Monday 17 March 2014

The Pullman Outskirts - You're Not Going Out To The Golf Club Dance Looking Like Something Out Of The Sweeney - Atom Bomb Farm ABF1


One of the best aspects at the cassette scene was pretty straightforward: if you didn't like something, use the tape for something else. For free music, the risk was usually limited to the cost of an stamped addressed envelope. For shop bought tapes it might be a quid or so over the cost of the equivalent blank. As an impoverished teenager several of my tapes suffered that fate. This one half did, as side two has only one track on it, so the rest of the C60 has the teenage me mumbling into a tape recorder, reminding in me that I used to have much more of a Midlands accent than I do now and that as always, my ambition outweighed my talent.
As for the original tape, I bought it in Selectadisc in Nottingham back when they had the original shop in St James Street. I remember that it was pinned to the racks behind the counter and cost about £1.50 and came with a small magazine, which like all these things has disappeared in the ensuing years.
In retrospect the music is actually not bad in a very Fall/Swell Maps in a barn kind of way (there is a farming concept running through the titles although the correspondence address seems to be student accommodation in Loughborough) although I probably didn't like it so much when I bought it. There's even a dub track with a faltering drum machine through a Kays amp and fake echoes and dropouts everywhere.
In a time when nothing is obscure, this tape appears to achieved it and The Pullman Outskirts appear not to have a presence on the net at all, not even as another forty-something's summer fun band memory, so this may be it. I guess I'd better keep the tape for a while then, it might be the only one left.


  1. Intro
  2. Indian Suit Mohican Surprise
  3. Tell Me Why Cow?
  4. Poultry
  5. Tell Me 3 Little Pigs (Part One)
  6. Ugly (Billy Goat)
  7. Tell Me 3 Little Pigs (Part Two)
  8. Baby Lover Dub
  9. Yoghurt it's Pear
  10. Pullman Outskirts Theme

Various Artists - Ideal Guest House - Shelter 1


You would be forgiven if you, as a connoisseur of mid-1980s indie, looked at the tracklisting below and thought 'I've got all those', because you probably have. This is a fairly standard lineup of the time, from the Wedding Present to Stump to BMX Bandits with Chumbawumba and a couple of outliers like Stitched Back Foot Airman and  Pigbros thrown in. What makes it more interesting than most is that all the tracks are linked by Ted Chippington, who was on the verge of being an accidental pop star with the Vindaloo All-Stars and his deadpan delivery of 'Rocking With Rita'.
Here though, he presents the songs with the assured skill and delivery that has made him the target of flying pints and derision and not a little acclaim for some thirty years. If you know this, you'll enjoy listening to both sides in their entirety. If not, I'll get around to cutting the tracks out individually eventually, but it really won't be as much fun.
If you want to hear more of a man gamely dying on stages across the country over 20 or so years, the box set 'Walking Down the Road: A History' occasionally surfaces although the original print has long sold out.

Side One:


  1. Big Flame - Man of Few Syllables
  2. The Wedding Present - You Should Always Keep in Touch With Your Friends (version)
  3. The Soup Dragons - Fair's Fair
  4. The Creepers - Sharper and Wider
  5. The Shop Assistants - Home Again (Live)
  6. The June Brides - This Town (acoustic)
  7. Rob Grant with Yeah Yeah Noh - Mr Hammond has Breakfast in Bed





Side Two:

  1. Stump - Kitchen Table
  2. The Legend! - Everything's Coming Up Roses
  3. Pigbros - Barren Land
  4. Stitched Back Foot Airman - The Deadly Spore
  5. BMX Bandits - Sad?
  6. Bogshed - Jobless Youngsters
  7. Chumbawamba - Kinnochio





Wednesday 5 March 2014

An Ordered Life - Rebirth (CBT CBT4)



Another one from Virgin on the Moor when it was the hip epicentre of Sheffield. Allegedly Ian Curtis could be found browsing the racks when he was working in the monolithic Manpower Services Commission building at the bottom of the road, but then again the same could probably be said of most of the musicians in the post-punk Sheffield scene.
Hot on the heels of the Human League's pop electronics and Cabaret Voltaire's art electronics came many other bands who picked up cheap synths and slapped on the eye shadow. Vice Versa were probably at the top of the second division before their miraculous tranformation into ABC but there were other bands who populated the pubs and venues with bright young folk emulating the Bowie and Kraftwerk influenced decadence filtering up from London: I'm So Hollow, Vendino Pact and Y? were all represented on the Sheffield/Barnsley compilation 'Bouquet of Steel' and there were others such as The Naughtiest Girl Was a Monitor and Hobbies of Today who put down the guitars and picked up the keyboards in response to those pale cyborgs and long haired baritones on Top of the Pops.

An Ordered Life did that too. They were named for a quote from James Anderton, notorious evangelical Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, and took their cues from Iggy and Bauhaus and I believe came from the west side of town. They were minimal, drummerless and swathed in effects and the tape sounds like it was recorded live in the rehearsal room - this was even in the days before the revolution of the Portastudio. They created a sufficient stir for their look and sound but only existed for three years before calling it a day.

I think I paid about £1.50 for the tape. The text looks like was printed on someone's Dad's office printer, probably harnessing the phenomenal power of a mainframe of the time, which would now run in emulation on your watch.

While doing a bit of quick Googling for the band I found that they had uploaded their output to IUMA at archive.org, so as well as my copy, here's their own.

Side One:

  1. Rebirth
  2. Ordered Life
  3. Flowers
  4. I
  5. Mass Production
Side Two:
  1. Futurists?
  2. Tidy Scratch
  3. Alone
  4. Ordered Life (Instrumental)
  5. Rebirth (Reprise)