Rough Trade

But you just couldn't do it.

And until, you know, the Desperate Bicycles came along and Scritti Politti and, you know, the early Rough Trade things and they were having, you know, manifestos of how to make your record and stuff like that.

And I was making fanzines and we'd put... you know, instructions about how to make your record.

You know, this is at age, yeah, 13 or something.

That's so good.

You think you got it made because you signed to Rough Trade.

This does, yeah, this could be an SMS.

I

I've got that.

And we were trying to track down Laura logic because she supported on the rough trade tool.

Yeah.

And I cut, and this is the days before Facebook and, uh, you know, and the internet wasn't quite so, uh, so I was like the detective tracking people down.

Bruce was in the 90s wasn't he when they reformed

but

also very significantly and as a good lead into Silver Lining Gordon Ogilvie and Colin McClelland also contributed and Gordon gave me some great stuff and also his wife gave me some good stuff and she's never gone on record before and she spent some time on the Rough Trade tour with the band acting as a sort of a gopher and helper generally so that was quite interesting and i think you're going to queue up silver lining again not perhaps an obvious stiff little fingers choice but it's a gordon ogilvy lyric uh i understand and i don't know it always just resonates and it says sadly it's as relevant today as it was back in 1981

yeah

Number 34, a weird one for me.

It's a compilation called Wanna Buy a Bridge, 1980 Rough Trade.

I have this comp.

It is good.

And what did we learn? The Wipers, Dick Hell, Misfits, The Velvets, Bratmobile, Joy Division, they all belong.

Slightly questionable choices for The Jam and Big Black, perhaps.

You know, definitely that rough trade comp.

And I just don't get Turnstile.

Yeah, that was a band called Life Without Buildings, which is probably the thing that most people would know me for.

We split up in 2002, but we got back together this year to do just a few shows, mostly for the 50th anniversary of Rough Trade Records.

But I kind of never really thought that I could be a solo guitar player at all.

I felt like I was a guitar player in a band.

Yeah, that single did really, really well.

It may have landed in the mail or I may have picked up a copy at Rough Trade.

Rough Trade was really nice to me and started giving me records because they recognized that this was a cool fanzine.

And I fell in love with that single and especially the other side called Worn Girls.

which is much longer, is an amazing track to this day.

Uh, Sandinista, Give Them Enough Rope Tour, London Calling, all at the Glasgow Apollo, so it was just maybe two and a half thousand capacity or whatever, and they were incredible.

So they were really an inspiration, but things like Joy Division, uh, you know, there was, uh, the John Peel Show was where people, you know, on the, on the BBC at night you could listen to that, and they played all of these independent, all these records from independent labels, Rough Trade and, you know, you know, the type of thing.

So that was all happening when I, uh, was, uh, young.

And, uh, but in Glasgow, there was a label called Postcard Records that formed in 1980, and they had bands like Orange Juice, um, Aztec Camera, Josef K, uh, and The Go Between did a record on, on Postcard-

It's called Lay in a Shimmer by the German producer Hendrik Weber, who's also better known as Pantha du Prince.

Um, and this opens his 2010 album Black Noise, which was actually released on Rough Trade.

Something I really, really love to mention is how he actually traveled to an isolated cabin high up in the Swiss Alps to record it.

He walked around the mountains with field recorders capturing the sounds of metal chimes, church bells, cowbells, and tumbling pebbles, and used them all as the actual rhythmic bones of the music.