If anyone living in the US would like to buy me a white bunny radio from this site I will not only love you forever but will send you something of your choice in return (or the money if you want to be boring). It’s a bargainous $7 but the only international shipping option costs a quite unbelievable $300 and I don’t want one that much. Please?

(Yes, I know this is of no interest to 99% of diskant readers. I have more proper content to go up shortly).

UPDATE: My bunny woes are over, hurray!

Yes, I know this is supposed to be an arts and culture blog and not some sort of hipster’s dating service, but basically we (being myself and my good lady wife) have booked a four-person chalet at this year’s ATP:Nightmare Before Christmas festival in Minehead on the 8th, 9th and 10th of December, and are in need of a couple of nice, friendly, preferably non-sociopathic persons to fill the other two bunks. Tickets are £135 a head and have sold out, so if you left it a wee bit too late, now’s your chance.

If you’re interested, do drop me a line at alex.mcchesney@gmail.com Cheers!

Update (01-12-06): After having a few offers that came to naught, these tickets are still available, so it’s not too late!

Hello. I have 50 free song downloads from www.emusic.com. My mother gave them to me. I was fairly excited about this as it’s an independenty version of iTunes with no nasty DRM and it has a pretty good selection of labels involved including Dischord, Kill Rock Stars, K, Wiiija, 4AD, Touch & Go, Matador, Chemikal Underground etc etc.

BUT, what with my recent listening being mostly major label pop music and tiny local bands I am actually finding it rather difficult to think of anything I might want and trawling through things randomly is getting tiresome. So far my ‘Save for Later’ area has ‘Starlite Walker’ by Silver Jews (which I haven’t heard in FOREVER) some Lung Leg songs I only have on vinyl and a Comet Gain album. So suggest things I might, or should, like and if they have it I will download it and let you know what I think.

Also if anyone wants a free trial let me know and I’ll recommend you so I get even more free songs.

Their record label have manage to misunderstand my perfectly clear (so I thought) instructions and have sent me two copies of the rather awesome ADHD by Blood Red Shoes on 7″ instead of one copy plus a Foals 7″. I really can’t be bothered trying to return it so if anyone wants to trade me something cool for it email me or leave a comment.

In other news, I just purchased an original Jay Ryan print from Art Prostitute and am rather excited.

Who here knows Tim Cedar personally? Or even virtually? Can someone please ask him if he has a copy of the Loveblobs Peel Session from 1992? I taped it off the radio when it was first broadcast, but lost the tape in a bizarre automobile fire not too long afterwards. I’ve since been totally unable to trace it – the BBC have routinely ignored my pathetic, pleading correspondences, no-one else I know even heard it. I can’t hold it in any longer. I must hear those songs again. For the past 13 years or so I’ve had to make do with singing the same few seconds of half-remembered blistering scuzz-rock in my head over and over again. It’s a sorry situation. crunch crunch-crunch crunch SAVE MY! crunch crunch-crunch crunch SAVE MY SOUL!*

*probably not the actual lyrics, but those are the ones I rock myself to sleep with every night.

Link

Thanks!

Some bands just come out of nowhere with something incredible, new and fully formed – like as if you’re walking down the street and then someone suddenly steps out of a shop doorway and clubs you over the head with a frozen trout. Other great acts creep up slowly and grow on you as they grow themselves. Lots of awesome and well-known bands have obscure and mysterious origins with potentially embarrassing limited edition/low budget/simply not very good debuts. Others simply churn out so many records that it’s easy to lose track of which was released when. It struck me just now while listening to Swervedriver what an awesome debut album Raise is, and how they never really did anything to match it. And then by comparison I thought about Oval, a band I love with all my heart, and how their debut, Wohnton, is pretty lame. And then how Spiderland is so superior to Tweeze.

So here, for no good reason, is a list of 30 of the greatest debut albums of all time (in my biased, not particularly knowledgable opinion, and as far as I can remember). In the interests of discussion, who have I missed?

Swervedriver – Raise
Panasonic – Vakio
Fushitsusha – I
Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced?
The Smiths
Suicide
The Fall – Live at the Witch Trials
Can – Monster Movie (or Delay, whichever you want to class as their debut)
Moonshake – Eva Luna
Mogwai – Young Team
The Pop Group – Y
AMP – Sirenes
This Heat
Cocteau Twins – Garlands
AMM – AMMusic
Erase Errata – Other Animals
Napalm Death – Scum
Nirvana – Bleach
Part Chimp – Chart Pimp
Polvo – Cor-crane Secret
Laddio Bolocko – The Strange Warmings Of
Rollerskate Skinny – Shoulder Voices
Scott Walker – Scott
Lemon Kittens – We Buy A Hammer For Daddy
The Stooges
Pink Floyd – Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Unsane
LFO – Frequencies
Einstürzende Neubauten – Kollaps
Happy Flowers – My Skin Covers My Body

See I was wearing Farahs and they ride up into your crotch when you sit down and anything in the pockets gets thrown out like lemmings on a cliff edge and so, it came to pass, that my long suffering mobile (that has been round the world with me twice) and me were separated last Thursday in a cab in Sneinton.
I thought “I don’t need a mobile, I lived for over 20 years without one for god’s sake” but alas, I cannot do it. I need to send puerile toilet humour to my friends via text message. I have spoken to my girlfriend twice in a fortnight and she lives round the corner!
SO! GIVE ME YOUR SPARE PHONES. I will swap it for something if you want, pay postage: whatever. Obviously, a camera phone would be shit hot but anything will do.

Today I unearthed an old cassette marked only with the words ‘John Peel’, scrawled hormonally in teen-angst biro on one side. Side A, it transpires, is taken up with Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Side B, the ‘John Peel’ side, is a compilation of stuff I taped off the radio. So, we open up with Mercury Rev’s Trickle Down, then there’s some Unsane, some Jacob’s Mouse, Pitchshifter’s (A Higher Form Of) Killing, a bit of Verve, all of which timestamps this at round about mid to late 1993. But – there are three tracks on there that I have no idea who they are, and I’m very very keen to find out. This is where you lot come in. Listen to the following, and tell me please, who the hell are these people? I need to hear more. Especially Track 1, which is awesome.

Track 1 | That Was Really Funny by Gag.
Track 2 | Indie-rock hopefuls Unwound, apparently.
Track 3 | Slightly ponderous, sludgy, with histrionic megaphone vocals.

I should have blogged about how good the 1-speed bike, Germlin & Loss Leader show was last week.

But I’ve just been to see Therese Raquin at the Citz. It’s very good but has got me thinking: are there any 19th century novels with a woman’s name in the title that don’t end with that woman debased and dying?

Just a thought.