Manchester, So Much To Answer For (1990)

The Fall Eat Yourself Fitter Buzzcocks What Do I Get

The Frantic Elevators  Hunchback Of Notre Dame The Chameleons Second Skin (Films) 

The Passage  Dark Times Blue Orchids The House That Faded Out

Tools You Can Trust Working And Shopping Twang Big Dry Out

A Witness I Love You Mr. Disposable Razors Big Flame All The Irish Must Go To Heaven 

The Smiths Handsome Devil Happy Mondays Mad Cyril Inspiral Carpets Directing Traffic 

The Railway Children Consider Dub Sex Swerve A Certain Ratio Do The Du 

A Guy Called Gerald Rockin' Ricki Ruthless Rap Assassins Three The Hard Way 

Kiss AMC Rawside New Fast Automatic Daffodils Big

I bet you've all been dying for a bit of Mick Hucknall on here?

A bit of a cash in on the (then) massive impact that Manchester was having on the popular music scene.
 Flaws? A Manchester comp covering roughly 1978-1990 with no Joy Division / New Order?

Stone Roses never played a Peel Session so they're not here either. Similarly absent and more of a loss - The Durutti Column and Frank Sidebottom . Anyway, what's here is, generally speaking, good. In places the sound quality is not great I'm afraid. (One of those 90's CDs that's turned a funny yellow colour...)

John Peel- Desert Island Discs (1990)

On last week's Morrissey Desert Island Discs post we acknowledged the difficulty of selecting just eight records after a lifetime of following pop music. If it is hard enough for us mere mortals imagine the difficulty faced by John Peel when he was castaway in January 1990 (20 years ago? ridiculous).
I was going to write a bit here about how the teenaged Lonnie Donnegan fan's fetish for records led to him becoming the most revered figure in British popular music, but it would be superfluous.

Handel: Zadok the Priest
Roy Orbison: It's Over
Jimmy Reed: Too Much
Misty in Roots: Mankind
The Undertones: Teenage Kicks (overall choice)
Rachmaninoff: 2nd piano concerto
The Fall: Eat Y'self Fitter
The Four Brothers: Pasi Pano Pane Zviedzo


Here's the programme, first broadcast on January 14th 1990.

The Fall- Extricate (1990)

I think this is my favourite Fall LP.
The sacred cows of British Independent music,
The Fall, in the person of Mark Smith, made anti fashion a fashion, anti pop popular.
The miserable old fucker has been turning out this intelligent though often barely intelligible stuff for 32 years now- for which we should all be eternally grateful.
By the way- I once went to a funeral where the preacher sounded ah just ah like Mark Smith ah, which was strange.
Stephen Hanley- bass
Craig Scanlon- guitar
Marcia Schofield- keyboards, percussion
Mark E Smith- vocals
Simon Wolstencroft- drums
Martin Bramah- guitar, backing vocals