GOODBYE LITTLE JIMMY SCOTT

PLEASE MAKE THE TORTURE STOP

ÇA

SPACE

THE KLF saying : "Yes, this is our idea of a remix."

THE WAIT IS OVER AND OVER

It's great when you care about something so much you freak out, and you know that probably a million other people are feeling exactly the same way right this moment.

DERNIER INVENTAIRE AVANT FIN DU MONDE

If the world ends tonight, I wanna be listening to Dion when it happens.

Or I'll settle for Nick Cave.

ALL NIGHT

MOVING ME

So like I said, JULEE CRUISE hits me where I live, in my home, in my bedroon, where my wife sleeps, where my children come and play with their toys. FLOATING INTO THE NIGHT sounds like a marketing person from Warner Brothers scanned my brain, my heart, and my soul, to create an album tailor-made for my tastes. And o I wrote that every time I play it, when it's over I have to either play it again or sit in silence cos there is nothing else like it. For a while there I had forgotten that she actually has another album, and that it's just as good.

FROM DAWN TILL DUSK

REVISIONNARY #6

Born to run? Candy's Room? Highway Patrolman?
No no no. Springsteen's best song is PHILADELPHIA.And for that matter, so is NEIL YOUNG's.

IN HIGH SCHOOL I WAS SUCH A BRAT

How could I manage to not know this song for twenty years? Thank you my friend AXEL KRYGIER for playing me this amazing-sounding (engineered and mixed by Tchad Blake) psych-cumbia gem.

BIRMINGHAM, THE CITY WITH A SMILE

After flopping ten times with FELT, after the demise of DENIM, LAWRENCE could have called it a day. Instead he came back with GO-KART MOZART, and released his most bizarre album INSTANT WIGWAM AND IGLOO MIXTURE, where he is at his most caustic and his most desperate. An album I've tried to share with friends, but only understood and liked by this fraction of them for whom the best band ever is THE RESIDENTS.

BOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME

Wow.

NEW BEAT MEETS HIP HOP

In 1990, Belgian Abdel Hamid Gharbaoui, better known as BENNY B released VOUS ETES FOU!, which would become the first hip hop hit single in French. Very quickly, more "serious" rappers will follow and they will all, without a single exception, dismiss him as a big joke, like, say, Vanilla Ice. Sure, he was not "street" enough, appeared in many family-oriented TV shows, didn't have a "message", and so on.
However, with 20 years insight, after the first wave of French hip hop has been followed by many acts that were also messageless jokes, we can reassess this song with more indulgence.
I would even go further than that: while the "serious" rappers of the time were all essentially apeing Public Enemy, BENNY B was the only one showing his true colors and repping the sound of young Belgium, since he was basically rapping over NEW BEAT jams.
You be the judge:

Because I enjoy this track so much, I had a little fun and made my own version, using the best bits of the "Wild Mix" and the Acapella, both on the B-side of the 12".
Enjoy VOUS ETES FOUS! (Whistled & Tasted).

L'ITALIE

Italians do it better they say. Well they sure don't do it worse.
Only an Italian band could get away with using that much digital piano, fretless bass, chimes on every bar, reverb on the snare, over the top melody, over the top guitar, over the top everything, and still manage to touch me right in the heart in the end, when "ironic listening" is swept aside.
This is a guilty pleasure I don't even feel guilty about. Cheesy? No way. Italian music should be judged on whole different terms. It is beyond cheesiness.

NEW BEAT MEETS CUMBIA

If you've been reading older posts here, you already know I feel THE MACKENZIE is the best band in NEW BEAT, that Belgian bastard son of Acid-House, born in the late 80s when, by mistake, a DJ played the 12" of FLESH by A SPLIT SECOND at 33 RPM instead of 45.
What I hadn't said is that I perversely play these MacKenzie 12" at 33 RPM so that they play even sloooooower than they already are.
Today I recorded and upped one of them; and I added a cumbia on top for good measure.
THE MACKENZIE - HIGHER IN THE SKY (Whistled & Tasted)

MCMXC

We really wanted to be on the forefront of that ENIGMA revival but goddamn Lou-Reed-lookalike Ben Stiller has two years on us.Though truth be told, he used the original album mix of SADENESS, I'd have chosen the superior B-sided US VIOLENT MIX.

MOVIES ABOUT GLADIATORS

Oh man LESLIE NIELSEN is dead.
That makes him the third star of AIRPLANE!, one of the best movies ever made, to leave us this year, after Peter Graves and Barbara Billingsley.
So now I am concerned about LITTLE ROSSIE HARRIS. Yes, this kid:
Seventeen years later, this kid would become half of the duet responsible for this masterpiece:

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

The 1994 documentary CRUMB was about the famous cartoonist Robert Crumb. But the most interesting part (for me) was the other Crumb, Robert's brother Charles.

FAR AND BEYOND THE UK INDIE SCENE

Yes, in spite of having always been so ridiculously underappreciated, QUICKSPACE did manage to appear on television once (in Japan). And now it's on Youtube. Even though the video has only been watched twenty-two times, one of the Youtube users who commented it got it right: "Quickspace is", indeed, "great band ever".