These were the top ten singles on the chart for stowaways, an amazing fourteen years ago this week!
Backlash aside, I always feel as though we should try and stir up a bit of excitement for this weekend’s Record Store Day, as we did in previous years. Here are some of the releases that caught my eye…
Good luck trying to find any of those. More information for the US here, the UK here, Germany here, and various other countries here.
We’ve covered Erlend Øye‘s latter career already, but when he started out he was merely a member of a rather good acoustic duo, Kings of Convenience.
They managed a number of minor UK hits, with Failure, Toxic Girl, and I’d Rather Dance with You, but they’re definitely an album band.
Start at the beginning with the brilliant Quiet is the New Loud (2001). If you never buy anything else, you do at least have a great chillout album.
Follow up the debut with its companion remix album Versus (also 2001) for a very different perspective on many of the same tracks. That leaves the second and third albums Riot on an Empty Street (2004) and Declaration of Dependence (2009), neither of which quite has the charm of the first, but both have some great moments.
Any of the singles. Also, if you weren’t too sure about the second album, you might want to give the third one a miss – each one is marginally less memorable than its predecessor.
Velferd‘s free 2013 remix of unreleased Rule My World is great, if you can still find it floating around anywhere.
It’s always a pleasure to be able to hide the odd nine-minute gem in the middle of a radio show, such as the brilliant Virus Mix of Everything But The Girl‘s Lullaby of Clubland. Surprisingly, the webcam shows me looking relaxed in the extreme.
Broadcast on LSR FM, online only. Artist of the week: Massive Attack.
Here’s another singles chart from ye oldene dayse!
For the seven-week Spring term of 2005, Music for the Masses returned with a Wednesday slot, and was an entirely relaxed affair, with the presenter sitting back and operating the controls with his legs crossed. Or maybe I was just posing for the webcam – it’s difficult to know for sure.
Broadcast on LSR FM, online only. Retrospective of 2004, with predictions for 2005 (no artist of the week).
In a slightly unpredictable sidestep, this week’s random jukebox brings us the lovely I’d Rather Dance with You by Kings of Convenience.
Show 27 was, judging from the pictures and playlist, a blistering affair, involving lots of waving hands around in the air like I just didn’t care, and finally seeing Kraftwerk as the artist of the week.
Broadcast on LSR FM, online only. Artist of the week: Kraftwerk.
One of the busiest and most varied musicians to turn up in the last couple of decades, Erlend Øye‘s name keeps turning up all over the place. If you haven’t come across him before, you have a lot to look forward to.
In addition to appearing on Röyksopp‘s debut album Melody AM, and being an integral part of both Kings of Convenience and The Whitest Boy Alive, he also has a solo career. You’ll probably remember him best for Poor Leno.
His 2003 musical journey across Europe Unrest is both unique and brilliant, and on top of that it seems to have been largely overlooked, so it would seem a good place to kick off.
His DJ Kicks album (2004) is one of the best you could hope to come across, so would be a good place to go next. Then introduce yourself to The Whitest Boy Alive with Dreams (2006) before coming right up to date with his latest solo work Legao. You can grab Rules later too, if you like.
Nothing – in fact, bother with everything. Oh, by the way, we’ll cover Kings of Convenience separately in a few weeks.
The lovely recent one-off La prima estate, and the single version of Sheltered Life, both of which are worth finding.
LSR FM, Leeds University’s student radio station, used to apply for an FM licence for a month once or twice a year, and this used to be extremely popular, as large numbers of wannabe DJs would apply to do shows. So it was that the returning Music for the Masses ended up in a graveyard slot, last thing at night on a Saturday night (or first thing on a Sunday, if you prefer to look at it that way, which nobody did, as they were all students). This had the nice effect that sometimes another presenter would forget to turn up, and your show could comfortably overrun by twenty minutes or so.
Broadcast on LSR FM, on FM and online. Artist of the week: Jean Michel Jarre.
This show was recorded, and for the most part still exists. It will be posted as a Playlist for stowaways soon.
