SPANK GOLD: And You Sure As Hell Can't Sing: Pick Of The Year 1994
Let's clarify the chronology a little here. Younger Than The Stones: Pick Of The Year 1993 was recorded some way into 1994: driven not so much by a desire to mark the passing of 1993, as a desire to win an argument I'd had in a pub with Lou. It might have been as late as March, in fact - I believe I hadn't heard one of the tracks on there (Aimee Mann, if you're curious) until it came up on a Sean Hughes radio show in early 1994. This tape, on the other hand, was made at the end of the year, as God intended, and all the other ones since have been made that way.
Lou's always had a theory that these compilations are a reliable indicator of my state of mind at the time I record them, and he suggested to me some time later that this one must have been made during some sort of low patch. Listening to it now, it's certainly a bipolar collection of tunes, with happy poppy things rubbing up hard against the noisy and the miserable. People who were on everyone's list back in 1994 - you'll know them when you see them - sit alongside bands that I heard once on the radio and investigated further out of curiosity. Here's what it all sounds like to me now, anyway.
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