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:
