On the back of the Steinski piece, I remembered I had an Age Of Chance white label kicking around along similar lines. It was part of my record shop booty haul and remains a real gem. White labels seemed incredibly precious, they made me feel like I was owning something very limited, something few others would own. And even though they were nothing of the sort, I still loved getting them during my Maker days.

Age Of Chance were the bastard little brothers of bands like PWEI, their mess of metallic guitars, shouting and falling down stairs beats seemed intoxicating at the time. Peel championed them early doors, and they went on to sign for Virgin who bottled releasing this mix because, as we’ve mentioned before, ‘copyright difficulties’ might rear their ugly head. Might. Rock and roll eh? it’s hard to fathom these days why labels were running scared of this sort of dazzling creativity. Why not just clear the samples? Must have been a good reason.

After signing for Virgin, AOC covered of Prince’s chartbusting ‘Kiss’. These days, with every indie Tom, Dick and Harry covering pop smashes, the very idea seems pedestrian, but back in 1987 it was a revelation. It was how you’d expect – punk ethic, hip hop beats, car crash guitars, shouty northern vocals, it was cheeky, irreverent and, like everything AoC did, it was brilliant fun.

It’s amazing that during their six-year career they never landed a hit single, but that just fuelled the music press fire where commercial success was a no-no. NME championed AoC, inviting them to appear on the legendary C86 compilation, a tape revered for inventing indie. You can perhaps imagine how far AoC stuck out alongside the fey jangle of early Primal Scream and The Shop Assistants.

The white label version of ‘Kiss’ – ‘Kisspower’ as I’ve just discovered it’s called – rides roughshod over their own cover… and the original. It’s an absolute, joy mashing up Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’, Janet Jackson’s ‘Nasty’, Aerosmith and Run DMC’s ‘Walk This Way’, Diana Ross, twice, and perhaps my favourite, Xavier’s ‘Work That Sucker to Death’ and there’s more, I think MARRS’ ‘Pump Up The Volume’ might be in there. A pat on the back for anyone who fancies adding to the list. Listen and enjoy.

More hear…
- There’s a bit of stuff knocking around on amazon including, fantastically, some cassette versions of singles and albums from about £50! Cassettes eh? How brilliant were they?
- Once again we have to turn to the collector sites for more reasonably priced stuff, check out eil.com for vinyl bargains.

At the risk of alienating everyone, I’ve found myself back in 1982… yet again. It’s like therapy, I will get over it. It’s curious to discover how much music I can listen to again comes from 1982. But I digress.

And at the risk of a digress on top of a digress, this track is a good example of why sites like rippingvinyl.co.uk exist. It’s a cracking tune, not a classic granted, but there must be rafts of stuff like this gathering dust on shelves. The point of this site originally (and of course I’ve digressed) was to dust down music that doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of being heard ever again. The Leisure Process’ back cat is long deleted, can’t buy a sausage by them anymore, except from collector sites (see ‘More Hear…’ section below).

It doesn’t seem right somehow when labels spend time scratching their collective arse and wondering how to make money when they’re sat on piles of tunes that stand no chance of making any money because they’re no longer available. If any label bosses would like to talk to me about how they could turn dusty tracks into cash, I have some ideas, natch, but I guess arse scratching and shoulder shrugging is probably easier.

Anyway, disgress over. I’m enjoying the current eighties electro throwbacks (Little Boots, La Roux, etc), because I was there as a newly turned teen first time round. It’s going to get quite odd over the next few years as the 30th anniversaries start to come thick and fast – how about The Human League’s ‘Dare’, released 30 years ago in October 2011?

Which brings me to Leisure Process. I was nothing if not a trainspotter in my early teens, and I had a favourite producer. Yup. I came to recognise the genius that is Martin Rushent after falling for his Altered Images remixes. I recall this mix catching my ear on Peel one night. It’s stuck with me and a few years ago I found the 12-inch in a shop for a couple of quid.

It’s funny how people remember Peel as an indie champion, I always saw him as a champion of good music who happened to be tucked away in a late-night hidey-hole. Always thought the joy of the radio DJ was they could just play the music without offering up an opinion. If they hated it, three minutes and it’s gone. I still wince at some of the bands I championed, in print, at The Maker.

Anyway, Leisure Process, as you can see, are a man with a saxophone and another man. The other man is singer Ross Middleton who arrived from Scottish new wavers Positive Noise, while the saxaphone man is Gary Barnacle, the go-to sax player during the eighties (and no, Hazel O’Conner didn’t go to him for ‘Will You’, that was Wesley Magoogan). A renowned session player, Barnacle has enjoyed a pretty successful career, even redeeming credibility lost by his association with Level 42 by popping up on no less than three albums by The Clash.

More hear…
- As we mentioned up top, everything is long deleted, but there’s still stuff knocking around, pretty cheap, on collector sites like discogs.com and eil.com.

Union Jackals ‘Spaceship Dream’

With the Eighties electro revival doing its best to be the new rock and roll, it’s nice to know some people are well ahead of the curve when it comes to the next revival. Stepping admirably up to the plate are London’s very fine Union Jackals with their bid to make the psych rock, post punk, shoegaze, electronic meanderings, prog stylings, classic guitar pop revival their very own.

It’s always interesting to see the kind of pals people like to pick as their front of house MySpace friends. Try Mark Gardener (the former Ride frontman who they’ve recently recorded a clutch of new songs with), Super Furry Animals, Flaming Lips and The House of Love for this lot, and if that doesn’t build a hatstand to hang the cap of where they’re coming from musically before your very eyes, we know a good optician. He can probably wash your ears out too, but only if you ask nicely. Lap it up, it’s got a dash of everything from XTC to The Charlatans,

There’s a couple of names in the Union Jackals line-up that sad people like me will recognise immediately – Stephen Barnes was mildly well-known at the height of the whole shoegaze thing as frontman of Lamacq’s favourite ever band, Thousand Yard Stare, and Paul Reeves was probably more famous in the NME office during his time as clever internet person than he was a guitar player in Paris Motel. But don’t let that put you off – forget the girth, feel the quality, which perhaps isn’t quite a saying, but it probably should be.

More hear…
- This lot aren’t shy in coming forwards, there’s the industry standard MS, an actual real-life website, a bit more music on the old last.fm and bit of Facebook action just to make sure no one is missing out.
- There’s a debut single featuring two tracks – ‘Analogue Star’ and ‘Out Of Control’ – and you can get that from iTunes, should the mood take you.
- And if you like your bands with pictures, there’s a nice video for ‘Analogue Star’ here too.

Little did I know it at the time (that’d be 1987), but hip hop producers Steve Stein (the Steinski bit) and Double Dee were a true musical mavericks – walking, talking legends who would go on to shape almost everything beat-driven that was to come and all without a hit to their name.

Their music hasn’t been widely available until pretty recently due to ‘copyright issues’. See, back then the music industry wasn’t worried about file sharing, oh no, they had the likes of Double Dee And Steinski to deal with. Clap your ears round their Lesson 1, Lesson 2 and Lesson 3 and you begin to understand why the music industry is in the state it is – they have always fought against the very people driving it forwards. It’s madness. These days, kids swapping music they love are the enemy, in those days people making music with the music they love was. Bonkers.

Listen to Double Dee and Steinski now and it all sounds commonplace, but that’s only because of their huge influence. Coldcut and DJ Shadow are only the tip of the iceberg of folk who wouldn’t have existed without them. I don’t think I knew it was called hip hop in 1987, but I loved the funk of it, the skill involved was breathtaking, I loved the cheeky lifts and nods to other songs I’d heard.

I was first smitten around 1982 when I’d just starting gigging. I’d seen Altered Images and Echo & The Bunnymen. Then, for some odd reason, me and my pal Cuz went to see Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Yup, I know. They bowled up at the University of East Anglia dressed like the Village People, with two boxes of records, a table with some record players on it and a row of microphones front of stage.

Hazy memories, but they came on really late, and clearly had no idea where they were. Their opening gambit was ‘Hello London’. Boy, they must have been confused – here they were in what was then a total backwater. One road in, tractors, fields – London sure don’t look like it does on the TV.

So there was me and Cuz, two 14-year-old white boys from Mr Cubitt’s class, out on a school night, gawping as the coolest looking black men we’d ever seen, making the most exhilarating music we’d ever heard WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S RECORDS.

It was unbelievably good. Cuz says I had to ring my dad (from a payphone, using a coin) who was picking us up to tell him we’d be late. The thrill clearly outweighed his displeasure at a midnight lift home. I remember being involved in a huge stage invasion at the end. I was probably three feet from the decks and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

So anyway, Steinski. I first found him on one the NME’s many cover-mounted 7-inch EPs. It was the only way to score free music back then, so we poured over the contents of these magical records. Bearing in mind how special they seemed to us, you hope they were lovingly compiled, but from my later experience of the Melody Maker/NME machine I suspect not.

Whatever, ‘The Motorcade Sped On’ was almost as gobsmacking as Grandmaster Flash. Lifting its drum loop from Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’, it remains one of my favourite tracks of all time. If only I’d have known then what I knew today I wouldn’t have wasted so much time on hopeless indie guitar bands. Ho hum.

More hear…
- If you only buy one greatest hits album today, make it the download of What Does It All Mean? – 1983-2006 Retrospective or you can just grab the three Lessons for 69p each. Money very well spent.

The Uncomfortables ‘Levi’s Genes’

Firstly, apologies to The Uncomfortables, there’s a bit of getting stuff off our chest before we get to how much like them, but it was their email that set us off. Hang in there, we will get to them, honest.

As we’ve said before, and more than once, it’s harder to be in band today that at anytime since rock and roll was invented, whenever that was. In the musical olden days, bands just did what bands are supposed to do. They wrote songs, recorded them, took drugs, played shows and chucked TVs out of hotel windows. Other people did the rest, because, well, they were good at doing the rest.

Musicians are good at making music, see. Not saying it’s wrong that today bands are expected to do all the stuff other people are better at, but it is slightly odd. And the internet on its own doesn’t help making the DIY thing any easier. Take the default music site of choice, MySpace. All it does is homogenise bands by serving up samey pages that strip away the single most important quality musicians have – identity. Personally, we love sifting MySpace, but it’s little wonder most bands sink in the goo.

Other sites have come and gone when it comes to trying to bust the MS stranglehold, but we think The Uncomfortables, and a growing band of, erm, bands, are on to something by using our new favourite site bandcamp.com. The thinking is very smart – it’s a breeze to use, crisp, clean pages, lots of ways to share, and the behind-the-scenes stats should prove very useful as should users choosing how much they want to pay for tracks. It’s very, very, smart. And best of all it’s simple.

Of course, it’s just another tool and bands need to learn how to use them much more effectively, but having something as good as bandcamp in your toolbox, it’s a start, right?

Right, feel better for that. The Uncomfortables then. Hailing somehow from Preston and Leeds, there’s more than a dash of early Pulp about this lot. There’s a real Jarvis twang about frontman Matt Gallagher and they wear the same tongue in cheek sense of fun on their sleeves – if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor there. We can’t help hearing a little bit of The Coral in there and, as should be compulsory for a band with a bit of Leeds in them, you can hear the ghost of the almighty Cud.

What makes them stand out though is they are clearly proper musicians, who can play proper and everything. And as my old pal James T points out, you really could do with a lawnmower if you’re going to cut the grass. And if you are brilliant live and getting shows beyond the safety of your hometown mates, that’s when using online tools such as bandcamp really comes into their own.

But don’t get us started, you’ve just read what happens when someone gets us started. And if you have read this whole piece, thanks. It’s nice to know we’ve held your attention.

More hear…
- Did we mention bandcamp.com? You can find The Uncomfortables page here. Especially clap your ears round the fantastically titled ‘Portrait Of A Band In Decline’ EP.
- … but they still have a MS you’ll be pleased to hear.