Bobby Gillespie (frontman of Primal Scream) released a new compilation late last year -
And as befits a dude with a serious reputation as a selector it’s a good one. Like the title says – a selection for back at yours or the day after. It covers a lot of names you should drop (from Gram Parsons to Skip Spence), has a Beach Boys dream segment, and starts with the lysergic drag of the 13th Floor Elevators. We might quibble whether the Kristofferson version of the title track is better than Hank Ballard’s but that’s just us.
It did make us wonder if this new product was better than the near legendary Gillespie C-90 cassette done for Select magazine in the UK at the height of Screamadelica madness (1992 to be exact), a mix which is sometimes referred to as "Punks, Drunks & Junkies". T
he mix is a bit edgier than his new mellowed out one, unsurprisingly though as he’d just finished the very fucked up Dixie-Narco EP and those were desperate times.You can find Bobby’s notes for it here and the tracklist was as follows...
Better yet, someone has re-compiled it all into a Spotify playlist for your streaming pleasure here.
The story was that the original tape (as made and decorated by BG) was given as a competition prize following the article in the magazine to an actual reader and turned up intact years later which feels more like an urban myth than fact.
But don’t you wish (nostalgically) for mix tapes again? Somehow they're better than playlists. And don’t you wish you could find some of the ones that inspired you? And that they weren’t all lost or de-spooled. And if you still have them, maybe you should tell us about them. We'd be all ears.
-TH
