Pigeonhole

My pre-occupation with the '80s and '90s Manchester music scene has resulted in an appreciation for all kinds of shit bands. Real shit. The Farm, Northside, Flowered Up, Paris Angels, and a host of other artists people hardly heard outside the UK back then, and certainly don't hear about now. Out of this flood of sub-par, bassline-driven, e-inspired, coke-fuelled, and alcohol drenched crap came a couple of standouts.

OK, maybe not a couple.

After The Stone Roses destroyed their reputation, and their ex-label, Silvertone, milked their back catalogue for all it was worth, all we had left were The Charlatans doing their best impersonation of The Rolling Stones. Sad. Depressing.

One of the few releases from the Madchester revolution that remains listenable comes from New Fast Automatic Daffodils (New FADs). Differentiating themselves from spiritual contemporaries The Happy Mondays by throwing more punk, soul and funk into the mix, New FADs turned out Pigeonhole, their phenomenal debut album (released: 1990). In some ways it sounds a bit like what the Mondays might have been going for with Yes, Please (a record you should NEVER purchase, no matter how cheap it may be). Unfortunately, The Daffodils never lived up to their first release with their subsequent LPs (sound familiar?), but at that point, there weren't many fans of the genre left to buy their stuff, anyway. It was all grunge, and Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and me sobbing in a corner wondering where it all went wrong. Oh yeah, U2 released The Fly around then too, and started doing all those multimedia broadcast gigs, and I briefly thought the Pet Shop Boys were OK. What the hell was I thinking??

Let's live in the past tonight:
New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Amplifier
New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Big
New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Fishes Eyes
New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Partial

These are high bit-rate MP3 files; file sizes are larger than usual.
New Fast Automatic Daffodils aren't for everyone. This ain't no CYHSY.