In 1994, I went to the Liverpool ABC cinema in Lime Street to kill a couple of hours I had spare. As I took my seat in the empty theatre, little did I know that I was about to be subjected to an amazing rollercoaster of a film. Pulp Fiction hit me like a train. To me, this was a new style of film, a new director to follow and a soundtrack that would fill that period of my life with music. So when Tarantino’s followup was the 1997 film, Jackie Brown, I was hoping that it too would renew the tarnished soundscape of my life.
By this time I was working long hours in Bootle so trips to the cinema seemed like a luxury reserved for films that had to be seen on the big screen like Star Wars. All other films, especially those which we were uncertain about, were relegated to the cheaper hire from the video shop. Despite being a video rental, Jackie Brown didn’t disappoint.
Quite often with music, it’s easy to hope that the blow away of the previous success will continue to fill one’s sails with uplifting wind and it’s sometimes the case that we disregard those works that follow as “not as good as the previous”. Take Air’s Moon Safari or Portishead’s Dummy for example, both are much more successful than their later releases because perhaps, they were seen as groundbreaking. I think the same is true of film and that a person’s personal perception and appreciation will change depending on their tastes.
That said, the soundtrack to Jackie Brown is as vastly different to Pulp Fiction as a cake is to bread but still holds its own. A lot more soul and country compared to Pulp Fiction‘s surf guitar filled selection but still a really good selection of tracks and, like the film, at a totally different pace.
Gloomy collaborative music by Evo Watts’ music project This Mortal Coil.
One lesson to learn when curating a large collection of music is to make regular backups. Last week I had to make an emergency restore of my Mac’s OS which meant having to resort to a backup from the iCloud. Unfortunately, this meant that only the files I’ve managed to upload via my very slow 21st Century rural broadband or those matched via iTunes are currently available for me to listen to. Indeed, today’s album, Islands, is not available on iTunes and my iCloud library does not have the files uploaded, which is a shame. Fortunately, I did manage to listen and pencil together a brief draft of observations for today’s entry but it means there may be a slight decline in posting regularity for the next couple of weeks. Please stay with me though!
If you’re one of those people who only engage with media that is no older than twenty years old, then not only are you deluding yourself, but you are missing out on a whole trove of cinema, music and literature. One such diamond in this trove is the 1965 film 
The second album from Sugarplum Fairies, a band I discovered on 
The sixth studio album from 
There are as many compilations claiming to be the best of gothic rock entitled Into Temptation as there are compilations claiming to be the best of gothic rock. Confusing really as this isn’t really what I’d call Gothic Rock, it’s what I’d call Scandinavian symphonic rock fronted by tight-fitting low cleavaged black catsuit wearing busty sirens in a wind tunnel aimed at appealing to frustrated teenage males with big hair and middle-aged balding forty-somethings trying to recapture their lost youth.
A bootleg so bootleggy you can smell the sweaty socks. Interstellar Encore is one of many Pink Floyd bootlegs donated to my collection by a former work colleague who had a similarly large music library to mine, although admittedly, most of his music was a bit more….”bootleggy” in nature.
Whenever I hear 
One-trick Pony John Shuttleworth’s latest album.
As long term readers of this project might remember, during the divergence of Yes in the early nineties, when Chris Squire said “No” to Jon Anderson’s use of the band name
Incantations is Oldfield’s fourth album following Ommadawn and precedes Exposed. Musically, this album features themes and motifs that are repeatedly used throughout the four sides accompanied by Oldfield’s stylistically familiar circle of fifths. Through his guitar wankery, his use of choral and a folksy solo by his singer du jour, Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior (doing a really good impression of 
The soundtrack for the 1993 film In the Name of the Father about the Guildford pub bombings of 1974.
I first learned about King Crimson following the amusing Bill Bailey fronted Channel 4 docu-countdown-show Top Ten Prog which was broadcast at the height of the prog revival of the late nineties/early noughties.
Tess Don’t Tell was the first song I ever heard from this, Ivy’s fifth studio album. I forget where it was but suspect that it was on a random “Music you might like” playlist from the earlier days of Last.FM before it was bought by Spotify and ruined. Of course having a band name like Ivy meant having to use hardcore advanced Googlefu so that Ivy, the American band, came up in searches instead of what other monstrosities came up instead.
Drugs are bad, or so South Park’s Mr Mackey says. But as anyone who really remembers the sixties will tell you, drugs make the music go weirder and In Search of the Lost Chord pretty much demonstrates this.
Never really been a big fan of Radiohead, Creep and Paranoid Android were my limit. They were always one of those bands people told me that I “should like”. Like it was some edict from above. “You should like Radiohead”.
We’ve seen 
As a mature media student at Huddersfield Uni, it was fun, and refreshing, to discuss similar musical tastes with my lecturers during tutorials.
Stegzy's Music Project 