Here’s a good long Apple Music playlist that could get you through an afternoon of chores, painting, or cooking. Perhaps a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Or keep you company on a flight from North America to Europe.
I’ve done a few playlists over the years on this blog but never any that focused on the music of a particular year in the past. I’ve chosen to start with 1991 because it was particularly pivotal year for me in terms of musical discovery. It was the year that I started to dip my toes into alternative rock, a brave new world for me, a wave of music that included a huge variety of styles, very little of which sounded like the music of my parents. So even though I wasn’t listening to all of these songs at the time, I’d say that the majority are old friends, intimate acquaintances.
There’s seventy-five great tracks, representative of how I saw 1991. It’s not a ‘best of’. I’ve already done the list of my top thirty favourite tracks on this blog here. Some of the songs in that list appear on this playlist but there’s plenty others here and some that are much deeper cuts. I know that there are those of you out there who might catch some obvious omissions. Some of these might have been because they were not to my tastes but there are others, like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or The Real People’s “Open up your mind (let me in)”, that were not available to be added due to music rights and Apple Music or whatever. Still, there’s so many other gems that show the wide range of music that was coming out in those years just before Grunge exploded and changed everything for alternative rock.
For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos for each song:
- Primal Scream “Loaded”
- Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff “Dizzy”
- Blur “Sing”
- Teenage Fanclub “Star Sign”
- Lowest of the Low “Subversives”
- Electronic “Getting Away With It”
- Throwing Muses “Not Too Soon”
- Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
- James “Sit Down”
- Chapterhouse “Mesmerise”
- R.E.M. “Belong”
- Spacemen 3 “I Love You”
- Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians “So You Think You’re In Love”
- EMF “Unbelievable”
- Crash Test Dummies “Androgynous”
- The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go”
- Pixies “Alec Eiffel”
- Levellers “Liberty Song”
- Big Audio Dynamite II “The Globe”
- Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
- Depeche Mode “Death’s Door”
- Slowdive “Catch The Breeze”
- Rheostatics “Record Body Count”
- Siouxsie & The Banshees “Kiss Them For Me”
- Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now”
- Northside “My Rising Star”
- Primus “Tommy the Cat”
- Morrissey “Sing Your Life”
- Pearl Jam “Jeremy”
- Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Grey Cell Green”
- Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
- Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
- Paris Angels “Perfume (Loved Up)”
- Barenaked Ladies “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”
- Saint Etienne “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
- Primal Scream “Come Together”
- Teenage Fanclub “The Concept”
- Billy Bragg “Everywhere”
- The Farm “All Together Now”
- Crash Test Dummies “The Ghosts That Haunt Me”
- Inspiral Carpets “Caravan”
- Morrissey “Mute Witness”
- The Tragically Hip “Little Bones”
- R.E.M. “Me In Honey”
- Meat Puppets “Sam”
- The Wonder Stuff “Welcome To The Cheap Seats”
- U2 “One”
- The Charlatans “Over Rising”
- Erasure “Chorus”
- Lowest of the Low “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”
- Violent Femmes “American Music”
- Spirit of the West “D For Democracy”
- Blur “She’s So High”
- Spirea X “Chlorine Dream”
- Chapterhouse “Pearl”
- The Grapes Of Wrath “You May Be Right”
- The Dylans “Godlike”
- Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”
- Levellers “One Way”
- Revolver “Heaven Sent an Angel”
- Barenaked Ladies “If I Had $1,000,000”
- Swervedriver “Rave Down”
- Rheostatics “Aliens (Christmas 1988)”
- Billy Bragg “Accident Waiting To Happen”
- The Farm “Hearts & Minds”
- Spirit Of The West “Far Too Canadian”
- Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television”
- Odds “Love Is The Subject”
- R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”
- Pixies “Head On”
- Northside “Take Five”
- U2 “Until the End of the World”
- Blur “There’s No Other Way”
- Lowest of the Low “Rosy and Grey”
- Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist. I hope you enjoy.
If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.
Cocteau Twins “Heaven or Las Vegas”: Not only my gateway* to the band but likely also for many others, given that the 6th full-length release by the legendary dream pop outfit was their most commercially successful – more intelligible lyrics from Elizabeth Fraser than usual and a very slight deeper leaning into pop from their typical experimentation were the likely culprits.
Inspiral Carpets “Life”: The debut album by the Manchester quintet was chock full of dance floor ready boppers made distinctive by the singspeak vocals of Tom Hingley and the swirling organs of Clint Boon and it might even have cracked my top 10 had the wonderful standalone single, “Commercial rain”, actually been on this one.
James “Gold mother”: Manchester stalwarts James first came to my attention with this, their third album, albeit a few years late***, but even still, I didn’t fully come to appreciate it until much later, after years of listening to later albums where the large group’s big sound became more fully developed. Nevertheless, a great introduction.
The Lightning Seeds “Cloudcuckooland”: Ian Broudie’s debut album as The Lightning Seeds was britpop before britpop was even a thing – and we know how much I love britpop****… so many great tracks that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at any point during the british alternative boom.
My (life in) music lists 