The Listening Club - 4th October 2015

Hey everyone!

#ListeningClub this week is on location, coming to you live and direct from my mum's house in Kent, where I've been doing the usual mix of odd jobs and IT support as you'd expect. Also taking time to grab a few choice English delicacies to bring back (lime marmalade and pickled onions, since you ask), enjoy some late summer sunshine with a few pints of bitter and a roast dinner, and celebrate the Amsterdam Glastonbury ticket squad's excellent performance this morning sorting out festival tickets for a whole bunch of people. A quite respectable day all round indeed.

Last week we woke up the town with the #wakeupvortex (not actual pope album pictured, obv), a rather spectacular selection of rise-and-shine anthems and then some. Thanks to all for the picks, track list is in the comments of last week's post if you missed it!

Back to regularly scheduled programming, @JimMcCauley was left clutching the frisbee, so here he is with this week's intro...

"Picking tonight's mystery LP was a piece of cake. Figuring out what to write about it isn't so easy. The problem is that the band in question is – to the UK contingent at least – instantly recognisable. You'd be hard pushed to find anyone in this country who doesn't know at least one of their songs pretty much off by heart. So it's difficult to say too much about them without giving the game away.

The thing is though, I've known all the hit singles for years, but beyond that I've never had a clue, so recently I've been acquainting myself with their albums and I think this is the one that stands out. It's a live album, recorded on a shoestring budget just after they'd begun to have a bit of success in the singles chart. Up until then they'd made a living on the road but not managed to sell many records; this was the album that turned things around.

It's big and loud, top-heavy with covers and all over just a little too quickly (which should please everyone who wants to watch This is England '90 at 9pm), but it's one of the great live albums, capturing the energy of a tight live act who've hit their stride and are about ready to take up residency on Top of the Pops, and it really makes me wish I'd been around to see them back then."

Alright! Direct download is here, and the new old HearThis stream is below:


See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1) !!!