So I heard Tanya Donelly play on some compilation CD I had, can’t remember what one it was, and thought to myself: “Hey, here’s a singer with a distinctive sound, I’d like to know more”.
I jumped on the next 86 bus into Liverpool City Centre, marched down Church Street and entered the palace of musical wonder that was HMV. I then flicked through the CD racks for D. No Donelly. Did the same for T incase some div had misfiled. No Tanya Donelly. Repeated this in Virgin and any other record store I could find. Nada.
During the Great Internet Download Free for All, I’d scour the listings on Usenet for Donelly and also come up with nothing. Then, a passing comment with someone, I forget who, asked if I had tried B for Belly. Belly? I asked. Yes Belly! What, Belly, the band from the early to mid 90s who did Feed the Tree and was somehow linked to 4AD records? Yes, they said, the very same.
I hadn’t. I had no idea that Tanya Donelly was part, if not lead singer with Belly. Punched Belly into my Usenet browser and Blam! There was Belly. I listened to a few tracks, decided I liked a few tracks, continued to listen to those few tracks and never beyond the album itself.
Sad that.
This is what stealing music did to my generation. We became super saturated with media and it stopped us absorbing the true sound. Moreover, streaming music and CDs killed the beating heart, the album. The ease of just playing the tracks we liked instead of sitting through the whole thing to get to the track we liked – that became the using a spoon to eat your roast potatoes of music.


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”.
In the early noughties, while the rest of the internet and Guardian supplement cultured Gen-Xers were going wild for the likes of
Like most teenagers, I was fortunate enough to be Bez to my old school friend, Mike’s band Jean Pierre O Malley & the Gieger-Muller Tubes. I attended most practice sessions (mostly on the promise of a few pints of beer afterwards) and I accepted that they would do cover versions of songs I didn’t really know.
The guitar. Some would say it is a crucial instrument in modern music. “Without guitar” they might say, “All you have is some bloke singing with drums and a keyboard.” Which is true, but as we have already heard with the likes of
Once, while talking about the amazing film Lost Highway and its soundtrack with a former acquaintance, the conversation went like this: