In true prog fashion, flying teapot hippy group Gong, split and became two entities; Daevid Allen’s Gong (the one responsible for all the pot head pixies) and Pierre Moerlan’s Gong a jazz rock based band.
Gazeuse! is the band’s first album and is very clearly jazz orientated. Unfortunately, due to a “jazz embargo” imposed on Gnomepants Cottage by jazz loathing Mrs Gnomepants, I am unable to bring you much of a detailed entry today. The only statement I can make is, if jazz is your thing or maybe you liked the theme tunes to late seventies chat shows like Wogan, Russell Harty or Parkinson, this will really float your boat. I’m not that much of a jazz fan, but I occasionally like to dip my toes into the murky cheese sauce that Pierre Moerlan’s Gong produced.
Gather in the Mushrooms is a compilation album featuring tracks by acid folk bands from 1968-1974.
As a prog fan, it is only natural that I have a penchant for music often classed as acid folk, which, one could argue, is a shared root for the mighty tree of progressive rock in the forest of alternative adult music.
This album was kindly “donated” to me by a dear ex-work colleague with whom we share similar tastes in music and interests in media and popular culture. When I saw the artist listing I was further excited to see artists such as Sallyangie (Sally Oldfield, Mike Oldfield‘s sister, with whom he began his career), Pentangle, Magnet and Spirogyra, all of whom have connection within this music project.
Hauntology at its best, Gather in the Mushrooms provides a soundtrack for a period when Canterbury was just begining to burgeon and fills the minds eye with images of green home county villages populated with beautiful long haired tie-dye be-dressed lady hippies like in some Avengers/Hammer Horror/sci-fi TV/Film that was never made. Beautiful tracks like Sandy Denny’s pre-Fairport Milk and Honey, Trader Horne’s post-Fairport Morning Way and the largely forgotten Forest’s Graveyard not only provide a powerful aural illustration for the genre but create a fitting tribute to a time that existed for a few but was appreciated by many.
This has largely become my third most favourite compilation of the past decade.
When I said I liked the Cocteau Twins I should have clarified that I liked a couple of tracks. It’s just that when you mention you like a band you often get inundated with advice about which albums you “should” like.
This is one such case. Apparently I “should” like this album because I’m a “fan”. I can actually understand that because a lot of the album sounds like early Dead Can Dance and there are occasions where you can detect the seeds of early goth, shoegazing and dream pop and it is easy to suggest a recommendation based on hearing other bands of similar sound.
This is the Cocteau Twins’ first album but really, it gets to a point where all Cocteau Twins stuff sounds the same. Indecipherable caterwauling from Liz Fraser droning guitar wibbles from one of the blokes and synthetic moodscaping from the other. If I was held captive in a car driving somewhere late at night in the post rain wetness while perhaps bleeding to death or coming down with a fever, this would probably be ok to listen to.
It seems almost as if there was an explosion of artists heavily influenced by Dead Can Dance and Ordo Equituum Solis. Seventh Harmonic are an all female band featuring Ann-Mari Thun of Arcana and Caroline Jago of Sol Invictus fame.
Seventh Harmonic’s Garden of Dilmun was sold to me through well placed adverts on social media and email bombardment promising me that the band were the next best thing since Dead Can Dance. It also came highly praised by a reviewer on music site Heathen Harvest. The samples I heard on Youtube did sound promising and, being a wannabe hipster, I parted with my cash and waited for the the album to arrive from abroad. It arrived and sat, still in its shrink wrap, on my desk for a period of months and two house moves before being listened to on a particularly gloomy day when heading into Banbury.
And no, it’s nothing like Dead Can Dance. It’s dark, I’ll give it that. Aurally invoking mental images of cavernous halls and cathedrals bedecked with banners, filled with etherial mist, knights of yore twatting each other with swords and Vikings rowing across placid lakes to give a monastery a good old sacking. I like it a lot.
Unfortunately, in my recent years I’ve found that listening to music is a luxury afforded only on a Saturday afternoon or maybe when the wife is away if I can be arsed. And so, Garden of Dilmun became one of the last albums I bought in CD format. My existing music library groaning under the weight of the gigabytes that it is formed of and thus spawned the Music Project. It’s many year mission to listen to every album in it, at least once, thin out those albums that don’t appeal and celebrate those that bring joy.
There was a fleeting moment when I thought relatives of Kirsty MacColl lived in my street when I was growing up. Instead it turned out Andrea McCann wasn’t related, but just happened that she looked a little bit like her. If you squinted.
This is another relationship legacy album, inherited when my previous wife and I split the MP3 library. I’ve never really been a fan of MacColl but I’ve always know who she was and enjoyed Christmas when she would grace my screens with the Pogues. Indeed, my knowledge of her sound is not limited to that song and, this album being MacColl’s best of album, this album features many of her top hits that were present in the charts during my childhood.
As a time machine, this album works, transporting me back to a time of paper rounds, Saturday’s working in Halfords and Christmases visiting Flannagan’s Apple for the Guinness.
And so we reach G. A world of compilations and best ofs (eg Greatest Hits) and Gothic music by far the largest group of albums alphabetically. Sorry if you’re expecting me to get to L by Christmas….
Can came into my life in the early noughties when a colleague gave me a copy of their Tago Mago album. I was suitably impressed but more of that when we get to T. Future Days features more chilled out Can rhythms melded with Susuki’s bizarre mumblings and Michael Karoli’s stand out lone-guitar performance. Kind of like lounge avant garde.
Future Days is Can’s fifth studio album. Vastly different from Tago Mago and yet not too far away from their fourth album, Ege Bamyasi. It’s surprising how little I’ve listened to this album, no really it is. Especially when I went through my revisit Can phase only last year.
Middle class wank mag, The Guide which is usually given away in Saturday’s Guardian, once said that Fur and Gold was the album must have for the noughties coffee table and that if you were to be taken seriously by your painfully middle class Land Rover dinner party guests you should put this album on the surround sound system and look hautily at ones guests when they contemptuously deny all knowledge of its existence. And thus the hipster was born.
I “bought” this album purely because I liked the track What’s a Girl to Do? and because I kind of had a warm tingle whenever I thought of lead singer Natasha Khan. However, the rest of the album was a disappointment so I’m glad I only “bought” this album because of course downloading music for free, pretty much like uploading music videos to Youtube, home taping and bootlegging, killed what was left of the music industry.
Which might account for the reason why nobody’s heard of the band since.
Avant Garde shite I downloaded in an effort to out weird hipsters.
Really, I never listen to this album in its entirety unless I’m trying to weird someone out or I’m trying to write an article about it. On it’s 6th listen it still hasn’t improved. Why do I keep this shit?
The way the percussive rhythm blends into each section seamlessly or the way the percussive rhythm lowers the active mind into a focused trance, rhythmically it is enjoyable. This alone is probably, on reflection, the main reason I keep the album. For those moments waiting to go into surgery or those moments when you’ve been given three months to live and a tab of LSD.
Internet faves Rasputina saw their hauntological American Great Depression era Old South sound into this their fourth studio release.
Considering my most favourite Rasputina release is their live album A Radical Recitalwhich features several tracks from this album, you’d think I liked Frustration Plantation equally. I do and I don’t. I like the clarity that the studio versions bring to the table but I like the gritty, close knit communal feel of the live album which you don’t get from studio albums.
Scandinavian rock valkyries again, this time with a live set featuring Nightwish’s pre-breakup line-up and Tarja Turunen.
The album is a live recording of a concert performed in Tempere in 2000 and was originally released as a limited CD run and released in DVD format with footage of the actual gig. It features a number of my favourite tracks from across the Nightwish catalogue.
I was never at the gig. Nor am I likely to want to go to a Nightwish gig these days. But, like with all live albums, I can play it really loud while standing in the garden in the dark and pretend I’m at the gig whenever I like.
Regular music project visitors, British Sea Power, return today with their 2013 release, From the Sea to the Land Beyond.
The album is actually a soundtrack for Penny Woolcock’s film From the Sea to the Land Beyond shown originally on BBC 4. The film is a showreel of archive footage from the BFI showing coastal life and activities through the ages accompanied by the unique salt encrusted rusty sound of British Sea Power.
Reworking their own material to provide haunting instrumentals, British Sea Power did an amazing job. I like to play guess the original song when listening to this album. For example Track 2 and the overarching theme throughout the album, Remarkable Diving Feat is a reworking of Waving Flags from Do You Like Rock Music
This is by far my most favourite album/soundtrack of the decade. You could listen to this album while watching any archive cine or super 8 material and not feel it was out of place. It really works.
No, I’d never heard of Mary Fahl until I came across this album either. Mary Fahl is an American singer song writer and in 2007 I obtained an unofficial advance of today’s album which is a song-for-song reimagining of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Mrs Gnomepants Mk1 used to say that cover versions are only valid cover versions if the artist doing the covering makes the cover their own. It’s only really recently that I’ve began to appreciate this statement fully.
I’ve always been fond of cover versions, my love of tribute artists like Iron Horse, Beatallica, Polka Floyd and Weird Al proof of this, so when it came to my first listen of Mary Fahl I was already full of expectations. Imagine my joy when Mrs Gnomepants Mk 1 came into the room where I was listening to it and said that she really enjoyed this version of her favourite Pink Floyd album. That kind of sealed it for me.
If you’re a big fan of Floyd’s Dark Side, then you might enjoy this too. Fahl has certainly put a lot of effort into producing the album and it’s remarkable how a female voice can change the dynamic of the sound originally made by Roger Waters. Fahl’s Dark Side has garnered a little bit of a cult following amongst some nerdy types which only adds to the enjoyment.
Then as a kind of postscript to this entry, while searching Youtube for examples of Fahl’s work, I came across her collaboration/guest appearance with Renaissance’s Annie Haslam. Again, highlighting how the music and artists I like are all connected somehow.
Bootlegs bootlegs bootlegs. They killed live music you know.
From Oblivion is a compilation of bootleg recordings of gigs by Pink Floyd. Only this isn’t. The album in my collection is labeled From Oblivion but looking at track listings around the internet, we have the correct track listing for the first 4 tracks then completely gaga for the rest which appear to be bootlegs from the Dark Side of the Moon tour.
Still. Good music. And, whenever I feel like I want to go to a Pink Floyd concert, I can bob this on the stereo, go and stand in the far side of the room, turn the lights off and charge myself £80 for the privilege.
Another appearance from Carl McCoy and his dust ridden forsaken cowboys, Fields of the Nephilim. This time with another compilation of songs from their catalogue. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of production or what, but to me this sounds more like recording of a tribute act than actual Nephilim songs. In the recording I have, McCoy sounds like he’s singer from a slightly higher register than usual.
Not going to say much more than that as I’ve already covered a lot in previous entries regarding these guys.
This was another of the first CDs I bought for my first CD player and I played it over and over and over.
Chris Rose, a boy at my school, was also a fan of the album and we would spend free periods in sixth form discussing the album, the film Maltese Falcon and Dashiell Hammett. We fostered a good friendship through the two years we were in sixth form together solely based on him seeing the albums title written on one of my cassettes while I was reading the book Maltese Falcon listening to the album on my Walkman.
The song from which the album takes its title, Friends of Mr Cairo, is a tribute and nod to the film noir genre made famous by the likes of actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, Mr Cairo being a character played by Peter Lorre in the film Maltese Falcon.
This is Jon and Vangelis’ “difficult” but popular second album.
Every so often during this music project I come across albums by bands I have heard of but can’t remember for the life of me what their song was that I liked or why I even have them in the collection in the first place.
I could lie and say I had always thought Franz Ferdinand was the geezer what got shot and started World War I. When of course I knew that there is also a popular music troupe with the same name and this is their first album. But until I came to write this entry, I couldn’t remember the name of their popular song.
The album Franz Ferdinand is a mystery to me. It sounds like nearly every popular music band’s album of the time, a sound I like to call Angry Indie. Similarly, I have no idea what the appeal is for these guys. Unremarkable, carbon copy of other “indie” bands.
Ok, analogy time. It’s like drinking real ale and thinking that you can detect the hard graft, dedication and attention to detail that the independent brewer puts into their craft when all the while you’re drinking mass produced slops rebranded by a major brewer like Scottish Newcastle.
I’d heard of Polyphonic Spree in rumours, whispers and the occasional collaboration with other artists like Yoko Ono and I wanted to hear more. So, during the Great Internet Download Free-for-All of 2007-2010 I was able to obtain a copy of Fragile Army.
I’ve always liked the concept of an ever increasing band, the community of music and the celebration of creativity fostered by bands like Polyphonic Spree and British folk band Bellowhead. Added to this, the open airiness and audible joy that emanated from what I’d heard of Polyphonic Spree’s music (notably You and I with Yoko Ono and Love My Way). However my joy was short lived as I started to realise that Polyphonic Spree was run like some sort of sinister cult like the Moonies or Hari Krishna led by a quasi-David Koresh figure. Furthermore, the sound becomes repetative, too similar and tracks become difficult to distinguish from.
That’s why my interest in Polyphonic Spree seems to tail off towards the middle of the album. Shame really.
I originally bought this album from Woolworths in Pwllheli while holidaying in my Uncles cottage. I remember being excited at the prospect of being able to listen to it on the record player we had there. And so, in 1986 progressive rock reverberated across the Welsh mountains for a brief moment Heart of the Sunrise leading the charge. That was until I was told to turn the music down.
At the time of the album’s release, Yes were coming to the end of an era with the imminent departure of drummer Bill Bruford (who left after the recording of the follow up album Close to the Edge) and the addition, in this album, of keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman, who replaced Tony Kaye. This was to become what some fans call “The Classic Yes Line Up” which is interesting as it was only like this for a couple of albums and it seems that nobody wants to talk about the regroup non-cannon album Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe .
The album itself features a number of really good songs, Heart of the Sunrise, Southside of the Sky and Roundabout; all fan pleasing tracks that are played regularly at gigs. It also features a handful of tracks written solo by each band member: Anderson’s We Have Heaven sounding like something from Olias of Sunhillow Bruford’s Five Percent for Nothing sounding like an A Level Music submission and the beginnings of later Wakeman solo projects audibly clear in Can and Brahms .
A fun album with some nice classic Yes songs but sounding flat, disappointing and unpromising with today’s ears.
More grumpy observations of the preposterousness pervading Britain from Nigel Blackwell and pals.
Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral is not an album with many memorable HMHB tracks on but it does come armed with the same bitterly amusing cynicism and acerbic observations of British middle class society as the other HMHB albums.
Surprisingly, despite the amount of HMHB I have, iTunes’ random play algorithm doesn’t seem to favour this album with it rarely appearing in any playlists. Which is a shame as I’d like to get to know it a little better.
For some reason, for years I thought the Cocteau Twins were a French band. Turned out Liz Fraser was just singing with a mouthful of gobstoppers or something.
This is the band’s seventh album is distinctively different to those that came previously with a much more mainstream appealing focal point and, disappointingly, the singing is intelligible. Nice, middle class mid-nineties dinner party background for young aspiring professionals trying to show off how cool, hip and in touch with culture they are before they spaff it all off by getting married and having kids.
I was never a fan of Tom Hank’s lumbering buffoon Forrest Gump. The film was a little too whimsical for my liking but I felt that the soundtrack was well researched and included a good few classic popular songs from the period of history in which the film is set.
Years ago, before it was ruined by Spotify I used Last.FM to stream my music. Using Liverpool University’s superfast internet connection, at a time when to most scousers the word “Broadband” met something to do with being fat, I would stream new music, scribble down those I liked and then try and download it all buy it legitimately.
Back in those early days, the algorithm used by such sites couldn’t cope with my eclectic music tastes and would regularly throw a spaz or start playing stuff it thought “I should like”. One such band was Mono which, it turned out, I actually liked.
Mono were a British band whose appearance on the world stage was brief and shared only by a few in the know. THE ultimate nineties/noughties hipster band. Many hipsters will know only of Mono through the inclusion of Life in Mono on the soundtrack of the fabulous 1999 film Great Expectations and other might know them because they were related some how. But I know them because technology said to me I wasn’t cool or hip enough to know them before anyone else.
Formica Blues is one of my most favourite albums. It crosses many genre boundaries whilst also paying homage to both John Barry and Lulu. Much akin to Sneaker Pimps, Portishead and Massive Attack, Mono fall neatly into the Triphop genre but with only one, highly acclaimed but hardly known album under their wing, the band disbanded in 2000; Lead singer, Siobhan de Mare, later working with Cocteau Twin, Robin Guthrie.
At this point, anyone who knows me personally will no doubt be thinking “Hang on, Dance/Trip hop? Isn’t Stegzy a hairy die hard Prog fan?”. Indeed, but sometimes, with every record collection, you find a “loved genre” busting album or band. Faithless are one of those bands.
Please don’t think I’ve gone and burnt my Yes t-shirt or thrown out my Roger Dean posters, far from it. I liked a couple of songs by Faithless. Happy cheery dance numbers with a dark and foreboding political message for the youth of the day, which, no doubt, was lost on many. I liked those songs sufficiently to try a few of Faithless’ other albums, this one and Back to Mine.
I left it there. My two favourite songs appeared on the album, Insomnia and Mass Destruction but the other songs were a little bit too beyond my cultural tastes. While similar to Massive Attack in some respects, the later dance tracks take me out of my cultural safety zone. A prime example of when getting a greatest hits album will give you a good idea of whether or not you’ll like a band’s other works too.
NME dubbed this “the album that should not exist”. Bloody hipsters.
I totally wished that the Manics hadn’t been so bloody mainstream or as a youth I’d have so gotten into them. Or so I thought in the nineties, as the “Indie” scene was rapidly pulling the wool over the listening public’s eyes as more and more “indie” bands appeared in mainstream charts, programmes and chat shows.
The Manics were one of those bands that I liked but didn’t want to fully embrace by getting any of their albums. I suppose fear of scorn from my contemporaries added to that, especially as my “indie” mates were all “No mate, the Manics went shit after their lead singer jumped into the Avon Gorge at Clifton”, my goth mates sniggered and said they were too happy and my shoe gazer friends shrugged and gazed depressively into the tips of their brogues whenever I mentioned the band.
Yet nearly every song on this album I like. Yes, I know that’s the purpose of a greatest hits album, but I suppose it is an excellent example of the “if one likes the “best of” then buy it and nothing else approach” as I still like this snap shot of the band’s golden age; Songs so full of hopelessness against a joyful melody. Exactly how Abba are. Artists take note, this works.
In 1995, just when I thought Chris Isaak had given up and gone off to that place where successful musicians disappear to, Isaak released Forever Blue. Nicely timed too, as dramatic changes were taking place in my own life.
Forever Blue was once described as the most “depressing Chris Isaak album ever”, fitting really as Isaak’s childhood sweetheart and wife died during the production of the album, a fact I only discovered last year. This nugget of information helps explain some of the lyrics and the songs on the album.
Regardless of situation, Isaak pulls out all the stops. Moping and pining lyrics dotted with the yearnings of pathetic love sick teenagers bring an extra departure from previous more jovial albums such as San Fransisco Days returning us to the near original classic Chris Isaak of Chris Isaak and Silvertone era. An excellent album for a break up.
This album helped me through the dark years of 1995-1997 and, if you were to jump into a time machine and go to my old flat back then, you’d have probably heard this album repeatedly being played, ingraining itself in my aural memory as a “flat album”.
In true prog fashion, flying teapot hippy group Gong, split and became two entities; Daevid Allen’s Gong (the one responsible for all the pot head pixies) and Pierre Moerlan’s Gong a jazz rock based band.
When I said I liked the Cocteau Twins I should have clarified that I liked a couple of tracks. It’s just that when you mention you like a band you often get inundated with advice about which albums you “should” like.
It seems almost as if there was an explosion of artists heavily influenced by 
There was a fleeting moment when I thought relatives of Kirsty MacColl lived in my street when I was growing up. Instead it turned out Andrea McCann wasn’t related, but just happened that she looked a little bit like her. If you squinted.
Can came into my life in the early noughties when a colleague gave me a copy of their Tago Mago album. I was suitably impressed but more of that when we get to T. Future Days features more chilled out Can rhythms melded with Susuki’s bizarre mumblings and Michael Karoli’s stand out lone-guitar performance. Kind of like lounge avant garde.
Middle class wank mag, The Guide which is usually given away in Saturday’s Guardian, once said that Fur and Gold was the album must have for the noughties coffee table and that if you were to be taken seriously by your painfully middle class Land Rover dinner party guests you should put this album on the surround sound system and look hautily at ones guests when they contemptuously deny all knowledge of its existence. And thus the hipster was born.
Avant Garde shite I downloaded in an effort to out weird hipsters. 
Internet faves Rasputina saw their hauntological American Great Depression era Old South sound into this their fourth studio release.
Scandinavian rock valkyries again, this time with a live set featuring Nightwish’s pre-breakup line-up and Tarja Turunen.
Regular music project visitors, British Sea Power, return today with their 2013 release, From the Sea to the Land Beyond.
No, I’d never heard of Mary Fahl until I came across this album either. 
Bootlegs bootlegs bootlegs. They killed live music you know.
Another appearance from Carl McCoy and his dust ridden forsaken cowboys, Fields of the Nephilim. This time with another compilation of songs from their catalogue. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of production or what, but to me this sounds more like recording of a tribute act than actual Nephilim songs. In the recording I have, McCoy sounds like he’s singer from a slightly higher register than usual.
This was another of the first CDs I bought for my first CD player and I played it over and over and over.
Every so often during this music project I come across albums by bands I have heard of but can’t remember for the life of me what their song was that I liked or why I even have them in the collection in the first place.
I’d heard of Polyphonic Spree in rumours, whispers and the occasional collaboration with other artists like Yoko Ono and I wanted to hear more. So, during the Great Internet Download Free-for-All of 2007-2010 I was able to obtain a copy of Fragile Army.
I originally bought this album from Woolworths in Pwllheli while holidaying in my Uncles cottage. I remember being excited at the prospect of being able to listen to it on the record player we had there. And so, in 1986 progressive rock reverberated across the Welsh mountains for a brief moment Heart of the Sunrise leading the charge. That was until I was told to turn the music down.
More grumpy observations of the preposterousness pervading Britain from Nigel Blackwell and pals.
For some reason, for years I thought the Cocteau Twins were a French band. Turned out Liz Fraser was just singing with a mouthful of gobstoppers or something.
I was never a fan of Tom Hank’s lumbering buffoon Forrest Gump. The film was a little too whimsical for my liking but I felt that the soundtrack was well researched and included a good few classic popular songs from the period of history in which the film is set.
Years ago, before it was ruined by Spotify I used 
At this point, anyone who knows me personally will no doubt be thinking “Hang on, Dance/Trip hop? Isn’t Stegzy a hairy die hard Prog fan?”. Indeed, but sometimes, with every record collection, you find a “loved genre” busting album or band. Faithless are one of those bands.
NME dubbed this “the album that should not exist”. Bloody hipsters.
In 1995, just when I thought Chris Isaak had given up and gone off to that place where successful musicians disappear to, Isaak released Forever Blue. Nicely timed too, as dramatic changes were taking place in my own life.
Stegzy's Music Project 