Solo albums, side projects and Stereolab-adjacent albumschat
2025
Main album chat starts on Sundays and song/album polls will appear from midweek. I’ll post links to any extra album(s) on the Wednesday too and get the remaining polls in a couple of days later.
I’m also building a best of Spotify playlist as we go along – 2 from each album, 1 from each mini-album and 2 from each of the Switched On compilations.
I quite like Mccarthy. I don’t hear much connection between their stuff and Stereolab musically (it might be there, but I don’t know enough to pick it up if it is).
Lyrically though, there’s a clear connection between Mccarthy’s anticapitalist polemics and some of Stereolab’s lyrics, e.g. Ping Pong.
I quite like them too. I think Tim wrote McCarthy’s music but there is nothing in the C86 twee indie pop that tells you what he was listening to at home!
Tim and Laetitia got together in the late 80s and she provided occasional vocals on their final album, 1990’s Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. She’s most prominent on this song:
I’ve read that McCarthy were a major early influence on Manic Street Preachers too.
I didn’t realise that Mary Hansen was a backing vocalist in the late 80s for fellow C86 band The Wolfhounds, which is how she met Tim and Laetitia. I don’t really know their stuff so I dunno if she was on any of the records or just at live shows.
A little bit more on Mary Hansen’s role in The Wolfhounds via this interview with Andy Golding:
That album (Blown Away) was pretty much recorded live with vocal overdubs. Dave and I play all the guitars on that album. It was great fun. Mary Hansen (who went on to join Stereolab) was living in the same house as Dave and Paul Sutton at the time, so we asked her to do some backing vocals. The whole thing just lifted off once we added her in. Fair play to engineer Ian Caple. He totally got it.
David Callahan (Wolfhounds singer) comment on Mary’s role on the Wolfhounds track Rite of Passage:
The best quality VHS transfer I could manage, here is the original mostly unaired 1989 promo video for Rite of Passage from The Wolfhounds’ mini-LP Blown Away. Filmed by Mike Mason from the 4AD band Swallow, the track features Mary Hansen on harmonies, later from the band Stereolab. One of the old songs I’m most proud of – and it sounds even better on record with the original long intro on the vinyl LP – an edited recording of a Joey Ramone interview, donated by Mary during mixing.
Let’s have a bit of Th’ Faith Healers too; Joe Dilworth was their drummer at the same time as being an early drummer for Stereolab. The motorik influences are a bit clearer in Th’ Faith Healers’ stuff compared to Mccarthy’s, with the Healers covering Can on their first album.
I’m pretty sure Joe Dilworth was a photographer, took the cover shot of Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha and was immortalised in their tune Dilworth’s Theme.
I’m going to give Space Age Batchelor Pad Music its own week. It might be a mini-album but it’s a pivotal release and eight songs is close to a full picnic.
Put it this way… if we did a Pixies listening club, I’d like a Come On Pilgrim week.
