Swingin' Ryan

I liked that! Normally when you hear a band it makes you think of other bands but it made me think of the producer Tony Hoffer, it sounds like stuff he's worked on like latter-day Belle and Sebastian, Midnite Vultures by Beck, Grandaddy etc. Good stuff

See that's more like it! The Fudge Awards are probably the best example of how to do music awards at this kind of level, they've got a sense of humour, the categories make some kind of sense and Sandi Thom hardly ever wins one.

In that case they can fuck off, and they can quote that on their website. 'Oh there's a fair amount of sour grapes about what we're trying to do'. Squash some sour grapes, ferment them, pour them into a glass and give it to me free, then we'll talk SNMA.

Agreed. Also if you're going to have an awards ceremony where you give nods to genuinely good, well-respected bands like Meursault, The Little Kicks, The Lorelei etc who have actually made PROPER albums, don't cheapen the entire thing by having an award for the best tribute/cover act. Imagine that at the Mercury Prize. "Well that's the album of the year, well done PJ Harvey, now onto the Matthew Kelly award for best Tribute Act". Saying that, was there a free bar? Because if nobody had to pay to enter and the nominated acts got to go free AND there was a free bar, then it wouldn't be a bad night out. I'd almost certainly go.

'The First Time I Ran Away', the first taste of the new M. Ward album 'A Wasteland Companion'. I like She & Him and Monsters of Folk, but when the spotlights just on M. Ward doing his day job of writing alone he is pretty much untouchable. This is unspeakably lovely.

It seemed to fluctuate hugely in how busy it was, it could go from queues down the road to about ten people full-stop. I guess Korova is a pretty big stumbling block though, I've still only been in there about twice, doesn't do much for me but then I live in Edinburgh now and I'm probably not the target market anyway. I think Moshulu's big advantage is it's size, it was one of the few places you could actually get near the bar when it was rammed, unlike Exodus which is a joke trying to get a drink at the weekend.

That was my initial thought but then I suppose it seems strange that a city with two major universities and a big student population has a fairly small amount of 'alternative' clubs. It's a good space to have someone do something with though, loads of room, two bars, huge dancefloor etc. I had some brilliant nights in Moshulu, particularly the period around 2007-2009 with things like Adventures in Stereo.

I love a lot of Motown and Stax stuff but I can't profess to know much about Soul post-1970 so maybe there's a huge difference between M People and Lisa Stansfield/Eternal that my ears aren't picking up on and what I know about Acid Jazz and Deep House you could write on the back of a fag packet so I'm willing to concede that M People may have been more original than I'm giving them credit for (I still think they sound fucking horrible though!) The Manics suffer a similar fate really, they've made some of the most subversive records of the last 20 years, worked with people as diverse as Steve Albini, John Cale, Kevin Shields, Erol Alkan, Errors, Fuck Buttons, Optimo, Andrew Weatherall and Mogwai but a huge amount of people will still think of them as being the same as The Stereophonics. As an interesting aside, M Peoples percussionist Shovell actually features on the Manics second album.

The Manics weren't nominated for the Mercury that year, I was more just mentioning M People as context for the British musical landscape at the time. I can see where your coming from but I can probably name about ten bands/artists who were making music that sounded like M People that year fusing cod-soul with disco but I can't think of anyone else doing Wire/Skids-esque post-punk with Industrial and Krautrock sounds like that Manics were on The Holy Bible. Listen to anything by Pulp, Blur or Oasis from that era, then listen to Die in the Summertime or The Intense Humming of Evil and you can see how out on a limb they were amongst other Brit guitar bands. I don't think there's a single M People song that wouldn't fit seamlessly onto a Lisa Stansfield or Eternal album. Still, horses for courses and all that!

Yes! They are the greatest rock and roll band of all time. This is not opinion it is fact and anyone who disagrees will be embarrassing themselves by being completely wrong. It's probably not this edition of TOTP you're talking about but this is joyous. The same year M People won the Mercury Music prize. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2sA3qZ8u6c

Some other favourites that I stupidly neglected (I'm aware that 'The Singles' is technically a compilation but as it features songs that aren't on any other album then it's a valid choice, that's the rules cause I fucking say they are).

Glad you both liked them! They're a lot more lo-fi than The Long Blondes as it's just the two of them with one guitar and the drum track on an old organ but I think they have a lot of that scuzzy glamour plus they love The Smiths and 1960's british kitchen-sink dramas so they feel very Long Blondes. Jeane is the only tune they have that's properly 'produced' so it's a good indication of how they could sound. Any band that loves the Manics and references Kathleen Hanna and Kim Deal in their lyrics have got to be worth a punt!

I think people are often far too hard on Aberdeen. I don't really know what people expect from it. For a city stuck in a cold corner of the North of Scotland with a population about the same as Salford or Southampton, I think it's doing alright. The only major sticking point for me about Aberdeen is the insane rent prices, one of the many reasons I now live in Edinburgh but I will definitely return to Aberdeen at some point in life, I still very much consider it my 'home'.

Mainly looking forward to Future of the Left, Alabama Shakes, Camera Obscura, M. Ward (hopefully) and Janelle Monae. Also looking forward to hearing more from - With all the navel-gazing electro recently I'd almost given up on bands making songs that go for your throat like these guys. Between these guys and Alabama Shakes the South of America is looking exciting. - Part of the History of Apple Pie and Veronica Falls crowd of bands that are actually still doing something interesting with the 'fuzzy reverb' sound that EVERY band has been doing for the last two years. XL have signed this guy which is probably an indication he's going to be massive. Somewhere between Daniel Johnston and Robert Johnson with a mad back story. - Scratchy, jangley 'proper' indie. Amazing Smiths cover, hopefully going to fill the gap the Long Blondes left.

My top ten (kind of in order) with pictures and brief annotations. This is a mix of about 5 non-movers and 5 that shift around. The absolute zenith as far as I'm concerned, lyrically and musically. Ten perfect songs written by a man who still believed in writing perfect songs. As much as I like a lot of stuff by The Beatles and The Stones, this killed them all. Should be regarded as a classic, probably never will be because they ended up getting briefly popular therefore forever killing them in the eyes of anyone who spends too much time on the internet. Unbelievable lyrics. Anyone who just thinks of Goldfrapp as an Electro-pop band should listen to this immediately. I remember saying in a moment of raw pretension although the phrase 'Felt Mountain' doesn't really mean anything, you'll know exactly what it means when you listen to the record (particularly the title track), but you wont really be able to describe it. Always find it difficult to choose between this and 'Underachievers...' but I suppose this is the masterpiece really. Scottish indie nowadays is primarily boys in plaid being earnest, but this is still what we're best at. Paul Heaton is part of a group of people in my mind along with David Gedge, Robert Wratten and Neil Hannon of 'People who deserve the respect and fame that Morrisey somehow got'. He's also part of another group along with Richard Hawley and James Dean Bradfield of 'Men I'd pay to sit in a pub with'. This has the best album name ever. I really could listen to M Ward singing anything. The word 'timeless' is generally wank, but this is 'timeless'. My vote for 'Most overlooked album of the 00's'. Probably didn't help that it came out in the UK in the same week as the Pet-Shop-Boys-go-Indie horror of 'Hot Fuss'. The scale of this album is unbelievable. Saw her play it in its entirety at the Royal Albert Hall, people were just bursting into tears all over the place. I'd call it 'spiritual' if that wasn't the worst word in the history of fucking words.

This song is everything you need from a Christmas song. Plus the lyrics are actually funny. Oh and anyone who doesn't like Fairytale of New York is absolutely mental.

Haha! It was a reference to a number of questionable comments regarding Homosexuality you made on here. I could find them and quote them if you want but I don't think it's necessary! I don't think you're an actual 'kill' em all' fire and brimstone homophobe, just more of a light 'it's political correctness gone mad' Jim Davidson-esque Homophobe.

Haha, God you're right. Six months away from this site and I've turned into Telecaster_Sam.

This is the nail on the head for me. That particular scene of bands at that time felt really special and I have some of the best memories of my teens from gigs in Lava, Drakes, Lemon Tree etc. As much as everyone who was a part of it will look back with rose-tinted glasses it seemed incredible. Some Ska band from Nottingham would turn up in a minivan at Lava on a Friday night and the place would be absolutely packed to the rafters, crowds of acned kids with sweaty mops going absolutely batshit to a band they'd never heard before. It was brilliant. The thing is that scene didn't 'die' for any other reason than it was such a 'right time, right place' thing. There were three main reasons - 1) Due to the huge popularity of Nu-Metal, Pop-Punk and all their variants, shed loads of teenagers in provincial cities got into 'alternative' music at the same time. 2) The internet was at that perfect stage, most people had it and could instantly find information about local gigs, but most people didn't have the ability to quickly download whole albums etc and there was no YouTube. Plus MySpace hadn't really kicked in so bands main forum for airing music was still gigging. 3) Places like Lava and Drakes etc actually having gigs that teenagers could get into meant all the kids who were hanging around St Nicks could suddenly hang around indoors, watch bands and look longingly at members of the opposite sex. There's definitely still a scene in Aberdeen and I think it probably has more good bands than it's had for ages, PLUS a lot of the bands actually seem to be going out and trying to actually make a proper go of it. I think it would be unhealthy if everyone from that scene was still hanging about in their mid-20's/30's wearing the same clothes watching the same bands. It's best just to keep that time as a great memory and concentrate on all the good stuff going on.

As much as everyone on here who is against Amy Winehouse in whatever shape or form would probably say they dislike tabloid media, all they're doing is recycling it's opinions and amplifying them through various sub-Howard Stern 'shock value' statements. When she was alive, most of the stuff that was written about her was stuff like 'Doesn't Amy look rough, she's missing teeth', 'Mad Amy wanders around in her bra', ' Look at Amy's track-marks, she's back on the Heroin....fucking ROFL'. Now she's dead they'll deny thats the way she was discussed and they'll pretend all that was ever focused on was 'the music maaaan'. It's just a never ending feedback loop of slimy ex-public schoolboy journalists hoovering up coke and fucking teenage girls and saying 'Look at the state of THAT junkie!, it filters down to sweaty young boys in their clammy wank-dens typing pseudo-bile onto the internet for LOLS and everyone involved forgets that what actually happened was a young girl with a Heroin addiction died and everyone got a nice big cheque or a good laugh out of it.

Genuinely pretty gutted about this, I expected the 'hiatus' would end eventually but I guess this puts an end to that. It's also a shame judging by what Blake's said that there seems to be such a messy end to such a great band. The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous are two of the most perfect albums of the decade, lyrically and musically. I saw them on the MA tour and they were stunning, really engaging and intimate yet played like they were playing to a packed stadium instead of a couple of 100 people in a dark, sweaty venue in Scotland. I agree Under the Blacklight was miles from their best and had some really questionable songs on it, but I'd always hoped they'd make one more great melodic Indie-Pop record like TEOAT before it came to an end. Looking forward to the B-Sides/Rarities release though.

Had a listen on Spotify, really enjoyed it. Born in a Different Time is stunning, reminds me of Richard Hawley which is always a good thing in my eyes

I love this albums

Genuinely gutted about Ari Up. It was only 6 months ago I saw The Slits live in Barcelona and she was incredible, 100% energy, bounding about all over the place. Can't believe that the whole time she was that ill with cancer, what a trooper. RIP

I thought it was alright but then I've never been a massive Arcade Fire fan so there was no real potential for disappointment!