JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD'S FIVE
Thomas Dolby - ‘The Flat Earth’ (1984)
“It was Sean who introduced me to this when we were about 13 or 14. I was right in the middle of my indie/Clash phase at this point, but he kept playing it over and over. It was one of the first times that I heard an album on which someone had a vague idea and just committed to it. People always go on about how they want to “be like a film soundtrack”, but this guy was actually doing it, in a full blooded, committed way. It’s an album that is absolutely lost in the middle of a jungle in another world, and not a record that an Englishman like Thomas Dolby should ever have made.”
Simple Minds - ‘Real To Real Cacophony’ (1979)
“The change that Simple Minds went through from their album to this is as startling as any change a band has been through. The ‘Life In A Day’ version of Simple Minds was a really acceptable version of post-punk, these snotty kids from Glasgow. But this album is utterly embroiled in Neu!, Faust, Cluster, Kraftwerk, ‘Station To Station’... and yet it sounds completely natural and unselfconscious. They never, ever get the credit for being one of the most inventive British bands ever, and this album always gets overlooked. People nowadays see them as just this rock behemoth, but they were much more than that.
ABC - ‘Beauty Stab’ (1983)
“I was obsessed with this album, and I don't know why. It's the follow-up to 'Lexicon Of Love' which everyone knows and loves, and it flopped. There was a review I remember that said, “Don’t expect to love this album” which drew me in, and then the cover, which is of a bull and a matador, drew me in further. And then I listened, and I just thought it was one of the most perfect meldings of pop sensibility and rock, which is the hardest thing to do. You can hear that there’s something in this band where they’re going, ‘You know what? I just want to do this once in my life. I've subdued it inside myself, and I just want to do this once and see if people like it.’”
Jeffrey Lee Pierce - ‘Wild Weed’ (1985)
“There was something eminently real about The Gun Club - you knew that that was the real Americana. It was fucked up, it was on the brink of collapse all the time, but they managed to harness it in the music. So when I read that Jeffrey Lee Pierce was doing a solo album and that it was a bit of a production number, I was intrigued. But it’s just a perfect melding of high production values and a swamp-rock sensibility. It’s dated a tiny bit now, but it’s still fucking brilliant. I hate the idea of people like Kings Of Leon or Fleet Foxes not knowing about this record, because it’s part of their heritage.”
The Bodines - ‘Played’ (1987)
“They were on the seminal NME tape with ‘Therese’, which is one of the indie-pop singles of all time. It stood out. You could tell that this band had a bit more ambition than all the other indie bands. The singer, Michael Ryan, had bee-stung lips and a perfect fringe - there was something going on there. You could see they were really going for it, that they wanted to be massive. And it didn't get there, but this album, its ambition, drew me and Nicky and Richey and Sean in. Back in ’85/’86, for proper indie kids to have the ambition to want to break out of the NME scene was quite brave. They did want it, they didn’t get it. But this album doesn’t matter any less for that.”
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