#83

Interesting thanks, i haven’t!

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#84

Meh/5

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#85

It’s a simple trick of taking a 2/3 chord song and just repeating it while building and building it until it sounds huge, but they’re really good at it

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#86

It’s not really the best place to start with them tbf

#87

4 for both (at least one point for representing Warwickshire). Doggen and Kevin from Spiritualized are also part of BE Music - I sang in a choir of Coventry scene folk when they played the cathedral a few years ago and they were GBOL.

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#88

used to have a ladies and gentlemen t shirt, seen em’ live.

don’t really like them anymore. boring.

#89

Spacemen 3 were a totally formative band for me. I was too young to see them live, but nearly all of my best pals from school were into them, along with about five other people in my home town, and became mates with all of them too. One of those bands that if you clocked someone in their t-shirt you’d pretty much know they were sound and would probably want to hang out. Also old enough to remember the fake ‘war’ that the music press tried to engineer between them and Loop, even though both bands were basically all “wha?”. Good lesson early on that the music weeklies were essentially a bag of wank.

Still listen to their four main albums all of the time and they are all brilliant – Perfect Prescription and Playing With Fire especially. No one else sounded like them at the time and I don’t think that anyone has since. Even Spiritualized and Sonic Boom / Spectrum / E.A.R etc. don’t really tread the same ground.

I know Pete Kember has (or at least had) a reputation for being pretty cantankerous, but he always seemed to come across well in the interviews that I read and clearly someone who was deep, deep into music. Learned about loads of artists like Sun Ra, Lightning Hopkins, Evie Sands, The Zodiacs and Daniel Johnston after he enthused about them or said they were an influence on the Spacemen. Was a big deal for a kid who basically exclusively listened to hardcore and indie rock up to that point.

Never rated Spiritualized quite as highly as the Spacemen (hardly rate any band highly tho’), but those first three albums are all brilliant and there’s loads of other good stuff spread about the later albums and EPs. There’s a lot of variety too – don’t understand the ‘they’ve only got one song’ criticism at all. Haven’t seen them live for years and years, but the three times I did have all been brilliant. Quite surprised that they seem to be taking a bit of a kicking – thought they’d be pretty popular. Maybe their peak stuff is a bit early to land in the sweet spot for most disers?

Quick mention of Pete Kember’s 90s stuff as well as it tends to get overshadowed a bit by Spiritualized. He did some amazing poppy bliss out stuff as Spectrum which I’m surprised wasn’t way more popular

(used to play this one to my eldest son when he was restless at night time!)

He also did some pretty great minimal techno (in collaboration with Thomas Köner and Kevin Shields) as E.A.R:

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#90

Gonna cook dinner, get a beer and start thinking about what to say. But yeah, given that this is my living room, I reckon it’s pretty obvious what score both bands are getting :wink:

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#91

Spacemen 3 get a 5 from me for the track ‘Suicide’ alone, especially some of the ludicrously long live version exist. I had a cassette copy of Playing With Fire and I think I warped the tape rewinding that track and playing it so often.

I have no idea why I never went through the discography but I guess some of the records were hard to find at the time, but now they’re all on Spotify I can finally do that. I’m glad to see their set from Switzerland is on Spotify, because it has a 28 minute version of ‘Suicide’ on it.

Spiritualized: I came into Britpop/Indie (for want of a better word) in 1995/1996 so when Ladies and Gentleman came out I was a bit 'who are these guys having a massive hit album? (well, number 4). My friend bought the first edition ‘pill’ album (the single disc) but didn’t like it, but I remember swapping the first Supernaturals album or something shit like that with him. So I have that somewhere in my childhood bedroom. I remember liking it, but not loving it.

I picked up a copy of Pure Phase on cassette in 1999 when I was taking my GCSEs. I was absolutely blown away by it. I still think it’s one of the best albums of all time, and I definitely prefer it to Ladies and Gentlemen. It’s one of my favourite albums - it’s one of those albums where I just look at the tracklist and go ‘wow, it’s all good!’

I then bought Lazer Guided Melodies and the summer of 99 was just dominated by those first three albums. I remember being on holiday with my family for the Solar Eclipse (remember that?) and everyone around me was like, ‘put on sunglasses’ on top of some hill or mountain in Snowdonia, but I was a goth teenager going “I’ll just listen to Born Never Asked / Electric Mainlin and stare at the ground, thanks” Later in the same holiday I bought Live at the Royal Albert Hall and taped it to cassette and I remember listening to various tracks off it, as My dad, my sister and me went up Snowdon (the ‘more difficult’ way, where you go around the lakes and then climb, rather than the straight path by the train tracks. Other tracks on that mixtape included Ex Con by Smog and Revenge of the Black Regent by Add n to X that I bought from a record store in Bangor, along with a Llama Farmers single or something.

So Spiritualized also get a 5 from me, for those memories.

I remember being disappointed with Let it Come Down, which for me, came too late I felt took all the things I didn’t like about Ladies and Gentlemen and tuned into them, rather than being the spacerock journey that I wanted.

That summer of 1999. I had ‘best of’ C90s that I curated of my four favourite bands at the time: Spiritualized, The Beta Band, Mogwai and Mansun (all British bands doing BIG THINGS, it seems( I think only Mogwai survived in my interests after each respective following albums. The other just couldn’t compete with what came before which perhaps is no fault of the bands, just your regular new-material-vs-nostalgia conflict.

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#92

5/5

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#93

I’m always going to go in to bat for the Beta Band first proper album. Yeah, (to use a comprison that might be unfair) It’s their ‘Southland Tales’ to the Three EPs ‘Donnie Darko’ and the rest of the career might as well be ‘The Box’

Wasn’t expecting to think about either The Beta Band or Richard Kelly tonight

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#94

:wink:

#95

Don’t know if it’s in the works, but the Beta Band have the highest potential for the most ‘voted for the first album / voted for the first single / preferred their earlier work’ in the history of HGATR

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#96

They’re on the big list but I can never decide if they’d get enough votes.

#97

Actually think hot shots 2 is my favourite beta band album. Maybe not as many peaks as the 3 eps but not a duffer on there.

Also spiritualized is a 5 from me

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#98

Probably not, but they always come up in discussions of ‘Which band peaked with their debut song’ even though I think they have many songs better than Dry the Rain

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#99

Shout out for the Pure Phase noise

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#100

Don’t think I’ve heard them but people always go on about Spiritualised so if I was being mean I’d give them 2/5.

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#101

On listening to Talk Talk for the first time recently it was an eye opener how much spiritualized have been influenced by them. Like spiritualized a lot, never really delved into spacemen 3 properly but did see one of them do some solo thing - spectrum, I think it was billed as, at Glasgow Stereo and it was aimless bleepy shite.

#102

Definitely. It’s all really good though.

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