No Pay To Play

And now, after an inordinate and totally unacceptable delay, we bring you details of a purely hypothetical mix of music which might, if one had been that way inclined, have been picked up from various web sites in the first three months of this year, and which, sequenced in this way, might have been burned onto an audio CD - might have been, but, of course, weren’t. But we thought you might like to know. Think of it as a 90-minute radio show without the ads.

1. Lou Reed and John Cale “Waiting For The Man”: two people alone in a room. Well, not exactly alone. An audience was there, although you sense that it might as well not have been. Nico was there too, but not on this song. Mistakes are made, and Lou is already showing his ability to destroy his back catalogue by singing all around the song. But this is a fascinating document nevertheless.

2. Eno / Moebius / Roedelius “Broken Head”: the third crucial Eno and Cluster track, cruelly omitted from the two Enoboxes. Some days it feels like it is going to go on forever; some days you wish it would.

3. X-Wife “Eno”: What “King’s Lead Hat” would have sounded like if it had been on “Here Come the Warm Jets”. The singer sounds a bit like Pete Shelley or Tom Verlaine. I know nothing about this and if it hadn’t been called “Eno” I would never have found it. Now that’s what I call good marketing.

4. Lassigue Bendthaus “Jealous Guy (poeme syncope)": a song I never thought I wanted to hear again gets dehumanised, decentred, vocodered and beamed back from deep space. Brilliant.

5. Roxy Music “More Than This”: the original and the best. If you want to know what it felt like to be young and alive in the 1980s, look no further.

6. Lizzy Mercier Descloux “Funky Stuff”: Lizzy was just a name to me back in the day. Now I see the error of my ways. A slab of angular New York no wave / dance music with extra “attitude”. And I now hear that she has died. Damn.

7. Vanity 6 “Nasty Girl”: just like the last one only more so. Parental advisory required.

8. Vive La Fête “Nuit Blanche”: Peelie was floggiing another track by these people (Belgian I think) around Christmas time. Sounds like everything about music that you ever liked, rolled into one. I particularly like the blatant lift of the ascending synth note from Visage’s “Fade to Grey”, and the guitar line from the Cure’s “A Forest”. You see? You know it already. Can there really be an entire album like this? And, if so, where can I get it?

9. Electrelane “Windmill”: there will always be room for one more wistful, gentle pop song featuring breathy female vocals.

10. Air “Cherry Blossom Girl (Hope Sandoval version)”: ditto. (Note: this is not just the album version with a different singer; it's an entirely different song.)

11. Jonathan Richman “Give Paris One More Chance”: this one goes out to Carl, the six-year-old, who also likes Jonathan’s “My Jeans”. (And Skyhooks’ “Blue Jeans”. But that’s another story.)

12. Joe Crow “Compulsion”: cheap electronic pop. Irresistible if you ask me. Vintage unknown but could conceivably have been a contemporary of ...

13. The Fall “New Face In Hell (Peel Session 24 September 1980)”: no explanation necessary, surely. Flowers will wilt.

14. The Von Bondies “Cmon Cmon”: overexposed to the point of irrelevance now, but fun for a couple of minutes. Heck, they have even played Canberra since this playlist was put together.

15 Black Widow “Come to the Sabbat”: Satanic folk music from, allegedly, 1971 - was this one song responsible for the entire heavy metal genre? Or is it a recently put-together hoax along the lines of “A Mighty Wind”? Warning: contains flute.

16 Joacham Witt: “Tri Tra Trullala (Herbergsvater)”: even by my own standards I know very little about this. It sounds like it’s from the 80s but presumably isn’t. Sung in German so it could be about anything. Or nothing. “Borrows” a piercing single guitar note from Echo and the Bunnymen’s first album.

17. Alexander Robotnick “Sountrack”: at sub-two minutes it could have gone on for 10 times its length and not outstayed its welcome. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’d call it sublime. Possibly years old, but who’s to know? Isn’t random downloading fun!

18. “Smalltown Boy”: don’t even have the name of the artist for this one. It’s an updated, goddamn swish version of that song. The vocalist can’t get up as high as Jimmy Somerville, but who can?

19. Contriva “Stuck (Superpitcher mix)”: more stuff from the younger generation. If that’s you, I’d just like to say thanks a lot for contributing to an environment in which I can end a CD with seven minutes like these. A good comedown.

You can do this yourself, you know.