Fidelity All-Stars cover is best, but Tiny Too's take on A-ha's "Takeon Me" is great.

Single by this Leicester friends-of-Prolapse band. Sounds like Add N to X. A side has a riff right out of "Mass Production", off Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" LP. Freed Unit's "Field Reports From Out-There" CD on Bedazzled did well here last semester

Can a record from four years ago (1994) be considered a classic? This 7inch has two of the greatest songs going amongst its 6 cuts. "Never Be Your Girl" and "Cotton Candy & Blue Sox" have Harley's amazing vocals, and driving music.

On the label run by Ohtomo Yoshide (turntablist leader of Ground Zero in Japan). He also plays in this "rock" band which features Japanese vocalist Phew. Closest comparison in sound would be Japanese band Demi-Semi Quaver, who have 2 albums on the God Mountain label.

Tomoyuki Tanaka interprets the Eurythmics hit as lovingly as he did to Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" on his full length. One really long version on the A side, the "mix for lay down" (my favorite of the 3) starting off side B, and a vocal-only track finishing it. The vocal-only track would make great layering material on an instrumental track, or even over the Aurora Borealis field recordings, on the 2CD set added back on 10/12/98

Here is clarification on the "C86" term I used in my Josef K comments on the 10/12 Gull Buy update. I've always been fascinated with the term "C86". I only knew it in reference to a sound. Here is an explanation of C86, named after a compilation cassette the NME put out each year, in this case (of course) the year of 1986 "[Josef K:] "They are part of the sound known as "C86", along with Big Flame,early Wedding Present, and This Poison!."

Well, not exactly. Josef K recorded between 79 and 82 so they could not have been part of the C86 scene, if there ever was one. I guess you are familiar with the C86 compilation LP which the hype came from? C86 wasn't only about this sharp guitar-sound, also much gentler bands such as Mighty Mighty, Bodines, McCarthy, Brilliant Corners (1985/88), Primal Scream (1985/86) or June Brides are typical C86 bands. If I should define it, it was the approach of punk ('anyone can be in a band') mixed with the ambition to make melodic pop-songs instead of punk-rock.

This is of course similar to what the Postcard bands tried to achieve, just with even less impact than the bands of the 86 generation. And then the sampler featured such strange acts as MacKenzies, Stump, Shrubs - which are hardly referred to when people classify a band as C86. So where do these fit in? Apart from a few melodic songs by A Witness I have no idea at all.

The C86 sampler has become VERY rare and I saw it sell at above 100 DM (sic!) already. In my list I would make it between 25 DM or 35 DM, whatever state the actual copy is in. It was originally released on cassette (that's what the C comes from) by the NME magazine, who had an annual (? - I know that there was a C81 tape incl. Josef K) series, and C86 was mainly guitar-pop oriented so it gave the genre its name. As I wrote before, this generalization, like any, does not fit perfectly as there were also some odd sounding bands on the sampler, and the difference between Shop Assistant's very sweet and soft "It's up to you" and Big Flame's hell of a punk rush "New way" for example is quite apparent.

There might be a similarity in spirit though, many bands had left-wing or critical lyrics, a famous example are the openly marxist paroles of McCarthy (who despite this later sang "we must campaign for the return of Labour to power", which was more realistic), a guitar-pop version of Gang Of Four (another favourite of mine) in a way."