Records And Albums

Music I Like

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The Molotovs - Wasted On Youth (2026)

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The Molotovs

Derivative? Yes, but the brother and sister duo of Matthew Cartlidge (vocals, guitar) and Issey Cartlidge (bass, vocals), backed by drummer Will Fooks, who comprise the well-connected Molotovs, are disarmingly honest about their influences, citing The Jam (of course), Green Day and sixties mod luminaries The Small Faces and The Who. But for me, The Molotovs are a supercharged 2020s version of the so-called “Mod Revival” of 1979/80, a slightly peculiar movement when a host of young British bands inspired by The Jam and the 1979 movie of The Who epic album Quadrophenia, burst on the post-punk scene playing frantic guitar-based melodic pop that briefly caught the zeitgeist. The mod revivalists shone brightly but soon faded, their appeal ultimately limited by their lack of originality and were eventually outshone by the related but far more innovative and popular, punk/ska mash up of Two Tone.

The Molotovs may meet the same fate but I must say, having first encountered the band on some admittedly not terribly impressive YouTube videos, I have been blown away by their debut album, the wittily titled Wasted On Youth that came out earlier this year. Beautifully produced and played, the tracks have some wonderful hooks, lyrics filled with youthful abandon, and that undefinable swagger that could indeed see them through to that difficult third album. For someone who was a teenager in the late Seventies, these guys provide a great nostalgic buzz, but longer term, I think the group will need to find a more distinctive sound or risk being labelled as little more than a photogenic Jam tribute act. I really hope they do, because they certainly have the talent.

In the meantime if you just want to lose yourself in melodic punk thrash for forty minutes, you could do a lot worse than check out Wasted On Youth.

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Lemon Twigs playlist.

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The Lemon Twigs

My new favourite band.

Blending a classic sixties beat music vibe with power pop, and with due homage paid to The Beatles, The Kinks, The Byrds and the Small Faces, it would be easy to dismiss the Lemon Twigs as little more than a nostalgia act. Whereas it’s true that their 1960s style and sound sensibility is sometimes a little too studied, a closer listen to their back catalogue reveals a range of 1970s influences arguably incorporating the likes of Wings, early Bowie and most strikingly of all, 10cc. However, the resultant whole makes the band unique within whatever the US "indie" scene now consists of, with lyrical content ranging from teen angst (I Just Can't Get Over Losing You) to existential searches for life's meaning (If You And I Are Not Wise), backed by killer melodies and wonderful harmony vocals.

The core of the band, who hail from Hicksville (seriously), Long Island are the brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario. Launching themselves as a duo ten years ago, they are now supplemented by bassist and keyboards player Danny Ayaala and drummer Reza Matin, initially to give more range and depth to the brothers’ live performances, but now possibly to enhance their image as a power pop quartet. With five albums to their name these overnight sensations have been around for some time, demonstrated by the maturity of their material and the technical skill of their delivery. I attach a playlist above which hopefully captures the extraordinary range of styles the Lemon Twigs possess. Their new album, likely to be a major commercial success and due out next month, is eagerly awaited (at least by me).

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Super Bad, K-Tel Compilation - Various Artists (1974)

Such a classic album from my youth. K-Tel is easily derided these days for their instant compilations, truncated tracks and “groove cramming” (which seriously reduced the sound quality), but for an early teenager in the north east of England with little cash, their albums were a godsend - a way to possess the chart music you loved all in one place, by the original artists and affordable for a 14-year old in the early 70s.

However, the real service K-Tel provided to that musically curious teen was its compilations of genres I never usually listened to. Super Bad was one such collection. With the album introduced on TV adverts by the impossibly cool Isaac Hayes, this compilation of the best of Philly, late Motown and proto funk soul was just incredible to my glam-infected ears. The early 1970s are often viewed as a soul wasteland: the glory days of Motown and Stax soul over, and the 4/4 boogie of disco yet to hit its stride. This interregnum is therefore at best patronised and at worst, cordially ignored. But these years boasted some of the sweetest melodies, infectious dance rhythms and pitch perfect vocals you are likely to find in the genre (check out Midnight Train To Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips, Hurt So Good by Millie Jackson, Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield and I’m Doin’ Fine Now by New York City, if you don’t believe me).

Real soul fans at the time looked down on the Super Bad collections as badly taped, hurriedly released, badly packaged and overcrowded pop for the masses while feeling a little embarrassed for genuine stars like Hayes who advertised the albums, but for an English ingenue like I was in 1974, Super Bad opened my eyes and ears to a whole new world…

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Like A Prayer by Dogma (2025)

Now this is a curiosity. I came across this extraordinary slab of gothic musical horror when the band, Dogma, an all female heavy rock band, popped up on my computer feed about artists currently on tour in the U.K. And what a visual and sonic treat this cover of Madonna’s 1987 paen to Roman Catholic angst, Like A Prayer is. To start with the track, it is a highly creditable pop-metal version of the original dance number, replete with crunching guitars, melodramatic vocal and big fat double-bass drum percussion. In truth, this modern take doesn’t depart markedly from the 1980s version in structure, but it does suffuse the tune with a muscular guitar-led power that gives it an interesting sinister edge absent from Madonna’s plea for divine forgiveness. What takes Dogma’s version of Like A Prayer away from simply being a piece of reworked tribute nostalgia into something altogether different is the jaw-dropping accompanying video, featured above.

For sheer over the top wackiness, this mini soap opera has it all: satanic imagery, desecration (literally) of Christ, a black mass and above all the sheer terrifying black metal imagery of the band themselves, a quintet of vamped up sexualised white-faced nuns, simultaneously looking arousing, supernatural and like demented escapees from hell’s own convent, as they run riot in a church, bringing a statue of a black Jesus to life before the lead singer, Lilith, ravishes him on the altar and dispossesses the flailing Son of God of his crown of thorns. Although so camp it hurts, the video still carries with it a degree of genuine menace (especially the voluptuous-yet-horrific appearance of the bassist, Nixe) and, if, like me, you are from a Roman Catholic background, it is rather unsettling (as was Madonna’s original video on which Dogma's is loosely based), for all its technicolor joyful excess.

Dogma themselves are a South American outfit, who have been around since 2021 and through several line-ups (one fan has counted eleven), whose real identities remain largely mysterious, including those of the current membership. Their official names are Lilith (vocals), Lamia (guitar), Nixe (bass), and Abrahel (drums) and in 2024, a second guitarist was added, Rusalka. The band therefore appear to resemble a cast of characters, inhabited by a succession of changing musician actresses. Their music tends to carry a revolt against the Catholic religion theme with the five satanic nuns glorying in debauchery and blasphemy. One could get offended by all this performative shock value, but that would really miss the point: above all Dogma are terrific fun.

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Down In The Tube Station At Midnight by The Jam (1978)

Without doubt the stand out track from the Jam’s 1978 album All Mod Cons (itself a powerful change of direction for the new wave group at their “difficult third album” stage), Down In The Tube Station At Midnight is perhaps as close as Paul Weller got to songwriting perfection with The Jam, and against some pretty tough competition. Not only does this epic boast fantastic production by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, superb playing by bassist Bruce Foxton, the sadly deceased drummer Rick Buckler, and of course Weller himself, but it speaks to a dangerous London at night time, within that most iconic of London settings, the city’s Underground, and a restless, violent urban world where unprovoked violence can reach out and grab the unwary or the naive from out of the shadows at anytime.

So far, so dystopian, but what raises Tube Station above other tales of street fighting men, is both the song’s mundanity and the terror at its heart. The victim of the vicious mugging is ‘on my way home to my wife’, bearing a ‘takeaway curry’, presumably for both of them, before being assailed by the thuggish and terrifying shout of ‘Hey, boy, have you got any money?’ from one of his assailants. Although the gang smell of ‘pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right-wing meetings’, placing them within a criminal fascistic class not unfamiliar to public transport travellers in late 1970s England, the song takes an even darker turn. The victim of the attack may even have been murdered (‘the last thing that I saw’), but what propels the number into gothic horror, is the line referencing the protagonist’s wife: ‘cos they took the keys and she’ll think it’s me’, turning it, frankly, into one of the most frightening songs I’ve heard.

This exercise in songwriting genius gets perhaps its best exposition from the 1980 live performance on display in the YouTube video posted above by JBtheModManchester. The sheer musical talent on display, from Waller’s stuttering vocal, through Foxton’s melodic and driving bass, to Buckler’s superlative drum coda towards the end of the song, reveal a band at their prime, putting down a slice of social, cultural and political punk/mod history that is as relevant today as it was unforgettable in 1978.

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Invisible Confetti by The Guilty Men (2024)

The name of one of my classmates in the Elementary adult French course I have been taking this spring/summer was spookily familiar - one Clive Gregson, whose music with Any Trouble I was actually playing at the time, having been an on and off fan of the group in the 1980s and 1990s. It took a little while to confirm my suspicion that this Clive was that Clive, but he did eventually admit that he was indeed the former new wave band’s front man and later vocalist with folk legend Richard Thompson’s group. He told me he had recently formed a band with his long term collaborator, Neil Cossar (formerly of The Cheetahs), ex-Barclay James Harvest members, Jez Smith and Clive Fletcher and former 10cc drummer, Paul Burgess, all musicians hailing from the north west of England, which they had named The Guilty Men. Through a combination of for old time’s sake and loyalty to a fellow would-be French speaker, I checked out the album they made last year called Invisible Confetti, and I must say, I was impressed.

OK, so the post-punk spiky guitar sound of 1980s new wave that characterised early Any Trouble’s energetic brand of power pop is absent, as is the layered overly ironic soft rock of mid-1970s 10cc, but if you like melodic blues-inflected country rock with a definite northern English feel, you won’t be disappointed, and Gregson’s voice is as affecting and subtle as it was at the height of his fame (particularly on Where Love Lived and Lightning On The Water). I should also mention the album’s stand out track, Susan’s Back Drinking, possibly one of the saddest and most guilt-infused country ballads I’ve heard.

Probably the most attractive aspect of The Guilty Men’s music however, is that you just know you are listening to first class musicians, who write great tunes with thoughtful lyrics - and, in the final analysis, are knocking out this music at the end of their careers because they enjoy it. They may be playing in their comfort zone, but their fans are probably listening in theirs: I know I am.

Keep on rocking, Clive - you and your mates…

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(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang by Heaven 17 (1981)

Recent events in the United States, particularly the sight of marines on the streets of Los Angeles to enforce Donald Trump’s draconian slew of migrant deportations in the teeth of huge civil protest and the horrific murders of a Democrat state politician and her husband in Minnesota, brought to my mind the tremendous track by early 1980s synth-pop band Heaven 17, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang. The group, one of an insurgent wave of serious outfits who had dropped post-punk guitar sound for synthesiser-led tunes and which incorporated the Human League, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yazoo, released this postmodern disco anthem as a protest against what the songwriters (Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware) saw as an incipient fascism on the rise in America driven by the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. By labelling Reagan as ‘fascist god in motion’, Heaven 17 saw the track, their debut single, banned by the BBC and greeted with a general reluctance to play it by other British radio media. Despite this, Fascist Groove Thang still made no 45 in the U.K. singles chart.

The track also bestowed on the band an aura of political cool that propelled the resultant album, the critically-acclaimed Penthouse and Pavement to much greater chart success than the single later in 1981. This success allowed Heaven 17 to become a leading light in the so-called “alternative dance” music of the early 80s which saw hip British musicians embrace American black dance vibes and re-invent them for a U.K. audience who hated Thatcher but who had tired of the po-faced politics-on-your-sleeve of punk. Given that where the US leads, sadly much of the western world follows, and with Reform U.K. mixing its toxic brew of divisive rhetoric and easy populist lies, Fascist Groove Thang has never felt more prescient or relevant.

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A track I can relate to!

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Time by David Bowie

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Time by David Bowie/ Holy Holy (1973)

I went to see Holy Holy at the weekend, a band rather unfairly termed on Wikipedia a ‘David Bowie tribute band’. To be fair to this group, they are a little more than that. Their core consists of Tony Visconti, David Bowie’s long-term collaborator, friend and producer (and bass player on The Man Who Sold The World album); Heaven 17 vocalist Glenn Gregory, and the original drummer from Bowie’s iconic backing band, The Spiders From Mars, Mick “Woody” Woodmansey. These guys are as much Bowie fanboys as the audience and what, at times, they lacked in finesse, they made up for in passion, soul and a palpable love for the music of the maestro’s 1970s heyday.

One of their best versions of the many Bowie tracks they covered when I saw them was the burlesque anthem Time, from the Aladdin Sane album. This is a song that has increasingly grown on me over the years. It can be fairly accused of being overwrought, and Bowie’s performance as melodramatic, but its sweeping melody and Mick Ronson’s superlative guitar playing, to my mind make Time one of Aladdin Sane’s stand-out tracks (out of in truth many on that album). But what raises this track to being one of Bowie’s best offerings is the lyrical content towards the end of the song, which shifts it away from ruminations on the inexorable passage of time towards one of the most affecting and heartbreaking set of break-up lyrics I’ve heard. The passage is worth replicating in full:-

Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful,

I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs,

But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you dreamless,

The door to dreams was closed, your park was real but dreamless,

Perhaps you’re smiling now, smiling through this darkness,

But all I have to give is guilt for dreaming…

This is Bowie at his most poetic, the lyrics and his vocals aching with regret, fondness and guilt at the end of his doomed affair. Gregory’s singing and the band’s playing at the concert more than did justice to this epic and the intensity of the delivery brought prickles to the nape of my neck. The experience reminded me of the beauty of Aladdin Sane but most of all brought home the emotional power of Time itself.