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Speaker 2another category then. Next generation rock and metal, I've called this category. Because, you know, metal is beginning to fractalize, or heavy rock, is really beginning to fractalize off into all sorts of different sub-genres. You know, there are so many sub-genres of metal these days, it's almost impossible to keep track of all of the different ones there are. And it's the beginning of it, I think, around this time. Because we have. In fact, I'll tell you why. In fact, I'll just rattle off the five that we've got in the list here. And this is by no means a complete list of all the metal albums released this year. But in a way, each of these five records represent a different aspect of how heavy rock and metal has fractalized in this particular time. Hysteria Def Leppard, the big American arena rock sound. Big production, big harmonies. Scum by Napalm Death, the first Napalm Death album, which kind of kickstarts the whole notion of grindcore music. Appetite for Destruction. which is almost a return to the old-fashioned rock and roll approach to heavy rock. But definitely with a very new 80s kind of sheen to it. You know, the old-fashioned rock star in a way. Electric by The Cult, which is a Rick Rubin-produced, very stripped-back, almost a pastiche of ACDC in a way. But with a very up-to-date 80s production. And then the last one I've got on the list is Under the Sign of a Black Mark by Bathory, which is seen as very much. precursor to the whole black metal scene that came out of Scandinavia at the time. Bathory being a Swedish band. This was their third album. It was very influential on the whole black metal genre to come. So then you've got five very, very different albums that all notionally are under this broad umbrella of heavy rock, heavy metal. But until now, heavy rock and heavy metal, you haven't had this incredible range. Everything sounded like a basically. transcendent of Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin or a combination of the two or Deep Purple. And suddenly, I mean, you could argue that Napalm Death, Scum, has got as much to do with experimental avant-garde noise music as it has to do with heavy rock and metal. Similarly with the Bathory record. Whereas Guns N' Roses seems like a very traditional kind of idea of what a heavy rock band should be. I mean, they were a phenomenon. This album still, I think, is in the top 50 appetite for destruction after the war. After all these years, you know. Any of these bands appealed to you at all, Tim?
Speaker 3No. Obviously, I've heard probably all of them on and off in some ways. It's just not my music, really. But I totally accept that. I think that 87 was a really healthy and fertile year for rock and heavy rock. And you can argue that bands like The Mission kind of touch on it. As I was saying, I think that the influence of Led Zeppelin was writ large this year. I mean, I've got a lot of time for Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin, there's so much more than a hard rock band, you know. It's folk, it's progressive, it's experimental, it's roots. It's all sorts of things. Plus, they are just such an amazing organic machine, live. And it's flexible. They've got the flexibility of a jazz band. Like a lot of those great, I suppose, you know, the trios, Cream. And then also, when you're getting into Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, they've almost got the flexibility of great jazz bands. The rock bands are like. Early Black Sabbath. People forget, you know, you listen to Paranoid, you listen to Black Sabbath, the album. They were always experimental, but they're a really quite loose band. Okay, there is one band
Speaker 2on this list that you can say, with the Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses. But this is a record that's got Welcome to the Jungle and Sweet Child O' Mine on it. You know, both very traditionally classy rock and rock.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, both still absolute classics.
Speaker 2Yeah. And they use Synthesizer on some tracks. I know because I remixed this album into Atmos. It's never going to come out, unfortunately. There's a lot going on. It's very aware of a lot of different things, all perhaps things from the previous decade. But still, there is a lot going on in the music, and it is quite eclectic, and it is quite diverse.
Speaker 3I think they never really. You know, I can see they're good. And obviously, those two tracks are enduring. You know, they're still taught in guitar schools all over the world. I think the whole record is eclectic.
Speaker 2The whole record is eclectic. It's one of those records where every track seems like it could have been a massive, massive single, massive song.
Speaker 3For me, I suppose, I guess they're in my Rolling Stones category, although there are some Stones albums and tracks I really quite like. It's just, there's a certain kind of showboating quality. It's very showboating. It's traditional rock star. It's posturing. It doesn't appeal to me. There's a lot of posturing. I suppose that's where I'm lost. But I can totally see why people love them and why they're lauded.
Speaker 2They ticked all the boxes for very quickly becoming one of. I mean, they literally, with this album, almost overnight. Actually, that's not fair. It took a while for the album to really, you know, catch fire. But once it did, they pretty much overnight became part of that rock royalty hierarchy in a way that very few bands have pulled off over the years. I think their masterpiece, personally, is Use Your Illusion, the next record, which was two double albums released on the same day. Just amazingly experimental in terms of being a rock and roll band. Amazingly experimental and amazingly diverse. But Appetite for Destruction is a great pop record at the end of the day. Every song is a great song. Every song is memorable. You can imagine any of these songs becoming staples on rock radio. And in fact, that's pretty much what did happen.
Speaker 3And Hysteria as well.
Speaker 2And Hysteria too. Yes, that's true. Yes. In a way that you can't say about Scum by Napalm Death. The one thing I love about Scum, the whole thing about Scum. Scum is kind of like the birth of what we now call grindcore music. Scum has the infamous track, You Suffer, on it, which lasts for one second, which was released on a double A-side single, I think, with another song by a band. I think it's. Electro Hippies or Anal Cunt, which also lasts for one second. So it's a double A-side with two one-second songs on it. What could be more performance art than that?
Speaker 3That is almost throbbing gristle.
Speaker 2Exactly. Let's move on to. Well, this is just something I think we mentioned in passing. This is a category you've come up with, Tim. The Summer of Love Returned. Oh, yeah. There's a little bit of a resurgence in psychedelia, this year, isn't there? In fact, we mentioned this when we talked about Butthole Surfers. There's definitely an influence of psychedelia. But there was actually things that are even more wearing that influence on their sleeves. Obviously, now we have the second Dukes of Stratosphere album, Sonic Sunspot, from this year, which, those of you who don't know, was XTC pretending to be a lost 60s psychedelic band. But there were also bands that were doing it in a much less tongue-in-cheek way. Spaceman 3, completely besotted by the. Well, not only psychedelic music, there's a lot of Velvet Underground in them as well. It's a bit more. But definitely taking on board that kind of whole drug rock thing. And also the Bevis Frond, In a Marshland. Was that the first album of Bevis Frond this year?
Speaker 3I honestly don't know. I was never that familiar with them. But I think this kind of adoration of the Summer of Love was coming back. There was a sense of 60s imagery, 60s sounds. It was funny because although it was the 10th summer, you know, seemingly summer, since punk in some ways, the Summer of Love was slightly more celebrated in 87. There was more a sense of incense and long hair rather than.
Speaker 2Is it perhaps a yearning back? You know, things have come around. So there's kind of a yearning. Kids are growing up hearing these great records from the 60s and 70s. So thinking to themselves, why isn't music like this now? You know, and forming bands that kind of mine that era.
Speaker 3It's an attractive era. And, you know, you find it in all sorts of times because obviously, even the late 70s, early 80s, to a certain extent, the Liverpool scene, we've said this before, that the Liverpool post-punk bands in some ways seemed as influenced by early Floyd and early Doors. And the Seeds, 13th Floor Elevators. Yeah, yeah. There was always that quality coming up through underground music. I don't think it had ever gone, but it sort of rose to the surface more as the decade wore on.
Speaker 2Well, indeed. And right at the end of the decade, we have the massive, the Manchester, the explosion of Manchester. Bands like Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, very clearly indebted to that kind of psychedelic music, summer of love. But actually, certainly in the case of Happy Mondays anyway, twisting it into something a little bit more contemporary, a little bit more, a bit fresher. Also absorbing DJ culture and dance culture and electronic music to create this new era of psychedelia. And interesting, because our next category is indeed Manchester. Some very important Manchester records. The first Happy Mondays record was this year. Yeah. They've yet to find their sound, I guess, but it's the debut album of Happy Mondays. The most important record to me, well, the two important records to me came out of Manchester this year. The final Smiths album, which I think is my favourite Smiths album. There's something, certainly in the musical forces employed, there's something much more expansive about this record. Johnny Marr is using more, keyboards, The arrangements with the help of Stephen Street, the producer, have really been fleshed out. And Morrissey sounds somehow lighter, more melodic. It's a shame in a way that this was their final album. There's also a sense that the, you know, there's two songs that I think people who hate the Smiths or have this idea of the Smiths always pick on as being somehow representative of the Smiths and this miserablism. One of them is Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. And the other one is Girlfriend in a Coma, which is on this album. But they're completely missing, of course, the humour, aren't they?
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, they're both very funny in their own ways.
Speaker 2Very funny and deliberately so, yeah.
Speaker 3Well, this is an album, I mean, you know, the Smiths did stretch out and obviously their B-sides were always exceptional. But they had, per each album, quite a uniform sound. Every album worked within quite a restricted set of parameters and obviously to great effect. And I like all of the albums they made. Probably the debut, although it does have a couple of my favourite ever Smiths pieces, that's the one which perhaps is the most samey, the one that I don't play as much really.
Speaker 2The production is quite rough on the album. It's quite hard to listen to, yeah. Great songs. Yes. The Peel versions are better generally.
Speaker 3And the Hat Full of Hollow that followed, which contained the Peel, some Peel sessions. Yeah, it just didn't seem to have a variety of tonality, that album. But yeah, everything they did, I adored. But this one, it was the band. Investigating everything. They were all over the place. And in this case, it worked. It actually still sounded coherent, partly because of the discipline of the songs, partly because of Morrissey's voice. It didn't, to me, seem particularly excessive or flabby. I think over the years, even more than The Queen is Dead or Meters of Murder, it's the one that I come back to because of the variety of textures and sometimes, I think, because of the strangeness of some of the arrangements and, you know, the sheer symphonic emotionalism of tracks like, you know, Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me. Death of a Disco Dancer, I think.
Speaker 2I think some of Morrissey's prettiest melodies, you know, I think of things like Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, I Won't Share You, Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me. Just some beautifully memorable melodies. And a slightly lighter sense. The music and the lyrics have a slightly lighter sense to them, more accessible, and maybe that's what some Smiths fans didn't like because I think at the time it was seen as a bit of a step down from The Queen Is Dead. I love The Queen Is Dead, but I think, like you, I would probably be more likely to reach for this album and listen to it from beginning to end than I would any of the other Smiths. With the possible exception of the compilations, which in many ways are their best records.
Speaker 3I mean, I think it's, as you've said, on one level it's lighter, but on another level, it sort of challenges you because, you know, Death of a Disco Dancer goes off into quite dissonant territory in a way the band never did. And that has an aspect of Summer of Love Beatles. There's almost a psychedelic sensibility in the production at the end of that piece. I mean, and it ties in with this, as we were saying before, about 1987 representing a certain melancholy, a certain darkness. Death of a Disco Dancer taps into that and then ends. You're almost in a kind of.
Speaker 2And Girlfriend in a Coma, obviously. Yeah. I mean, although it's a very light, fluffy pop song, lyrically, it's pretty dark, obviously. Yeah. The other album from Manchester this year that I really love, and technically it's not really an album, it's a compilation, but for me, this is their best record, which is New Order's Substance 1987, which is an album. It's a beautifully realised compilation. It's obviously a compilation that's had a lot of thought put into it. And it has a new song on it, True Faith, which is a great, great new song. It's a collection of all. all 12 of New Order's singles up until that moment in their extended 12-inch form. And I love it. I mean, Blue Monday for me is one of the greatest singles of all time, but there are so many great New Order singles during this. Everything's gone green, you know, Confusion, Shellshock, they're all here. And in a way that I don't necessarily enjoy the albums all the way through somehow, the actual official albums, with the possible exception of their first album, which I think we did discuss.
Speaker 3It's Ceremony, isn't it?
Speaker 2Movement, yeah. Oh, Movement. Ceremony was the single from the same year. This for me feels like a really satisfying album.
Speaker 3Yes, I know what you mean. And yeah, I think we said before, the Movement is possibly our favourite New Order album. I mean, it's the logical follow-on from Geordie Visions closer. But I agree with you that in some ways, this is the most consistent album. It's all strong.
Speaker 2They were a great singles band. Yes, they were. They were. And then another Manchester, another favourite on our show, the Jurity Column, Vinnie Riley released his album, The Guitar and Other Machines, also produced by Stephen Street, who produced the Smiths album this year. And I think for that reason, it's probably the most, sonically, the most impressive album, the Jurity Column release. But it's far from my favourite. I think it's a good rate.
Speaker 3I think he betters it with the next Stephen Street produced album, Vinnie Riley. And of course, the connection between the Smiths and Vinnie Riley then yields Vinnie Riley as the guitarist on Morrissey's debut solo album. And he does an excellent job. It's a really good album, but it comes between, you know, what I think is a real highlight, Vinnie Riley. And I think, you know, you had Without Mercy not that long beforehand as well. I think that each of their albums had a very distinct identity. The problem with Guitar and Other Machines is it's a Jurity Column album. Well, a bit of an error there, Tim. The previous album was so. No, I was not saying that. I'm saying it came slightly earlier.
Speaker 2Ah, you were saying. No, you were saying it came between Without Mercy and Vinnie Riley and it actually came between. You misunderstand. I don't understand.
Speaker 3Without Mercy was pushed and it was on Factory Records.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, Circuses and Bread was released on Factory Benelux because Tony Wilson didn't want to release it on Factory in the UK. That's why. Yeah, but that's not a reason. Bowie, quiet. So Bowie the dog's just come in. He wants to comment on Jurity Column. Actually, no, Bowie. What's the album before the Guitar and Other Machines? Is it Without Mercy? Or is it Circuses and Bread? What do you mean you don't know? I think you're being pedantic. Of course I'm being pedantic. What would you expect? Seriously, what do you expect? I don't expect pedantry from you. You don't expect me to be pedantic. On the Album Years podcast, you don't expect pedantry. I don't expect pedantry. Seriously? Right, let's quickly dispatch. Yeah. Not because these are not records that deserve to be talked about, but let's quickly dispatch Minimalism and ECM, The Chairman Dancers, John Adams. Yeah. All those born with, Wings, Jan Garbarek, Akhnaten and Dance Pieces by Philip Glass. Do You Be by Meredith Monk, Arbos by Arvo Pett, Cloud, Bowie Quiet. It's too late. We finished the Jurity Column discussion. Cloud About Mercury by David Torn. I'm going to guess you would like to talk about the Meredith Monk album.
Speaker 3Not necessarily. I owned. Bowie wants to talk about it. That's true. Do you think I'm wrong there? I owned most of those and most of those I liked. I think Dan's pieces, by Philip Glass, you know, the problem at this stage is there weren't a lot of Philip Glass recordings released. I wasn't quite as keen on his gargantuan operas.
Speaker 2I'm not a fan of opera anyway. I'm not a fan of the operatic style of singing. So Philip Glass doing what Philip Glass does with opera singers over the top is never going to be my preferred way to hear. Well, also the orchestrations
Speaker 3became mammoth during that time as well. His whole, the sound of his, his music changed. He was still making, that said, you know, intimate piano music and he was still doing some great film soundtracks. And as I said, you know, out of those, never really liked Hack Norton, really liked Dan's pieces. Cloud of Mercury was a kind of interesting ECM release because David Torn, I suppose, is one of those artists on ECM who sort of slightly tore it apart. He's a slightly grittier, messier player and he was using Bill Bruford and Tony Levin as his rhythm set section. What band were they in, Tim? I'm not sure. It's a 1970s band. Drinks at the Ready Fund. Queen? It's coming up. It's coming up. Wait a minute. They worked with a really good guitarist. Wasn't Tony Iommi. Wasn't Tony Iommi. Okay. Robert Fripp. King Crimson. Okay.
Speaker 2So, I mean, I thought, I'm surprised because I thought you were going to talk about D.U.B. because I know you were a big Meredith, I mean, remember?
Speaker 3Yeah, it was a good, no, it's a good album. Great cover. There isn't really that much to say about it. We discussed Meredith Monk on a previous show and I can't kind of find any other words to describe what she does in some ways. You know, this was
Speaker 2somewhere between a weird kind of performance art, a performance artist. And minimalism. And minimalism. But it's all based around the voice, isn't it? That's the thing with Meredith Monk. Yes. Everything is based around using the voice but not using the voice to sing always. Sometimes using the voice in very percussive ways and textural ways. Yes. She was all about exploring the possibilities of the voice in the context of kind of theatrical.
Speaker 3Weirdly enough, you could see how she might have crossed Jane Sibri's radar with some of her rhythms and some of her vocal manners. And so that's another thing you can throw into the Jane Sibri mix, really.
Speaker 2And Arvo Pär, this is the second album he's released on ECM. Amazing record, Arvos. I don't know what more we can say about Arvo Pär. We've kind of covered him on the show before, haven't we? Let's, the last two categories on the list, Tim, the future part one and the future part two. And I've named them these things because there is a sense of what is about to come and about to have massive massive influence on the whole path of music to come the future part one is kind of the bands that anticipate grunge and grunge is really i think the last somebody can always make an argument for this not being the case but i think of grunge as the last big revolution in guitar music as we sit here in 2023 the last big revolution in grunge music came at the dawn of the 90s nirvana soundgarden smashing pumpkins new metal came later brit pop came later i know later i know but i think for me in terms of the way actually shaping not just music but cinema fashion all of the things that rock music used to be able to do have a big influence on lifestyle all those things grunge was really the last time that i think of grunge as the last big revolution in grunge music came at the dawn of the 90s that rock music felt like it had the power to do that and in 1987 we have some real future echoes of of grunge to come and in fact arguably the band that really are responsible for grunge pixies yeah released their first well it was a mini album come on pilgrim on 4 ad this year and it's all there isn't it everything we come to think of as grunge music is there in pixies the quiet loud quiet loud thing i mean surely that's that's a pixies trademark isn't it um and and so in many ways they don't get their get their credit they don't get their due do they for for no i mean i was
Speaker 3about to say because maybe there's something slightly quirkier about them obviously they predate it but then smashing pumpkins could be pretty quirky and they managed in some ways to black francis
Speaker 2wasn't as pretty as kurt cabane was it let's face it that is true you know and sometimes little things like that do matter you know in terms of in terms of being embraced by the
Speaker 3pop i mean i saw the pixies on their first uk tour and they were phenomenal live and i'd gone there to see throwing muses and throwing muses were good and throwing muses at that time you know had a slightly more kind of arty almost indie talking heads poetic quality but i gotta say the pixies would have blown anyone out of the water you know i've never been necessarily a great fan of the albums they've made i think they're good and i like some of them weirdly i quite like trump lamond which is the one people didn't like but um they were staggeringly good live
Speaker 2i think they are a band that have cast such a shadow over rock music and in the same way that perhaps bands like velvet underground and can have been so influential without ever necessarily being massively commercially successful themselves pixies would be one of those bands they're almost like a musician's
Speaker 3musician and they had an immediate impact really because if you think of you know we're talking here as a musician's musician david bowie was one of the people who discovered velvet underground or at least he was given some of that underground material and started to champion them in the press and his own music and actually he was one of the people who championed the pixies and of course formed tin machine partly i think as a result of
Speaker 2that yeah i believe that's true yeah also this year we have uh dinosaur junior you're living all over me sonic youth sister fantastic record i mean sonic youth sister is a great record i mean sonic youth sister is a fantastic record i mean sonic youth sister is a fantastic record i mean sonic youth always had a more garagey new york kind of aesthetic to them but definitely they were i think they were part of the fabric of what grunge became big black songs about fucking an early steve albini project steve albini would become one of the key figures in grunge music producing in utero for nirvana uh but also albums later for people like pj harvey husker do would they fit into
Speaker 3that or not husker do would i don't
Speaker 2know if they made an album this year but they definitely bob old and husker do would fit into that too yeah and the second part of the future is wow we got two albums released this year that you probably would have to say on all of the albums on this list have had the longest significant impact on rick astley not rick astley i think this is game over in terms of what's the most long-term influential records public enemy yeah yo bum rush the show and paid in full by eric b and rakim hip-hop records and wow what an impact hip-hop has had and continues to have on contemporary pop music and here we have i mean you know obviously hip-hop has been twisted into lots of different shapes more commercial less commercial this is really the beginnings of hip-hop as we know it um are you a fan tim public enemy yeah the first hip-hop you know the first public enemy record um and arguably public enemy the most important of all the early hip-hop bands yeah i mean obviously i'm
Speaker 3thinking back to off the 70s things like last poets that get credited as being kind of birth gil scott heron and so on but they're not hip-hop bands i mean we're talking early grandmaster flash you
Speaker 2know yeah which is sort of commonly seen as the first sort of rap crossover rap single but here's hip-hop pretty much as we know it today this is the debut public enemy record and it's it's interesting because these records are happening very much an underground level at the time aren't they
Speaker 3they're still getting published i mean i remember the enemy were picking up on a lot of this and um and melody maker did as well so it was interesting seeing them in this era of goth in this era of smiths public enemy are still my favorite bands in the genre partly because they're almost like the black sabbath they're a blueprint for a certain type of music but there's something really nasty and dirty and hard-hitting about their music as well but it's i suppose ties in with the swans absolutely
Speaker 2yeah but i mean it's very literate as well isn't it i mean okay there's a fair amount of you know politically incorrect lyrics in here but it's very smart it's very canny it's very wordy it's very you know in some ways it's very intellectual and there's a lot to talk about
Speaker 3here i can already hear that open university program on it you know it's a bit like with dylan's because i think they kind of did have in that culture almost that kind of impact of a dylan as dylan's being the poet of the generation and very much so i mean this album wasn't particularly
Speaker 2successful at the time i'm looking at the wikipedia page now it got to number 125 on the u.s billboard 200 uh and and that's the only place it charted in the world apparently and yet it reverberates doesn't it through the years i mean 30 35 years 36 years ago this album came out and it's still i would say pretty much seen as year zero for what we think of as modern contemporary hip-hop music there's a sense that things haven't moved obviously they have moved on but there are certain elements of what public enemy were doing in 1987 that are still central to what hip-hop music is to this day and one that almost flew under the radar at the time
Speaker 3i think that as i said i think there were debates especially in the british music press and i think the enemy certainly some of their journalists championed you're
Speaker 2absolutely right it was named as the best album of 1987 buddy i stand corrected yeah so enemy pretty quick onto the bandwagon named it as the best album of 1987 now i'm guessing that probably for most of the previous 10 years it would have been things like the smiths and the cocteau twins getting the best album of the year in the enemy so this is a very very big shift uh isn't it towards hip-hop culture so this is a big moment isn't it 1987 i think it was and
Speaker 3i think that it caused some dissent amongst the journalists and obviously by the early 90s there was a different kind of momentum creatively after grunge britpop and enemy in a sense lived and died on britpop in the end because it became so associated with that culture that by the early 2000s it partly technology partly people getting out of the habit of buying partly demographics but it suddenly seemed out of sorts with anything that was happening and not able to catch up so so there we go
Speaker 21987 fascinating year really as i say these these future echoes for grunge and hip-hop particularly seem in some ways to be the most significant developments in the year but there was a lot of interesting things going on as we've discussed you know in goth and electronic music singer songwriter what would be your pick of the year tim if you if you could pick uh an album i think the the influential category is already taken care of unless you disagree with
Speaker 3me i know i think public enemy has to be the influential yeah album of choice and in terms of personal album of choice couldn't be further away from the public enemy but probably secrets of the beehive okay i'm
Speaker 2just looking at the list now i think slabs album dissension is a very big record for me i might go with that one i might go i'm seeing if there's anything it's going to challenge you here i love the smith's record strange race yeah i mean strange
Speaker 3ways is pretty close i know that this is not a rated smith's album but you know it's in my top three of this year possibly and i also love
Speaker 2two sprawling double albums from this year print the prince album the cure album ah
Speaker 3that's one album we didn't really properly discuss because i always think that um kiss me kiss me kiss me is their physical graffiti in terms of the ground it covers and not only does it have why can't i be you that vibrant joyous single it also has some of their gorgeous pieces of music on this record um so i've always liked it as a cure album and as a sprawling double i think it works quite I love it.
Speaker 2I much prefer it to Disintegration, which is obviously a much higher rated record. Disintegration is very kind of samey to me all the way through.
Speaker 3I think Disintegration suffers primarily because it's a CD age album. If Disintegration were 40 minutes long, it's up there with Faith, 17 Seconds, Pornography.
Speaker 2See, I don't think it would be for me, even in that case, because there's something about the late 80s production that rubs me slightly up the wrong way with Disintegration. I love that kind of parched, dry, claustrophobic sound of Faith, Pornography, 17 Seconds. Disintegration has this big stadium rock production. I'm not that fond of it. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, on the other hand, I love it. And as you kind of pointed out, it's very diverse, very eclectic, it's very playful in places, but it's also got some quite nihilistic moments as well. The title track, you know, The Kiss, that opens the record. You know, it's a very brave way to open a record, I think. Seven minute sort of like squall of guitar noise.
Speaker 3Yeah. A few of their albums were kind of flirting with the extremities of goth noise, playful pop, and these kind of nihilistic ballads, you know, head on the door to an extent. And obviously the kind of the top, Love Cat Sierra, had that. But I think this was the most successful distillation of almost every Cure identity.
Speaker 2And a couple of new ones too.
Speaker 3Yeah. I mean, I really like, I mean, I still, I liked it a lot at the time. Really like it now.
Speaker 2Yeah. Great lyrics as well. That song, How Beautiful You Are. It's pretty dark. Yeah. And also Just Like Heaven is one of their most famous songs is on this record. It's a great single. Yeah. So I'm going to go for a couple of sprawling, I'm going to be a cheat here and pick three or four. A couple of sprawling doubles, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by The Cure, Sign of the Times by Prince, The Slab record. And what was the other one I picked a minute ago, which I've now. Oh, The Smiths. The Smiths record. Yeah. Great. Okay. Well, that's 1987 wrapped up. We will be back with something else another year at some point. We haven't decided what we're going to do next. Maybe we should do something else from the 2000s, Tim. We did try one, didn't we?
Speaker 3We've tried at least one.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. But we haven't revisited the 21st century. Maybe we should do that. It's quite scary. Well, it's a bit scary. I think it's a bit scarier because obviously in the 21st century seems a kind of proliferation of music generally. There's more music being made than in the 20th century. But also there's less of it that we're kind of familiar with, I suppose. Whereas with a couple of exceptions, we kind of are listening to everything in 1987. Yeah. And we get to the 21st century and there's a lot of music I just don't have any interest in and I don't listen to and I couldn't tell you anything about. But let's maybe try as an experiment and see what happens.
Speaker 3Let's go for it. We could even suggest that people suggest a year to us.
Speaker 2Yeah. That might be a good idea. Let's pick a year and see what people, you know, see what other people say they were listening to in that year. Yeah. And then we can go and listen to it. Thank you very much for listening. As always, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please go and leave us a good review or don't, whatever you want. And we'll see you again soon. But for now, goodbye from me and goodbye from Tim.
Speaker 4Bye bye. Bye bye.
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