Outdoor From August 2016

Serving to embrace the floral heavens of British pop, this ceremonious edition combines the first ten prized volumes of the acclaimed Piccadilly Sunshine series. Celebrating the obscured artefacts of illustrious noise that emerged from the Great British psychedelic era and beyond, it is the essential guide to the quintessential sound of candy-coloured pop from a bygone age Pop is NOT a dirty word!

The first few months of 1970 were tumultuous for the Grateful Dead. They had been all over the country, from the Fillmore East to Hawaii and back, by way of New Orleans and St. Louis. They had fired their organ player, fired their manager, hired a new road manager and recorded an album. By 8th March, they had already played 34 shows. As near as anyone can tell, the sessions for Workingman's Dead were 16 - 19th February and then 9 - 16th March, when the basic tracks were completed. What has come to be known as the project tour - an east coast jaunt running 17th March through 29th March - was undertaken with the aim of composing a road song while on the aforementioned surface. Lyricist Robert Hunter had joined the tour for this express purpose and Truckin was written while the group allegedly hung around the pool in Dania, FL, just North of Miami, where they would also perform two gigs at the unlikely venue, Pirates World, an amusement park in the city which hosted rock gigs on weekends.

The brilliance of this collection is that it combines the standard Brit-punk anthems by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, and Stiff Little Fingers with other great songs that typify the variety and range of punk-era independent music from both sides of the Atlantic. The songs are so well chosen that the punk aesthetic is further revealed by the inclusion of songs that characterize pub rock, new wave, and other related genres. The usual punk suspects ("New Rose," "Anarchy in the UK") are all here, along with many other treasures: Dr. Feelgood's "Milk and Alcohol", Devo's "Mongoloid," Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," and Television's "Marquee Moon." The less commonly anthologized punk selections are inspired, too: the Ruts' "Babylon Is Burning," Generation X's "Ready Steady Go," and X-Ray Spex's "Identity," along with the seminal "Sheena is a Punk Rocker." The conception of the genre is expanded further to include Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, XTC, Joe Jackson, the Pretenders, the Tubes, and Blondie, and their presence overcomes the tendency for boring repetition on a very long collection.

By the release of 1986's A Kind of Magic, Queen's stature as a prominent rock band in the U.S. had slipped considerably, while in all other parts of the world (especially Europe), they remained superstar hitmakers…

Forest Swords chops out 27 of his favourite tracks for the latest DJ-Kicks, after having recently signed to Ninja Tune for Compassion, one of our albums of the year in 2017. Like much of his own output, his DJ-Kicks skirts around pristine electronics and embraces more organic textures: 80s post punk (Anna Domino, Dead Can Dance), classic 90s British electronica (Orbital, Mira Calix), and smokey digi-dub (Rhythm & Sound), all rub up alongside some of the most forward-facing producers working today (Demdike Stare, Laurel Halo, Fis). The compilation sifts through rhythms, shifting speeds and emotions: from pop icon Neneh Cherry's primal thudding to the zombified throb of exclusive Forest Swords track 'Crow' via Deena Abdelwaheed's clattering deconstructions to the euphoric two-step of Djrum.