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Bastard Pop
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Historia De La Musica Rock - 2002 to 2004 |
After years of threatening to do it, I've collected some of my early works in the bootleg/bastard pop field. It could be said that I'd already missed the "golden age" of this stuff by the time I started, as the people who inspired me to have a go (Richard X, The Fucking DeWaele Brothers, Erol Alkan etc.) had already sensed that it was perhaps time to move on. However there was a second wave which I got caught up on, mainly because the stuff was getting known outside of very select London circles.
This was due, mainly, because of Daniel Sheldon's "BoomSelection" mp3 blog - the only place at the time where one could get hold of these elusive tracks without listening to XFM's "The Remix" or stumbling across illicit 7" singles in a few clued-up record shops like Rough Trade. In a sense, it was an extension of what I'd been doing since the 1980s - cutting up other people's records, first with a pause button on a cassette recorder, then with 'tracker' software on the Commodore Amiga computer. All of a sudden, I was able to use more than 4 second samples...
Back then, the only way to get this stuff out was on early peer to peer networks such as Napster and Audiogalaxy (aah, what a great thing that was...) and even then it wasn't easy to let people know that the stuff existed. I didn't have a website as such, and forums such as "Get Your Bootleg On" were in their infancy. I still struggled to get myself heard, and by the time I'd got any sort of a 'name' the scene was already flooded with rubbish. Things haven't changed much. By the end of 2004, I really wasn't interested in throwing out individual 'novelties', and concentrated on longform mixes.
But now, in 2007, there's the frightening prospect of it all coming around again, as this kind of stuff finally hits the commercial sector properly. Maybe I'll become part of it at last? Well, I doubt that very much, but you never know... someone needs to keep the standards up.
Thanks for listening.
sH - February 2007
1: 52 Scrubs (Live At The Ruthin Enormodome)
2: The Without Me Song
3: The Doves Are Mine
4: A Day In Tracy's Life
5: Black Freak
6: (Are You Gonna Be My) Dirrty Girrl?
7: An Egyptian Trick
8: One Phat Breeda
9: Charly's Anthem
10: I Feel You Really Caught Me On Edge
11: Bad Grey Rocker Girls
12: Double Freak
13: Slow
14: Hot Shots
15: Crazy Dick
16: Ein Atomkitten In Einem Kraftwerk
17: Shansun
18: Tainted Beyonce
19: Thinking Of No-One
20: Enjoy The Silence (Float Mix)
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