Tie You Down, Pretend You're Madonna: Pick Of The Year 1989
[whooshy Lost-style flashback/flashforward noise]
It's the year 2000, and I'm at the imaginatively-titled V2000 festival in Chelmsford with Grizelda. There are plenty of high and low points that spring to mind from those two days, but I'm going to focus on the specific point at which Grizelda and I decided to walk away from Travis' set and find someone less irritating to watch. It was when Fran Healy stopped playing for what felt like several hours to talk about the midlife crisis he was currently experiencing. At age 27. "Piss off, you annoying child," I actually said on the internet at the time. Which is a wee bit embarrassing, really, because I appeared to have forgotten...
[whooshy Lost-style flashback/flashforward noise]
...that in 1989, when I was 25 going on 26, I felt exactly the same way. That January, I started to think that after five years or so in London, I'd swapped the rut I'd got into back in Manchester with an entirely different rut. Something had to be done.
I've mentioned the idea of 1989 being my personal year zero before, around the time when I was trying to flog books to you: among other things, it was the first year I ever attended the Edinburgh Festival and the London Film Festival. Did this rejig of my life have an impact on my Pick Of The Year compilations? Well, looking at the tracks on this one today...
[whooshy Lost-style flashback/flashforward noise]
...the focus seems to have drifted away from indie rock (although that's still the main genre covered) and takes in a few tracks from outside of the usual stamping grounds of the UK and the US. World music was a fairly big thing by '89, and I was willing to experiment within John Peel-defined boundaries. Live, that included going to gigs by people like Real Sounds Of Africa, Epo (a Japanese singer who played the Edinburgh International Festival and then was never heard of again), 3 Mustaphas 3, Les Negresses Vertes and the Gypsy Kings. Okay, that last one was at Wembley Arena and hardly counts as experimentation. But what was I listening to on record? Let's find out.
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