Singles Night

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So here I am after a day spent renovating/decorating our bathroom – a whole morning bleaching/cleaning down all the tiles and grouting and an afternoon/early evening redoing all the gloss – so basically fume city all day.  I hate bleach, the way it looks, the way it smells and what it can do scares me – I should have had the nous to save my review of Nirvana Bleach until today.  Ah well.

Anyhow several glasses of good red wine later, I find myself sitting here after family have shuffled off to bed, happily spinning some singles and feeling tipsy and content*.  You’ll be shocked to know (not) that I used to buy loads of singles, sometimes from bands I knew, loved and collected, other times just to try out bands I’d heard of, quite often I’d pick up anything with swearing in the title** and a lot of the time, pretty much at random if they happened to catch my eye; after all 7″ s were cheap enough.  Out of the very latter, there’s a few bands I got into and bought other singles/LPs from – the whole point of singles as far as record companies were concerned, but there again there are quite a few interesting ones I’ve got where I really liked the single, but just never took it any further.  Bit of a one night stand you might say.

So here are a couple of those, I’ve resisted the urge to Google – after all if I haven’t by now, why bother? it doesn’t do to spy on your exes.

One I listen to a lot because it’s on my ‘Jog, piggy! Jog!’ exercise playlist is, We Rock Like Girls Don’t I Just Want To Stick My Head In The Bass Drum.  A great title from a really well-named band.  They’re an all female outfit and I have a very, very vague recollection that they were from Scotland, but that’s it.  I purchased this sucker on 21 April 2005 and was just blown away straight away.  Let’s state the sodding obvious, this rocks! They have an excellent crunching guitar sound and there’s a great pop tune hidden away in all the noise, excellently produced by Mark Freegard.  It’s a great hymn to the visceral power of volume, noise and, umm, volume again – oh and certain other rudeness.

I just wanna stick my head in the bass drum

I just wanna feel it thumping and then some

I just wanna kiss you hard until you come

Not terribly Jane Austen is it?

Next up was one I sought out because it was a pop punk classic, I snagged a pretty ropey copy of The Leyton Buzzards Saturday Night Beneath The Plastic Palm Trees, a mere 18 years after it came out in August 2007.  As the brilliant cover suggests it’s a wry look at your first few forays into crappy nightclubs and the rituals and dangers surrounding it all.  The music is a slightly reggae-tinted punk-pop and this is one of those perfect punk single snapshots^ of life, the title says it all really.  I love the line about bouncers,

I rather like the video, reminds me somewhat of the Guns ‘n Roses Use Your Illusion trilogy, except filmed on a bit of a tighter budget, at a car boot sale.

There’s loads of great stuff hidden away among my singles, I need to get around to counting and cataloguing them properly some day.  I am particularly taken by these one-shot affairs though, they’re just little capsules of excellence entirely unrelated to anything else in my universe and my universe is all the better for it.

400 Down (still).

*probably the killer combination of fumes and Rioja.

**actually a pretty damn accurate way of finding new stuff I liked.

^like The Cortinas Fascist Dictator – possibly my fave punk single ever.