Category: Hall of Fame
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Celebrity Skin by Hole
This album is indestructible. It wouldn’t be allowed to fail even though everyone and their cat had already written off Courtney Love as a hasbeen widow who had her finest work subcreated by Kurt Cobain. You can’t imagine how much Courtney was disdained in the years before Celebrity Skin was released. The letters page of […]
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The Dreaming by Kate Bush
Madness as music is The Dreaming by Kate Bush. Later, she’d talk about the record in terms of the audience reaction, telling an interviewer that people regarded it as her ‘she’s gone mad’ album. Kate Bush is everything to so many people, but all we really know of her, the actual artist, is the stories […]
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G.F.S.U. by Lolita Storm
I found Red Hot Riding Hood sitting on the New Releases shelf at HMV in Glesga, waiting for me because no one else knew it was there. listed influences on MySpace sold them immediately. Betty Boo. Girls Aloud. Suicide. Shampoo. Even Sigue Sigue Sputnik, for God sake. What? I thought. How can a band this […]
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Cut by The Slits
Everything I learned about London came from an album called Cut by a band named The Slits. I bought it at Avalanche Records in Glesga, while at college, one eye on my work, the other on a city that always pulled at me. London needs no explanation. For me, London birthed punk. The real punk. […]
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Garbage by Garbage
Nineteen Ninety-Six was a year where I was slowly starting to form myself through music and art. Before that, music was something I listened to for enjoyment, something in the charts I bought because it was popular and catchy. The bands I’d inherited from my dad (The Smiths, The Cure, The Slits, Siouxsie And The […]
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Aurora Gory Alice by Letters To Cleo
Letters To Cleo are brilliant and this is my favourite album they did. Let’s take a quick look at how I found them – and how long I had to pause the tape to see their name in the credits!
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The It Girl by Sleeper
Britpop fascinated me while I lived through it, because I never quite belonged to it, yet somehow it filled the charts and radio playlists with guitar bands. Even as a teenager, I felt something about Britpop was a little too masculine, overly laddish, which wasn’t me at all. The entire scene, I’d later discover, was […]
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A Christmas Record (Ze Records)
Ze Records was one of the hippest labels of the time. This was their attempt at a Christmas album. It’s…something.
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Lycanthropy by Patrick Wolf
I saw Patrick Wolf very early on in his career at the original Stereo while he was touring Lycanthropy. The gig wasn’t very well attended, which made sense because Patrick was most definitely a cult artist at that point, beloved by critics and photographed for all the coolest magazines, who presented him as the coolest […]