The Lost Music Club (plus Speedy - Heard, Seen, Done, Been)

The Lost Music Club is a new record label which is co-run by the respected Alcopop! Records and the editor of the fantastic blog 1p Album Club (a blog which reviews albums that can be bought online for a solitary penny). The aim of the label is to release albums from respected artists which never saw the light of day for various reasons. Having announced the launch of the label last month, today they announced their first release, and for someone like myself, who has a great affinity for the Britpop era but hasn't delved into music by some of the "also rans" of the movement, it is a rather interesting one.

Step forward Sheffield band Speedy. Having formed in 1993, the group split up in 1997 when the Britpop bubble burst with only a solitary hit to their name ("Boy Wonder", which reached the dizzy heights of #56 in the chart in 1996), before their debut album "News From Nowhere" could be released. Now seventeen years later, that album is finally going to see the light of day, and in anticipation, the band have made one of the songs from the album "Heard, Seen, Done, Been" available as a free download. It is a song that is very much of its time - the song is mid 90s through and through. But that doesn't mean it isn't good, because it is ruddy fantastic.

We wish The Lost Music Club well with their new venture, and look forward to seeing what other lost gems they intend to unearth. In case they are angling for suggestions of albums that never saw the light of day, we'd like to suggest fellow Britpop "also rans" Catch, Joe Lean & The Jing Jong (perhaps the most famous unreleased album of the mid 00s indie rock revival), and the second album from Geneva, "Weather Underground" (which technically was released, albeit very much under the radar).

"News From Nowhere" by Speedy will be released on 7th April 2014. The band will reform for two gigs to coincide with its re-release in London and Sheffield at the start of April.

Best Friends - Nosebleeds

People say that everybody comes up with three million pound ideas every year. Because I am a benevolent captain, I will share one of mine with you.

Basically my idea is an app which is inspired by automated music recommendation services like last.fm. However, unlike those services, which analyses what you have listened to on your MP3 player/iPod and gives you suggestions based on what you've already experienced, my concept will only give you one. Having analysed the most popular songs you have played, as well as looking at the genres/type of music which gets added throughout the year, the app will distill this into one song that represents you and your music taste most succinctly. It could be a song that you have played all the time, it could be a song that has laid dormant on your hard drive for years going criminally ignored, or it could be a song that you've never heard in your life before that moment. Whatever it may be, it will be your song, and yours alone, at least until a few months down the line when your music taste changes and you get a new 'you' song. If anyone would like to develop/licence the idea from me, my fee is 20 Battenberg cakes, to be deposited in a bank in the Cayman Islands (lest HMRC tries to take the marzipan).

So if this hypothetical app was to analyse this blog's musical preferences over the past year, what song would it consider to be 'my' song? That's something I could not know for sure, but I imagine it would sound something like "Nosebleeds", the new single from Sheffield group Best Friends. It's a song that contains more or less everything this blog loves - loud distorted guitars, a lovely wee guitar riff/lick running through the song, a youthful urgency in the lyrics, yet fashioned into a pop focused mold. Some people might call this music garage rock revival, others an attempt to replicate the sound that broke The Vaccines three years ago. As for myself, I can only call this song one thing -  my song.

"Nosebleeds" is out now as a 7" single, complete with a comic put together by the band.

Clear - Sunlight

Now that we are into September, the month where the heat generating orb in the sky begins to fade for the majority of the day, here is a song that should help to brighten your day. "Sunlight" is the debut single by Clear, a band who have close connections to Richard Hawley - two of the members have played in his live band, and their drummer, Andy Cook, was a member of Britpop legends Longpigs. The song is a lucious piece of timeless guitar-pop, with its harmony vocals calling to mind some of the best bits of Teenage Fanclub. It might not be the most complex song you'll hear this year, but it is the simplicity of the songwriting that makes the song so brilliant.

Blue Lip Feel - Hiring Mr Know

There has been much excitement on Twitter recently about the news that septuagenarian rock band The Rolling Stones are to lay off the cocoa for one night in order to headline this year's Glastonbury Festival. Even though it's been more than fifty years since they first crashed into the public consciousness, it's nice to see that their influence is still being felt on the next generation of young hopefuls looking to soar through the musical ranks.

This brings us on very nicely to Sheffield quartet Blue Lip Feel. They've been building up a following in recent months in both their hometown and in London, and are due to support Tribes on their upcoming UK tour in April. They've recently debuted a brand new song "Hiring Mr Know", which is available as a free download, and has a classic rock sound that is very much indebted to the archetypal sound of Jagger, Richards et al.

So are the young band really the devout disciples of a group three times their age, or did they just listen to Primal Scream's "Give Out But Don't Give Up" on repeat growing up? Either way, I'm sure there'll be much for them to enjoy if they head to Worthy Farm this June.



Photo of Blue Lip Feel is © Scott Hukins