Riffling through my 7″s #5
Whatever you might have got the impression from, over the last two weeks particularly, my record collection is not made up solely of things from the £1 bins of Avalanche Records, Cockburn St, Edinburgh (though they are lovely people). The thing is, I have got some absolute goldmines out of there, including records I have read about and wanted to hear and just haven’t for whatever reason. Well, if you can a) own the thing rather than just copying it b) support an excellent record shop and c) not have too pay much for it, why not?
Coldcut were/are two male producers Matt Black and Jonathan Moore, who are responsible for violently cool label Ninja Tune, which is still running to this day. Coldcut’s My Telephone 7″ is interesting for it’s place in the gran scheme of things and how music, both ‘indie’ and ‘dance/’electronica’ got shaped over the course of the last twenty years or so - not that these are separate ghettos, obviously. Coldcut had made the cover of the NME in 1987 talking about sampling with a record called ‘Let Us Play’. Then they made it onto Top Of the Pops in a fairly short space of time -twice -when they launched the quite successful for a time careers of both Yazz and Lisa Stansfield.
Lisa Stansfield can just about be heard on ‘My Telephone’ which only made it to no.52, but is much better than the big hit with Stansfield ‘People Hold on.’ The following year it was reworked with Mark E. Smith to become The Fall’s first single of the Nineties ‘Telephone Thing.’ That made no. 58 in the charts and no.35 in John Peel’s Festive Fifty, which is generally a much better barometer of taste than the ‘proper’ charts, anyway.
So, for your listening pleasure, let us present:
Hi Ed,
Great to see the reviews being kept right up to date. I don’t get a lot of time to read them, but it’s always interesting to keep the finger on the pulse!
Howyeh keith, good to hear from you! See you soon
Hi Ed
Trying to convey irony is a skill mastered by only greatest writers, and I obviously failed miserably! The pulse I was trying to keep my finger on was not that of modern music.
Wonderful!
heh heh…Keith, my brain is total mush at the mo and the less said about my pulse the better! When being ironic on here I usually put in winks ; )
Bizzarrely, I seem to get more feedback on the older stuff I post, rather than the more modern stuff. Now I know how John Peel felt *tongue in cheek*
Adam, glad you like it!
Really, Ed, you are being disingenuous; judging by your very lucid and obviously time-consuming posts, you brain is anything but “total mush”. I’ve found your blog very informative, and will recommend it to colleagues ;-}
*wry chuckle* it’s good therapy ; )