Headphones On

Last week I downloaded the C97 mix from Sweeping The Nation. On top of thrilling me with some of my favorite "old" songs¹, it put me in "a mood". Now "a mood" could go either way really so quite fortuitous that this one went all shiny happy positive.

Once upon a time I think I used to be a bigger indie music snob than I am now. Judging by the C97 comp, that year was apparently 1997. As an over-reaction to the world pretending to care about "Britpop" for approximately one news cycle I retreated into the blossoming Internet in search of some of the most random and obscure indiepop that the British Isles had to offer. I was shelling out ridiculous amounts of money (basically every dime I made at the job) for singles on labels that would exist for 6 months before folding² for bands that even friends in England had never heard of.³. Anyway, as I was saying... 1997 was not such a bad year for music, if you searched beyond the bad Blur and Oasis releases.

¹ "Mum's Gone To Iceland!" ... what ever happened to Bennet? I don't want to even guess how much $$$ I spent importing that Linoleum record into America.
² Hello EmiDisc!
³ It was also around this time that I began the ridiculous search for every My Life Story release. To this day this remains one of the only bands I am a completest about. While I have sold off most of the collection of odd singles and such something has always stopped me from selling the My Life Story collection... well something other than no one else ever wanting it.

Buy some: The Divine Comedy, Mono, My Life Story, Sarah Cracknell, Space, Belle & Sebastian