A Head Full of Wishes

A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.

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Categories: galaxie 500 my record collection

My record collection
#146: Galaxie 500 - Today / Uncollected (2xCD)

Domino’s double reissues of Galaxie 500’s catalogue in 2010 were lovely, each studio album was doubled up with a more recent release and packages with nice glossy booklets each with a specially commissioned essay.

Galaxie 500 - Today / Uncollected (CD)
Galaxie 500 - Today / Uncollected (CD)

Today was released with Uncollected (the compilation of unreleased tracks and obscurities that first saw the light of day in the 1996 box set) and the essay was by comedian and fan Stewart Lee. You can read Stewart’s essay on his website (and you should) but here’s a couple of extracts if you need convincing:

Today, which I took a punt on when its blurred foliage sleeve loomed out from the racks of Avalanche records in Edinburgh’s West Nicholson Street in August 1989, was an amazing record. The opening track, Flowers, deceptively defeats expectations and leaves the listener bewildered and susceptible. The jangly strummed guitar seems predictable enough, but the drums are playing jazzy off-beats, the bass is charting its own wayward path, and then, minutes in, there’s a guitar solo so audacious and unexpected that it’s immediately clear that all bets are off.

Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste - Stewart Lee (7th November 2009)

I saw Galaxie 500 three times in 1990, every gig a transcendental experience, and I saw the back of my head bob on live TV footage of a show in Ladbrooke grove. Soon, previously hardcore strummers the world over had taken note, slowed down and blissed out, but Codeine, Low, Bedhead, Bay, and the rest of the slow-core scene never packed the punch implicit in the fuzzy felt wrapped fist of Galaxie 500.

Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste - Stewart Lee (7th November 2009)

Lucky for us, Kramer, an uncommonly sensitive producer, had the sense to capture Galaxie 500 for posterity, like insects in amber, as they really were, rather than how they might have imagined themselves to be. In the twenty years since the album’s release, various alternative rock trends have withered on the vine, shrivelled and become meaningless.

Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste - Stewart Lee (7th November 2009)

Journalists write like journalists and no matter how much they might love a band they rarely are able to get that sort of love into an article. Fans write like fans and their love is impossible to hide. Stweart Lee is very clearly a fan.

I’m a fan too which is why I could spot the Galaxie 500 box set behind Stew in the photo for this article in The Guardian in 2010.

Previously in my record collection: