Dead Kennedys: Rawhide

There's always one blog that gets neglected when I get busy. Sorry about that: I've been pontificating about music over here.

Anyway, Tuesday is nostalgia day; so here's the Dead Kennedys and a bunch of midgets doing Rawhide. A firm favourite of yesteryear (well, sometime in the 80s anyway).

Camper van Beethoven: Take the Skinheads Bowling

"Had a dream - I wanted to lick your knees."

Ah, fine memories. They could release this today and it'd be more popular than it was then.

Fields of the Nephilim: Last Exit for the Lost

Fields of the Nephilim. The goth band from Stevenage. Beloved of adolescents in small market towns across the land. I used to mope about in Lincolnshire and listen to them in my black-painted room. I even went to see them twice, once in Peterborough and once in Cambridge. I was so cool.

These days I wouldn't listen to the Nephs for fun. Though, if it's any consolation to them, I once named a cat after the drummer, Nod, and I still have a sneaking affection for the song above.

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An interlude...

...Happy Christmas

The Cure: Other Voices

The sorts of school I went to used to think they were turning dirty-fingered oiks into respectable young gentlemen with the ability to command. What they were really doing was getting hold of reluctant teenagers and inflicting on them the exact conditions that would make them develop lifelong Cure habits.

I was no exception, and still am not. Here's Robert Smith, Lol Tolhust and the rest of the band playing one of my enduring favourites: Other Voices.

Sonic Youth: Tunic (Song for Karen)

Bearing in mind the some of the sphincter-gazing gothic crap I used to listen to at 16 - bands like Clan of Xymox, Christian Death and (shame, oh shame) Creaming Jesus - it's astonishing that I've dragged any albums from the early 1990s into my present-day iTunes library.

One of the few is Sonic Youth's Goo. I listened to it again and again as I travelled round the south of France in a battered Volkswagen camper van [cool], driven by a friend's parents [not so cool] which also contained my friend, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend [who subsequently ran off with a middle-aged hippy pal of the VW van-owners and was next spotted on page 3 of The Sun after chucking herself, nude, into the river at Oxford - way too cool for me].

Anyway, the Sonic Youth binge was brought to a premature end as the van's big end went, just as the band was singing Tunic (Song for Karen), which contains the entirely appropriate lyric "You aren't never going anywhere".

So, for years, Tunic was a song I always equated with the "Nous sommes en panne" routine and with running in and out of siesta-deserted shops and restaurants in search of change for the telephone (muttering schoolboy rubbish like "Pouvez-vous changez ca [waving 50 franc note] pour cinq pieces de dix francs - s'il-vous plait?").

Still, given the fact that we subsequently had to travel on a train from Marseilles to Calais with bugger all food, and with no access to the other carriages, it's easy enough to remember that this particular song is actually about anorexia - Karen Carpenter's anorexia.

I don't think I knew that at the time, mind you, as I was more hung-up about my hair - whenever I looked in the mirror it only seemed to be backcombed about a quarter as much as it actually was.

Anyway, I found out the real meaning of the song soon enough. And, I'm sure you'll agree once you've listened to it, it's one of those songs that deserves a permanent place in a decent record collection - even if it does fantasise about making friends with Elvis in heaven (though I suppose his cheeseburger supply might come in handy).

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Here's the album: it's a must have.

The Orb: Little Fluffy Clouds

Two things have the power to broaden a teenage boy's musical taste within 24 hours. The first is trying to get into the knickers of a desirable girl who listens to thinly-disguised rubbish. The other is a new-found interest in mind-altering drugs.

I dabbled in both. But whilst my efforts to be desirable and sexy led me to affect a taste for All About Eve and Sinead O'Connor (oholymotherpleaseforgiveme), the enthusiasm I developed for smoking doobies blossomed into an appreciation of dance music, which seemed to do far more interesting things to my head than the supposedly melon-messing Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and similar stonage fodder for geriatrics.

Being 16 years old and short of cash, most of the dance music I amassed was taped from friends or off the radio, with a fair bit also coming from the compilation albums you could get in Woolworths. One was Dance Energy, which had - amongst the dross - some excellent tracks that included Massive Attack's Daydreaming, 808 State's Cubik and - best of all - The KLF's What Time is Love. All stoned people get fascinated by boring and trivial things, and one that appealed to me was watching the woofers on a big pair of speakers pulse and jump to that last track.

I was watching just that in an acquaintance's room when he passed over the joint he was smoking, then stuck on a track he had only just discovered. It was Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb and listening to it was like having your brains strained through a golden mesh and polished with champagne bubbles.

And though it's years since I stopped smoking doobies, I think it still is.

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The best way to get a copy of Little Fluffy Clouds is to buy The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. It's an amazing album.