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Highlight of the year?
Easy!
Julian Cope playing to a small gathering on an extremely cold October evening in Liverpool's Mathew Street. Not a venue in Mathew Street I should add, because this was part of the former Teardrop Explodes frontman's three day busking tour and this was a street performance with Cope playing a magical sixteen minute version of the Teardrop's favourite, Sleeping Gas.
You don't believe how good it was?
Well, think of your favourite living artist and imagine being one of just twenty or thirty people watching he or she play a lengthy version of their first ever single in the street. That way you'll get some idea of how utterly brilliant this appeared to me…
The biggest surprise of 2008, musically speaking, is that Bruce Springsteen was responsible for my favourite single of the year, Dream Baby Dream. Now, being a non-betting person, I don't know what the odds on this were, but if I tell you that the last Brucie album I bought was Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and that the last one I actually liked was Born To Run (when I was still in high school!), you will get the general idea. This version of the Suicide classic (as part of an going tribute to Alan Vega that has also seen releases by The Horrors, Primal Scream, and Lydia Lunch), however, truly is one of the greatest things I have heard all year. That Springsteen should be covering a Suicide track at all seems, on face value, something of a surprise, but get beyond the initial shock and perhaps it makes more sense. Two men of a similar age from a similar part of the world, who presumably grew up on the same diet of rock'n'roll. It's just that when it came to making their own music they went in different directions, whilst never totally losing that early rock'n'roll influence. Whatever. Bruce Springsteen took a great song and made it his own. It's already shaping up to be one of the great cover versions for me.
Anyway, enough of all that. Here's the list business… |
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