B-Side Sunday.

Crashing into view with more demented euphoria than a pilled-up elephant tripping through an animal orgy in sweaty celebration of his full-frontal lobotomy, it’s the return of the most accurate and least factual Sunday service in all of Christendom – the ceremony that plucks you from the taxi-rank realism of the quotidian and flits you heavenwards on the back of another heavenly offcut otherwise lost in the thickets of the indierock undergrowth.

Only ever two people short of a threesome, B-Side Sunday rings true like some sort of sonic papal edict of aural salvation, propping up the best traditions of the few through a righteous blast of joy that’ll fistfuck your cerebral cortex as it whispers sweet nothings into your ear. So settle again by the fireside as we lead you through all the usual flights of fancy and wild tangents in another fleet-footed romp around pop’s backgarden, snuffling out the truffles of B-Side brilliance with nought but a twinkle in one eye and a dream in the other.

Long before Albarn started sniffing the inside of glowsticks and sculpting Gorillaz’s digital majesty, Blur were embarking on the slow build from goggle-eyed fascination with American rock to the chirpy cockney warblings that so successfully founded their corner of Britpop – a transition perfectly captured in ‘Young & Lovely’. Flipside to ‘Chemical World’, this was originally set for inclusion on ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ until those dastardly suits, eyes ever-locked on their unit-shifting dreams, replaced it with ‘Turn It Up’ to appeal to the American market. Jingly-jangly, summertime cor-blimey guv’nar wide-eyed wonderment, it’s the glorious sound of Damon “where’s me washboard?” Albarn perfecting his barrowboy schtick before the band went on to consume Britiain with the superlative-ravaging ‘Parklife’ the following year. Not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s good stuff for those who like it.

In other news, this is to be the last B-Side Sunday for a wee while. Like poker, no one wants to quit when they are behind but no one wants you to stop when you’re ahead; Edison extolled the idea of perseverence, he created a thousand lightbulbs that didn’t work – but regardless, sometimes it is simply time to stop. In many ways, it’s nothing short of a miracle that B-Side Sunday lasted as long as it did: like a ragged paper napkin that has outlasted every tea towel in the kitchen, it defied the rules of blog disposability for as long as it could. But hold close to you the warming thought that we shall always have the memories: it was the Sunday service that you truly deserved. Which is meant as a compliment, but then not all compliments are worth having. Amen.

B-Side Sunday.

Alas… No B-Side Sunday this week. God loves a trier, but the Vicar simply can’t summon the energy today to cast the moneylenders from the Temple of pop like some kind of modern-day glitterball Jesus, armed ony with a righteous B-Side blast of ‘Side Two’ salvation and the cock-eyed optimism that plagues those men burdened with a dream. Vacation is what you take when you can’t take what you’ve been taking any longer.

Next week, though. Next week he takes it all back. Cherrypicking the best from the rest to leave you in giddy pools of your own sticky, trembling ecstacy that is guaranteed to have you more excited that a puppy that’s just inherited a toilet roll factory – whether you like it or not. Quite simply, it’s the weekly blog ceremony that won’t take your no for an answer.

B-Side Sunday.

Ooooh Lordy! Grander than Don King’s bling cabinet yet packing more wisdom than three brains in a blender, it’s B-Side Sunday! The weekly religious rtiual that’s here to save you from all the bad noise that assails your ears daily, from battery-farmed pop to pasty-faced dance meanderings to issue-riddled moancore that probably shouts out its own mum’s name in bed, B-Side Sunday ties shit music to a chair before beating it to death, burying it under the patio and flitting you heavenwards on the back of another brilliant B-Side plucked from the yawning chasm of muso obscurity.

Coming correct with more records than the KGB, B-Side Sunday remains as thrilling and visceral as diving crotch-first into a threshing machine. And almost four times as fun. It’s the difference between left and leaving, the difference between then and now yet simultaneously also the embodiment of everything inbetwixt. T.S Eliot said that between the idea and the reality falls the shadow: he was almost certainly talking about B-Side Sunday.

This week is the turn of those digital devils Gorillaz, the Albarn/Hewitt cartoon creation that charms you with its arresting sense of the surreal whilst also managing to look so good that it makes Jessica Rabbit resemble a burns victim wearing a Frankenstein mask. And even if they didn’t, ‘Rock It’ (flipside to ‘Rock The House’) remains a zeitgeist-rogering tyke that has the damn-nerve to replace most of the lyrics with “blahblahblah” and still come out the other end a stone-cold triumph of good sounding gurnery. In short, it makes you want to jump up and down like a defiant Ritalin-popping kid on their parents pristine and freshly-made Ikea bedspread until you have an aneurysm. Go back for seconds and stay for thirds, Amen.

B-Side Sunday.

Saints be praised! In these days of drag, with the recession’s sickly shadow looming across every nook and cranny of the interweb, it is with some pride and not inconsiderable pleasure that B-Side Sunday rises once again and, stigmata-dripping, turns its attentions to saving 09 for those who just ain’t ready to stop believin’ – armed only with a single nugget of ‘Side Two’ salvation and a cheeky trouserful of charm. The semi-religious ceremony so prodigiously peerless that it hangs the competition from a flagpole before biting the head off a passing dog, drinking its Winalot-flavoured blood and giggling like a teenage girl knee-deep in the Jonas Brothers’ stinky kecks. Your weekly wanderlust in musical magic that puts the ‘pop’ in poppers and the ‘mental’ in religious fundamentalism, plucking you by your ears from the downward pull of a culture geared only to leave you fat, content, controlled and miserable as Sky+ boxes twinkle merrily in the background. Choice ain’t just a button on your TV remote, baby.

If neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them and psychiatrists charge the rent, then Underworld certainly provided the soundtrack for more than a few of the castle’s E casualty residents, certified head-snapper ‘Rez’ being a fantastic track that even appeared in the club scene of head-scratching psycho-romp Vanilla Sky. Recognising that dance music’s fundamental tenet is that the artist isn’t the star; the audience is, Underworld steered an inimitable course until they had charted a legacy far beyond the navel-gazing meanderment of most 90s dance. Flipside of the ‘Cowgirl’ single, ‘Rez’ is ample proof and any clubber worth their poppers can tell you why.

Sure, it might sound about as cutting-edge as a Sinclair C5 spluttering noisily into life but back in the early-90s this wedge of electrobop managed to sound more intoxicating than gaffa-taping a bucket of poppers to the underside of your nose and doing a headstand. Whirry bleep-tastic nonsense with a warm fuzzy centre, ‘Rez’ builds steadily like a slow train coming until you’re numbly clawing at your own nipples with vinyl-encrusted fingers in wide-eyed remembrance of those MDMAzing days of yore.

Of course, the whole shebang is utterly useless if you’re not totally pickled on industrial-strength pharmaceuticals, but then so is tipping cows – and we all do that. Besides, once the track has rattled to a close and all that remains is the memory, are you left scratching your chin in beardy befuddlement or body-popping like Bobby Brown on day release? Thought so.

B-Side Sunday.

Churchill’s last words were “I’m bored with it all”, but not even the man who laughed in the face of animal rights by walking around with a little black dog on his shoulder could have been perspicacious enough to predict the glorious triumphalism of B-Side Sunday – the weekly ceremony that bridges the mainstream and the marginalised under the edifying glow of pop’s forgotten pantheon with such portentous magnificence that even the merest sliver could have made the great man leap from his death bed, score an ounce of devil’s dandruff and groove up the West End in search of some top-drawer boilers and a bit of nonsense. It’s your gumshoe sleuth in the house of pop, lurking in the dregs of 2008 to pull the faithful down the rabbit hole of sonic salvation in much the same way air rescue plucks stranded passengers from sinking ships. Like an American GI lost deep in the jungles of Vietnam who hasn’t heard that the war is long over, B-Side Sunday waits, knee-deep in the beat and far from the madding crowd, in order to keep you underground, overground and a-wombling free with the finest cuts of ‘Side Two’ salvation.

Famously protective of the integrity of their albums (if not their reunion tours..), those cheeky hard-rock pioneers Led Zeppelin released a scant amount of music outside their official LPs. ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’, the B-side of the ‘Immigrant Song’ single, was later tacked onto the post-breakup cashola comp ‘Coda’ when it was reissued on CD for the ‘Complete Studio Recordings’ box – but like a dog that was bought just for Christmas and is fated for the skip alongside with the Christmas tree, it deserved much more than the treatment it received – a fine example of exactly why our fave pervo, smack-rock herberts from planet indulgence could walk the tightrope between peerless brilliance and tragic wankerama with the type of hunkin’ carnal zest that could give your granny a hard on whilst making your grandad dance like a little girl and still have us clamouring for reunion tickets that have prices that look like telephone numbers. Sounding like it was recorded mid-orgasm, ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’ is a track that flirts drunkedly with you before nicking off with your best mate and self-esteem. You’ll keep coming back of course, cos secretly you think you deserve it.

But as you prance pompously in front of the bedroom mirror singing along in a vain attempt to shift all that turkey and your mind slowly turns to gaze wistfully into the rearview mirror of 2008, remember that it wouldn’t be New Year’s without the regrets. There is a Scandinavian word ‘Vermod’, that means to be simultaneously happy and sad, and although Monday morning may be coming like a jail on wheels, the New Year is hot on its heels – carrying with it another chance to make a fresh start on old habits once the blizzard of white vows have melted away. Until 2009, amen.

B-Side Sunday.

In this troubled world with its uncertain future, where you either hold ’em or fold ’em as the masses of sold souls hurl themselves, goggle-eyed and credit-cards wedged between every outstretched finger, into the fresh hell of another Xmas, it’s comforting to know that B-Side Sunday is there to soothe your furrowed brow and lift you above the season’s cloyingly chartbound sounds with another forgotten slice of ‘Side Two’ magic plucked from pop’s shiniest jewellery box. We would have picked an Xmas-y tune for the last B-Side Sunday before old Saint Nick goes about his business, but we are better than that and far less tawdrily predicable. So are you.

Timeless like a broken watch, B-Side Sunday stands as a God to the Godless in these irreligious last days, a Sabbath ceremony so naggingly addictive that you would gladly hock your granny down the knackers yard for just one more solitary second in the sanctifying light of its polysyllabic style and blue-sky outlook. Smoother than James Brown covered in babyoil and more wholesome than a truckload of brown bread; alongside doing its damnedest to get you a +1 with St. Peter at Heaven’s Gate, it’s here to cater for all your cheapest thrills with its swoony rushes of giddy bliss. And in accordance with those gabbled ideas, here comes ‘Patiently’ by Rilo Kiley – B-side from the rather lovely ‘It’s A Hit’ release.

Featuring the sugar-sweet sonorance of Jenny Lewis, who boasts a voice so effortlessly beatific it makes Bjork sound like a 60-a-day fishwife clearing her throat, the band push on with an heads-down indie bluster that somehow manages to come together to form much more than the sum of its parts. All in all, it’s more mischevously marvellous than an afternoon spent goosing Cat Deeley and, like losing your virginity, it’s a pleasurably sticky mess that’s over far too quickly.

So despite all the turkey and incoming relatives, enjoy December’s dregs while they last. ‘Cos next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Xmas spirit. Amen.

B-Side Sunday.

Returning once again in a blizzard of aural factoids that unfurl into a melodic pile-up lusher than Brian Wilson crashing an eighteen-wheeler into the Sydney Opera House, it’s B-Side Sunday! The holy ceremony that is kinder than every Samaritan ever but still knows how to rebel just right; having spent its halcyon youth beating all the other religions up in the playground for their dinner money before strutting off to smoke fags with Richard Dawkins behind the bike sheds. In short, it rocks like a bastard and swings like God’s own balls.

Bored with all the bad noise, those tracks that flit about with plenty of guile but nary a bollock between them? The ones that make deafness seem like a blessing rather than a curse? Then let B-Side Sunday carry your ears from the wrong side of the musical tracks into the holy light of the future with but a sprinkling of ‘Side Two’ magic. Despite entering its autumn years, like a dying firework, it can still sputter out some sparkle.

As bonus track on the recent misery-masterpiece that was ‘Our Love To Admire’, ‘Mind Over Time’ is cut with enough haughty menace to drop the knickers of even the sternest unbeliever at fifty feet. Proving that style never goes out of fashion, Interpol slink around swarthily for just long enough to convince you of their unerring brilliance before flitting off into the night as the cavernous applause echoes around the hollow B-Side Sunday church. It’s the perfect Christmas soundtrack for couples who aren’t going to make it as far as February. Amen.

B-Side Sunday.

Just as the Lord Mayor’s parade is always followed by the dustcart, so too is the chemical utopia of Saturday night succeeded by the cautious optimism of Sunday’s grey half-light. A time for introspection and reflection, a time for the semi-religious service with all the misplaced fervour of a threatening late-night phonecall to stick on its game face and pluck you from Mephistopheles’ slithering claws of damning temptation. B-Side Sunday may well throw itself headlong into the darkest heart of the blackest sin-fests every Sunday for little more than the reclaimation of a few sold souls, but it’s a price that the faithful are more than willing to pay – after all, darkness is where the stars are. Here to bring joy to the bereft by throwing a belated spotlight onto the once feted but soon forgotten, B-Side Sunday crawls to the pulpit once again to present a little more for little you. It’s the ceremony that’s so rammed with holy glory and spiritual enlightenment that it’s santifying light of undying divinity is beyond words. Almost.

When it comes to bleary-eyed indie misery, no one could quite capture the joy of shame and the shame of joy quite as well as those gloomy little heroes The Cure, who crafted several hundred thousand gems of noisy but delicate dreampop that never failed to leave you smiling until bits of brain started to drip from your nose. One such brain-dripper extraordinaire is ‘2 Late’, which originally washed up on the 1989 single ‘Lovesong’ in that brilliant period after Robert Smith grew his hair but before he piled on the flubber and began to resemble a bloated tranny: it’s the sound of The Cure in their pomp, swaggering up and down the indie thoroughfare with the sort of cocky assurance that would have made Muhammad Ali look like a bashful schoolgirl. ‘2 Late’ will have you staring in bewilderment at the speakers like a pigeon at a Gameboy before leaping joyfully into a sweaty foxtrot as the irregular lope of a chorus swills around your brain like a ferret in a washing machine. It’s almost enough to make you forget tomorrow is coming. Almost.

B-Side Sunday.

Bounding out of your monitor like yet another pop-up Viagra ad (but with infinitely more engorged earnestness), It’s B-Side Sunday! The weekly ritual that won’t take your no for an answer and still toils ceaselessly to drag your weathered soul from the pits of sin to the apex of holy retribution. The bi-fortnightly formal that understands that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and so brings forth loving bounties of pop for your spiritual salvation as you sit silently watching your life end one minute at a time.

The world is full of miserable sods and, luckily for us, most of them are songwriters. One such miserable sod who is more than a little special is Nick Drake, ambling into view with his laid-back stoner charm and the bambi-eyed brilliance of ‘Black Eyed Dog’ – a song so comfortingly confusing it’s like sitting in your favourite easychair and wondering whether you control your brain or your brain controls you, until you go cross-eyed and fall into a dribbily slumber. The aural equivalent of a mother’s hug on a cold day; it might sound essentially the same as everything else Drake released but, when the results are this good, it really doesn’t matter. Sure, Richard Dawkins and all the other godless cynics are already scribbling furious letters to Canned Applause pointing out that ‘Black Eyed Dog’ was not a B-Side but, like all religious ceremonies, B-Side Sunday hinges on a fair degree of hypocrisy and pointlessness. Besides, winter Sundays were made for Drake, and that’s good enough for us. Amen.

B-Side Sunday.

Leaping out of your web browser with more excitement than a puppydog that has inherited an Andrex factory, it’s B-Side Sunday! Like that elderly gentleman lurking in the playground whose underwear was always stuffed with sweets, B-Side Sunday is dark, complex and just a little dangerous – yet still simultaneously succeeds in being cuddiler than an army of Nans reading a bedtime story to a million slumbering kittens. Indeed, B-Side Sunday is all things to all men; and if it were a book, it would be rammed with all the steely wisdom and deathless aphorism of Steinbeck but still manage to be so damnedably erotic that you’d only ever want to read it one-handed. Packing more brooding intelligence than a spurned librarian, this week we see The Beach Boys venture forth with ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ – a fantastic slice of tender vulnerability wrapped up neatly in layers of candycane melody that is so gloriously mismatched it’s like watching Glasvegas tearfully flail around a children’s birthday party.

Having sat still on the flipside to ‘I Get Around’ for over 40 years, our Brian’s finest offcut is understandably eager to get going; and does so, with ample bravura and melancholic majesty. ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ serves as a shimmering reminder of a time when music still meant something to Mr. Wilson, before all the acid/birthday cake and he ended up sat alone in an anonymous Californian mansion with a bank balance bigger than the high score on God’s pinball machine. Still, it’s easy to lose yourself up in the eyrie, just look at Kayne West. In fact, don’t. Amen.