Yeah, "Carmen" was a single (at least here in the UK), but you're verdict of that being "an error in judgement" is probably a good one since it missed the charts completely (Wikipedia tells me that it actually got to #79).

The My Bloody Valentine comeback album from 2013 is pretty good, though not as good as Loveless, predictably, or even Isn't Anything for that matter. But if you're already "on the bus" with the band, which you are, you'll find plenty to enjoy there.

As for The Sundays, I'm sure you'll have heard "Here's Where the Story Ends", which is a fantastic song and was a bit of an "indie disco hit" in 1991 (Wikipedia tells me it was a number 1 on the U.S. Alternative Chart). I'd be surprised if you'd not heard this.

Hey, Slam_Bradley, berkley, and EdoBosnar, I'm just drawing up my 1994 list and I'm wondering if it's OK to include live albums in our yearly lists? Or is it best we limit it to studio albums only?

I'm not generally a fan of live albums, but there are a few exceptions (one of which came out in '94). But by their very nature, live albums almost always feature songs from across a band's whole career, so they aren't representative of a set period in that artist's history like a studio album is.

Thoughts?

I don't know this album, but Brian Setzer is a dude, so I'm sure it'd be worth a listen. I know the Stray Cats 80s stuff reasonably well, due in large part to a teenage friend having been a fairly big fan. Given the retro roots of his Stray Cats stuff, I guess having Setzer do a swing album with a big band must've seemed like a bit of a no-brainer.

I think he was certainly a very complex person. And not a little strange too, to be brutally honest.

I'm not sure what story you are referring to regarding Sinead O'Connor, but I know in the 2000s he developed a bit of a dislike of other artists covering his material, regardless of the songwriting royalties it brought him. That always struck me as a bit weird insofar as he was being financially compensated for those covers and also because he was an artist who regularly gave songs away to other acts -- and, in fact, "Nothing Compares 2 U" was given to The Family years before O'Connor recorded it (if that is the gist of the story that you're referring to?).

Myself, I loved Prince back in the '80s and still do...but only up to a point. I enjoy and own all of his albums (and several bootlegs) from his debut in 1978 up to the point in 1993 where he changed his name to "symbol" or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. His last couple of albums prior to that -- Love Symbol and Come -- were patchy as hell, but I drew the line when he released the God-awful "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" single. That song was a piece of cheesy sh*t unbefitting of an artist of Prince's magnitude and I never bought another album by him. Still, there was a golden period from between, say, 1980's Dirty Mind album and Diamonds and Pearls in 1991 where his output was incredibly good and incredibly prolific.

And my all-time favourite album from 1984 is...


#1 - Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths




Manchester band The Smiths are simply one of the most important and influential British bands of the last 50 years and I will die on that hill. Their impact on UK indie guitar bands and alternative rock in general is hard to overstate. They are also easily one of my Top 10 all-time favourite musical acts ever.

Hatful of Hollow was the band's second album, but it's a bit of a weird one and very often not really considered a "proper" Smiths album. Though in my book it is absolutely a legitimate album by the group.

What happened was that the band (along with some fans and critics) were disappointed with the slightly sterile, "polished" sound of their debut album. The band's radio sessions from this era had presented a lot of the same material in far more lively and passionate renditions. The idea was hatched to issue some of these radio sessions, as a way of addressing the criticism that the production on the Smith's debut album was receiving from some quarters. These radio tracks were accompanied by some newly recorded material, recent non-album singles that the band had issued since their debut album, a few B-sides, and the original single version of "Hand in Glove" (which was again far superior to the weaker version found on their debut LP).

The result was Hatful of Hollow, a brilliant, sixteen track summation of what it was that made the Smiths so special in their earliest period. Classic UK hits like the wistful, but venomous "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" – a song that lyrically straddles the blurred line between loneliness and misanthropy – and "William, It Was Really Nothing", sit beside all-time classic Smiths tracks like "How Soon Is Now?" (the song that even people who don't like the Smiths like!) and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want".

Other stand out tracks – and this is an album consisting entirely of stand-out tracks, in my opinion – would be "This Night Has Opened My Eyes", "Still Ill", and "Back to the Old House". The band's debut single "Hand in Glove" is a contender for 'Greatest love song ever written', as far as I'm concerned, with a rollicking musical backing and beautifully honest lyrics, which capture the intense, self-involved rush of romantic infatuation – "Hand in glove, the sun shines out of our behinds/No, it's not like any other love/This one is different, because it's us."

Since it contains vastly superior renditions of key songs from the band's debut album, I have always thought that a good case could be made for treating Hatful of Hollow as the Smiths' debut proper, while bypassing the first album altogether. Like, this is the band's debut 2.0.

Anyway, here's the single edit of the majestic and hypnotic "How Soon Is Now?", which I guess is probably the most famous song from the album…

I've seen this before on the internet and I'm pretty sure it's incorrect. Please allow a descendant of your former Colonial overlords to teach you damn Yankees a thing or two about the Boston Tea Party...

Aside from the fact that many contemporary or near-contemporary illustrations of the Boston Tea Party clearly show it being loose leaf tea that was tipped into Boston harbour, the British East India Company, who owned the ships in question, did not import tea in bricks like those in that picture. All the tea they imported from India and China etc was loose leaf and stored in wooden tea chests.

In addition, several accounts of the incident mention the protestors not only tipping the tea into the water from the decks of the ships, but also piling up mounds of tea leaves along the dockside. These were then pushed into the harbour using rakes and brooms. You cannot really create mounds of tea with tea bricks.

The actual tea that was thrown into the water in Boston was almost exclusively Bohea (pronounced "boo-hee"), which, though barely known today, was by far the most popular tea to drink in Colonial America. It was popular largely because it was pretty cheap compared to other types of tea. There were also smaller quantities of green tea seized and destroyed by the protestors, but it was mostly Bohea that went into the water.

I know all of this because I went down a bit of a Boston Tea Party rabbit hole after visiting the site of the incident in 2018 and I read quite a lot about the protest. As part of my research, I sourced some Bohea tea (it's kinda hard to find nowadays, as barely anybody in the West drinks it any more), but it turns out that it's rather lovely. It's a very smooth and refreshing tea, with a distinctive smokey flavour. These days, I always keep a tin of Bohea in my house and drink it with reasonable regularity.

Yours sincerely,
The British.

This is another blues artist that I've not heard of. Listening to those two tracks, "Port Arthur Blues" can easily be dated to the early '80s by that choursy organ sound, but other than that, they are both fairly enjoyable "late night" blues tracks. Very much in the tradition of T-Bone Walker and B.B. King.