Fruits De Mer Records Top Ten
A Fruits de Mer Records Top 10
(with only one Fruits de Mer release in it - how uncommercial can you get?)
Over 50 years of buying records and the last 12 of them running a little vinyl label, so narrowing any list down to 10 is a bit of challenge, but I've gone for 10 that have really influenced my musical tastes and obsessions over the years...
The American Breed 'Mindrocker'
(b-side to their 1967 version of 'Bend Me, Shape Me' - my first 7" purchased with my own money and I was already into b-sides and psychedelia - or at least what a 10 year old in the Black Country thought was psychedelia)
Touch 'Down At Circes' Place'
(from the LP 'Touch', released in 1969 - and I was buying obscure psych/prog albums on the cheap in Woolworths sales, funded by a paper round; I loved the album so much I drew the band's logo on my schoolbooks)
Egg 'I Will Be Absorbed'
(1970 - good grief, now I was getting into weird time signatures; nearly 50 years later I released a lovely cover of Egg's first album by a guy called Kris Gietkowski)
Grobschnitt 'Symphony'
(1972 - my first taste of krautrock, and my first big musical obsession, bought on the strength of listening to side of it in the first Virgin Records shop in Birmingham - the shop was tiny, had big leather sofas and even bigger headphones...and a strange smokey haze in it whenever I went in)
Fairport Convention 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes'
(timeless; Sandy Denny had the finest female voice of the last 50 years - no argument)
Robyn Hitchcock 'The Yip Song'
(I'd moved down to London from the West Midlands in the late 70s and lived not far from the Hope & Anchor so live music was virtually on my doorstep, and The Soft Boys played there - but I've chosen Robyn's solo track 'The Yip Song' as it's the greatest No.1 single that never was - and I keep trying to persuade Anton Barbeau to record a cover of it)
Julian Cope 'World Shut Your Mouth'
(I struggled with music in the 80s, but Julian was an exception - the finest male voice of the last 50 years - and the best microphone stand)
The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds'
(1990 - and suddenly music mattered again - a lot...ambient, trance, techno, trip-hop, EDM, IDM, electronica, D'n'B....I was hooked and trips down Berwick Street became very expensive)
Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin 'A Million Miles To Earth'
(My last obsession before Fruits de Mer Records started to take over; Pete seemed to be releasing at least an album a week at one stage - I must have a hundred on his Fax label, and again Berwick Street was a very happy, and frequent, hunting ground for me)
Sendelica 'Venus In Furs'
(Sendelica's first single on Fruits de Mer, in 2010 - I still get goosebumps when i listen to it; they've since released four LPs on the label and their main guy, Pete Bingham, runs our annual summer festival in Wales each August - please god we can go ahead with it this year)