1996

Lamb - Lamb
Cheikh Lo - Ne La Thias
REM - New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Scheer - Infliction
Alice in Chains - MTV Unplugged

Scheer - I saw these supporting Belly at the Astoria in 95, they made a bloody great racket, though they seemed to disappear into obscurity not long afterwards.

Much as I loathe the whole MTV unplugged phenomenon, Alice in Chains is one of the few bands where this approach makes sense. Coming across like a mellow (but still exciting) greatest hits, it's a shame (to put it mildly) that not long afterwards the singer succumbed, like so many others, to the naughty drugs.

Cheikh Lo is the first african artist I'm listing here, but not the first I'd become interested in. That would be Angelique Kidjo, who I simultaneously encountered on Jools Holland and late night pile of arse, Casey Kasem's America's Top Ten show, more from her later. Anyway Cheikh Lo is both Senegalese and good, if a little throaty.

REM - A strange choice, perhaps, considering all the knockout REM albums to chose from, but I've always preferred records that are a well rounded listening experience, rather than patchy ones with a few genius singles scattered around. Plus it features Patti Smith, the bearded lady who told Debbie Harry to get out of Rock n' Roll, for which I should despise her, but the moustache keeps calling me back.

Lamb was my favourite band in 1997 (I know I'm talking about '96, but I didn't get the album till the end of the year), engineering a collision of clattering beats and alternately sweet & abrasive vocals. Sometimes wrongly and bizarrely categorised as mondeo man's dinner party music by the chin strokers, it would be hard to concentrate on anything else with this playing in the background. I remember dancing like a loon to their set in the pissing rain at Greenbelt, ah the folly of youth, I ended up with a sprained knee and a bit of a cough, ahh (to be read a a sympathetic ahh, not a pathetic ahh).