Tag: The Lightning Seeds

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Albums

Best albums of 1990: Honourable mentions

It’s been nearly two months since I wrapped up my last mini series. So it’s about time to do another, right?

Right.

It actually occurred to me while drafting those comeback posts back in February and looking back over all the best albums series I’ve done over the years, that I hadn’t done a historical piece in a while. 1990 was the year that I opened up this blog with, starting a series on my top 30 tunes for that year so that seemed a good place to pick up, given I’m on a roll with this return to blogging. I’m actually reusing the above pic from the page that sums up that entire list, both for nostalgia’s sake and for taking the path of least resistance.

I won’t rehash all the words that I already spilled on said page but suffice to say, 1990 was an important year for music for me. It was just around that time that I was getting into alternative music and because it was pre-Internet, some of the albums on this list were discovered, and appreciation gained for them, in the handful of years following their initial release.

With this post, I am sharing a smattering of albums (in alphabetical order) that are great and mean a lot to me but landed just outside of my top ten favourites. I plan to post the rest of this series every week or so, intermingling them with our regularly scheduled programming. The next one in the series will feature albums ten through six and the posts that follow will each proclaim the greatness of my top five albums for the year. The series may take a month or two when all is said and done, but bear with me. It should be fun.

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.
Check out: “Cherry-coloured funk”

Happy Mondays “Pills ‘n’ thrills and bellyaches”:  Eventually, I got over my prejudice against the mythical Madchester group for the part they played in bankrupting Factory Records** and moved past the couple of tracks with which I was already familiar, care of a mixed tape a friend made for me, and I fell hard for the ‘Mondays’ best selling record – yep, it’s druggy, danceable, and chaotic fun.
Check out: “Step on”

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.
Check out: “This is how it feels”

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.
Check out: “Top of the world”

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.
Check out: “Pure”

*This, after many years of trying and failing to find some common ground with the band and at least, a couple dozen spins of this particular album.

**It took a long time, though, because Northside, one of my favourite Manchester bands at the time, got caught up in said bankruptcy and never managed to release their sophomore album.

***After it was reissued for the US audience as the eponymously named album with the instantly recognizable flower on the cover and included a new version of the classic “Sit down“. A bunch of us were given copies of this CD at a high school CFNY video dance party and many never listened to it. Much like the Inspirals album here, “Gold mother” might’ve cracked the top ten if “Sit down” were on the original release.

****And as I’ve written about before on these pages, I came to The Lightning Seeds late – they somehow escaped my adoration for many years!

I’ll be back very soon with albums #10 through #6 for my Best albums of 1990 list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 1994: #29 The Lightning Seeds “Perfect”

<< #30   |   #28 >>

Back when I was a young man, especially in the years just before, during, and immediately after my time at university in Toronto, I was a proverbial night owl. I would often stay up all night and only go to bed a few hours after the sun rose on the new day.

This behaviour likely had its roots in the job that I started the year after I graduated high school, working at the local 7-Eleven. I often worked the midnight shift because I was the new guy, was young, and appreciated the meagre shift premium. And often on those shifts, my good friend Bowers, who was also a late nighter, would pop into the store on the nights he wasn’t himself working at the paint factory, coming in during the wee hours to rock the Addams Family pinball machine, shoot the proverbial poo with me and whichever young lady was my shift partner on the night, and we’d walk home together when my shift ended around 7am. On those nights when we were both off work, I’d head over to his place and we’d watch movies all night in his basement over pizzas and beers.

During university, I had no lack of friends who also enjoyed partying late into the night, drinking, listening to tunes, laughing, and generally being ridiculous. On those later evenings, there was always a point where others would disappear off to bed and only the hardy few remained. Those were the moments where the decision was made either to pack it in or realize that you might as well wait to make sure the sun came up. Of course, it was usually the latter.

And when the sun did peak its bright rays over the horizon, it was magic.

It was pure perfection. The air was crisp. The streets were quiet. The skies were replete with a myriad of colours. It felt like the world belonged to you (and your friends) and nobody else. There was a joy. But there was also a sadness.

This song, “Perfect” by The Lightning Seeds, perfectly* encapsulates this feeling, this mood, this magic. Frontman and driving force, Ian Broudie puts into music and words exactly how we all felt in those moments.

“Now tomorrow’s here today
And yesterday’s today’s just fade away
Watch the morning chase the night
Rolling home, it’s getting light
Feeling sleepy, full of wine
Fall in bed, just in time.”

“Perfect” is track one on the Liverpudlian indie pop band’s third album, “Jollification”. It starts off with low level music already in progress, sounding off in the distance like a faraway bird, a shadow in the bright blazing sunrise. Then, the song proper starts, a jolt of life, that second wind, roaring guitars and dancing synth washes and a drum beat that matches the beat of your heart. The song feels bright and wistfully happy – a song of hope for a new day but sadness for the night we’ve lost.

*Sorry, not sorry.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1994 list, click here.

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Tunes

Eighties’ best 100 redux: #93 The Lightning Seeds “Pure” (1989)

<< #94    |    #92 >>

Here’s an example of an artist and song that I most definitely wasn’t listening to in the 1980s. In fact, I wasn’t even listening to them in the same century as the 1980s.

As astounding as this may sound, I only became familiar with Ian Broudie’s The Lightning Seeds a couple of years ago when this very song came up on a Spotify playlist that was ‘generated for me’. The song blew my mind and sounded vaguely familiar so I had to stop what I was doing and check my iPad screen to investigate its provenance. Of course, The Lightning Seeds’ name was familiar to me, having been a keen listener of alternative rock radio and a voracious consumer of British music magazines in the early nineties, thus, I decided to delve deeper. I switched from said playlist to The Best of The Lightning Seeds and within a few songs that sounded very much within my wheelhouse, I found myself wondering where this band had been all my life. And shortly after that, when I was having a drink or two or three with a bunch of my old friends of similar age and musical tastes, I made mention of the group and all of them, to a one, knew and loved their music. To this day, it remains a mystery how the Seeds’ music escaped my notice for so long but they’ve not been far from my listening tendencies ever since and when I decided to redo this Eighties Best 100 list last summer, there was no way “Pure” would be left off it.

Ian Broudie formed the project in Liverpool in 1989. Prior to that, he had been a member of a number of notable New Wave groups, like Big in Japan, and did production work on albums by other groups that will also appear on this list, like Wall of Voodoo and Echo & the Bunnymen. Generally a studio-only project for its first handful of years, Broudie put together a collection of musicians to take the show on the road in support of The Lightning Seeds’ third album, 1994’s “Jollification”. Two more albums were released and Broudie decided to put the group on hiatus to close out the 90s. After the aforementioned best of compilation and a new album saw the light of day in the latter part of the 2000s, The Lightning Seeds have been an on again, off again concern right up to present.

“Pure” was The Lightning Seeds’ very first single, released in June 1989, more than six months in advance of their very first album, 1990’s “Cloudcuckooland”. It was the very first song Broudie had ever written and sung himself, and did very well on the UK singles charts. And why not? The song is a blast of sunshine and rainbows. An amalgam of New Order and The The new wave, but with a lot more cheer. It dances and flits with computer bleeps, jangly guitars, boppy rhythms, and glorious horn flourishes. And Broudie gathers himself together and lets loose his thoughts on love and happiness. It’s good times on repeat.

Original Eighties best 100 position: n/a

Favourite lyric: “Fresh and deep as oceans new / Shiver at the sight of you / I’ll sing a softer tune / Pure and simple over you.” Just like that, heart-melting stuff.

Where are they now?: The Lightning Seeds released their seventh album, the amazing “See you in stars” in 2022 and then, opened up one of Glastonbury’s stages in 2023, so very much alive.

For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.