Sunday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

44. BOSTON: More Than A Feeling/ Smokin' (1976) Masterminded by Tom Scholz, the Brian Wilson of AOR, this delightful paean to the redemptive power of music and lost love is the definitive slice of hair metal for those who own no heavy rock; a joyous rapture of three-and-a-half minutes of pop beauty. With its repeated suggestion to, "hide in my music...

CULT RECORD: DE LA SOUL:"THREE FEET HIGH AND RISING" (1989)

De La Soul appeared on the scene in 1989 as the polar opposite of Public Enemy and N.W.A., proclaiming a "Daisy Age" and sampling Schoolhouse Rock, Johnny Cash, and learn-French-yourself records. The music steered by producer Prince Paul of Stetsasonic, was rooted on black pop at its most cheery and integrationist: doo-wop, '60s soul, and, most presciently,...

CULT MOVIE: SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943)

The ambiguous blend of good and evil so suited Hitchcock that many of his films could have been mentioned here.(His other classic noirs include Notorious and The Wrong Man, a fine tale about a family wrecked by police procedure.) In this film, Wright plays a bored young girl called Charlie who invites her uncle Charlie (Cotten) to visit but soon discovers...

Saturday

CULT RECORD: CAN: " TAGO MAGO " (1971)

In creating a unique sound-world of wanderlust and wonderment, Can is up there with Hendrix and Miles Davis. Each phase of Can's meandering career has opened up vast vistas of fertile terrain for subsequent bands to colonize and cultivate: avant-funk( Talking Heads, PiL, Cabaret Voltaire), trance-rock (Loop, f/i, Cul de Sac), lo-fi (Pavement, Thinking...

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

46. CURTIS MAYFIELD: Move On Up/ Beautiful Brother Of Mine/ Give It Up (1971) Lifted from the Gentle Genius' eponymous debut LP, this eloquent, uplifting anthem for black empowerment proved a big hit with the British public, rising to number 12 in the UK charts in 1971. Edited down to just under three minutes from its original eight-minute album length,...

CULT MOVIE: THE EVIL-DOLL ( 1936 )

Best known for Freaks and 1931's Dracula, director Browning's 20-year career also included this oddity. His last but one film before retirement, it was originally titled The Witch Of Timbuctoo but the title was changed when the script was altered because of censorship concerns.. Co-written by actor/director Erich von Stroheim, the story follows a Devil's...

Friday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

48. SMALL FACES: Tin Soldier/ I Feel Much Better (1967) Many's the fan who fantasizes about a whole Small Faces album the calibre of this two-headed monster. Their masterpiece compresses everything they excelled at into a fiery three minutes, 20 seconds. From Steve Marriott's count-in to Kenny Jones' conclusive tumble of tom-toms, it's a feral rock'n'soul...

CULT RECORD: PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.: METAL BOX (1979)

If Johnny Rotten had gotten his way, the Sex Pistols would never have made the thuggish but populist hard rock that make them such a world-historical force. Instead of mod, glam and proto-punk ( the Stooges, New York Dolls), the Pistols would have been informed by his favored listening: Captain Beefheart's fractured avant-boogie, Peter Hammill's art-rock...

CULT MOVIE: ONCE UPON TIME IN AMERICA (1984)

Sergio Leone's final film as director has never yet been released in its entirety. Noodles (De Niro) and Max (Woods) are childhood friends who rise in the Jewish mafia but whose friendship turns to betrayal. An attempt to edit the film into chronological sequence proved disastrous. Leone himself edited the 225-minute version, and it is only in this...

Thursday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

50. DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: Son Of A Preacher Man/ Just A Little Lovin'(Early In The Morning) (1968) The greatest white soul singer? Dusty's performance here made her a contender. John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins' song was first offered to Aretha Franklin, who turned it down. Recorded by Dusty as part of her Dusty In Memphis sessions, it proved an unbeatable...

CULT RECORD: THE RUNAWAYS: "THE RUNAWAYS" (1976)

When The Runaways released their debut in 1976, they had no company. In addition to gender, youth also set them apart. At 17, lead guitarist Lita Ford was the group's senior member; singer Cherie Currie, rhythm guitarist Joan Jett, bassist Jackie  Fox and drummer Sandy West were each a not-so-sweet 16. Stoner girls across America didn't have access...

CULT MOVIE: HOOP DREAMS (1994)

Ambitious film spanning five years in the lives of two basketball hopefuls from inner city Chicago. In the cut-throat world of US sports, both boys make it into an elite high school which produced one of their idols, NBA star Isiah Thomas, but have trouble with grades and their home lives. Their longing to escape and become NBA stars is palpable,...

TOP TEN: TANYA DONELLY (BELLY)

1. MARY MARGARET O'HARA: "Miss America" 2. X: "Under the Big Black Sun" 3. BEATLES: "The Beatles" 4. ENNIO MORRICONE: "The Mission" 5. MADDER ROSE: "Panic On" 6. NEIL YOUNG: "Harvest" 7. PATTI SMITH: "Horses" 8. NICK DRAKE: "Time of No Reply" 9. YMA SUMAC: " Xtabay" 10. HARRY NILSSON: " The Poin...

Wednesday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

52. MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS: Heatwave/ A Love Like Yours(Don't Come Knocking Every Day) (1963) Heatwave has it all-- a smouldering lyric penned by Holland-Dozier-Holland, a fervid call and response from Martha Reeves, Rosalind Ashford and Annette Sreling Beard, a pounding beat motored by baritone sax and hand claps-- and it earned the trio their first...

CULT RECORD: SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: " THE SCREAM " (1978)

1976: Siouxsie Sioux is the queen of punk; a style-terrorist whose swastikas and fetishistic peek-a-boo bustiers are a kick in the eye of straight society; an ice bitch whose skull-piercing howl obliterates the legacy of all the traditional, wispy songstresses who came before. 1991: Siouxsie is a simpering sophisticate, dolled up like some Hollywood...

CULT MOVIE: MARIHUANA (1935)

The fact that this is also known as Marihuana, The Weed With Roots In Hell, will give you an idea of the film's attitude to an illicit spliff. A reporter goes undercover to investigate a dope ring when a bunch of teenagers become addicted to marihuana after just a single toke. As a direct result, an innocent summer becomes awash with drowning, alcoholism,...

Tuesday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

54. BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS: Jamming/ Punky Reggae Party (1977) That there's hardly anything to Jamming is somehow central to its appeal. The song's insistent hook ensured that it was the first Bob Marley record to cross into the clubs and his first Top 10 single. No less ground-breaking was its B-side. Painstakingly assembled by Lee "Scratch"...

CULT RECORD: MOTORHEAD: "ACE OF SPADES" (1980)

Igor Stravinsky once remarked that the baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi didn't write 685 concertos, he wrote one concerto 685 times. It could be similarly argued that every hemi-semi-demiquaver recorded by Motorhead in its 20 years of existance is a minor variation on the group's triple-speed signature song "Motorhead," written by Lemmy Kilmister shortly...

CULT MOVIE: SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Wilder's classic movie straddles many genres. Film writer Richard Corliss calls it "the definitive Hollywood horror movie" but it can also be watched as a straight satire of the movie industry and/or the greatest film noir. The film could have been even darker in tone; it originally opened with Holden as one of a number of talking corpses, narrating...

TOP TEN: STEVE TURNER (MUDHONEY)

1. PAGANS: "Buried Alive" 2. ALEXANDER "SKIP" SPENCE: "Oar" 3. BLACK FLAG: "Jealous Again" and "Nervous Breakdown" EPs 4. LINK WRAY: "Early Recordings" 5. VARIOUS ARTISTS: "Ear Piercing Punk" 6. VARIOUS ARTISTS: "Scum of the Earth" Part 2 7. SPACEMEN 3: "Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to" 8. CHRIS KNOX: "Croaker" 9. FEEDTIME: "Shovel" 10....

Monday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

56. SLADE: Cum On Feel The Noize/ I'm Mee Now An'That's Orl (1973) The first single to enter the chart at number 1 since The Beatles' Get Back, was written by Noddy Holder about how it felt to be on the stage with the biggest band in the land. Like the earlier hit, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, it attempted to encapsulate the ear-shredding mayhem at Slade...

CULT RECORD: THE ONLY ONES: "THE ONLY ONES" (1978)

At the height of the British punk explosion in 1978, the Only Ones opened their debut album with " The Whole of the Law," a defiantly sentimental love ballad tugged along by a cheesy lounge saxophone and singer/songwriter Peter Perret's tragic-romantic lyrics. Live, the band's leopard skin vests, furs, pink top hats, sharkskin smoking jackets, and...

CULT MOVIE: EVIL DEAD (1982)

The Evil Dead had a budget of less than $100,000 and was essentially director Raimi, his brother Ted and a group of mates ( including star Cambell and then-assistant film editor Joel Coen) making a jokey horror movie set in a woodland cabin. Despite the lack of cash, they produced some great effects as Cambell and pals accidentally unleash abominable...

Sunday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

58. MUDDY WATERS: Mannish Boy/ Young Fashioned Ways (1955) Raw, earthy and hip-grindingly lubricous, Mannish Boy epitomises Muddy Waters' own vodoo-infused band of Windy City electric blues. The record--the foundation of modern rock music and inspiration for the '60s British blues boom-- begins with an  exultant whoop followed by Waters' gravelled...

CULT RECORD: MOBY:" EVERYTHING IS WRONG" (1995)

Techno's tug for its fans, as far as i can tell from gazing into their smooth, pierced, trusting faces (while we're all high on drugs), is that it imagines the sound of a huge, cozy waiting room where we can all dance and relax until capitalism finally exhausts itself. It's incredibly passive-aggressive music-- harsh sounds for gentle souls. The noise...

CULT MOVIE: CALIGULA (1980)

For all the furore surrounding this movie, the end product is less entertaining than the documentary The Making Of Caligula, which is included on the DVD re-release, and nowhere near as strange as the real emperor's four-year reign. The chaos surrounding this film, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's bid to prove that porn really is an art form, can...

Saturday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

60. CARLY SIMON: You're So Vain/ His Friends Are More Than Fond Of Robin (1972) Tough and atmospheric to the point of being scary, You're So Vain deserves to be feminist anthem number 1 rather than Gloria Gaynor's flouncy I Will Survive. Almost every line sounds like one you'd only think up five minutes after you wanted to say it-- "some underworld...

CULT RECORD: BIG STAR: "RADIO CITY" (1974)

Unlike that Velvet Underground saying, everyone who heard Big Star didn't go out and form a band. They just became critics. Or critic-practitioners like Greg Dulli, the dB'S, and the Bangles. Revisionists insisting that "September Gurls" was pop's summit, and not the jangly equivalent of learning calculus. ( On Live, taped after Radio City, a DJ asks,...

CULT MOVIE: RAGING BULL (1980)

Raging Bull is about boxing in the same way that Battleship Potemkin is about a boat. Like all the best sport films, the sport itself is a vehicle for exploring more complex themes, not least the relationship between masculinity and violence. Raging Bull shows its subject Jake LaMotta, warts and all, as a figure whose capacity for violence in the ring...

Friday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

62. SQUEEZE: Up The Junction/ It's So Dirty (1979) " I never thought it would happen, with me and the girl from Clapham" -- surely the finest opening line ever? Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook's distillatuion of a loser's life into three minutes of impeccably rhymed couplets is kitchen sink drama of the bleakest kind, despite the tense-troubling final...

CULT RECORD: PRINCE: " DIRTY MIND" (1980)

Think of him as the Picasso of pop. Recall that film of Picasso at work: just one curved river of a stroke on canvas and the artist's presence is unmistakable; a second's splash of Prince's keyboard whoopee cushioned against a syn-bass and a falsetto squeal provokes exactly the same instant recognition-- the master's line. Picasso had as acute a memory...

CULT MOVIE: ED WOOD (1994)

Two cheers for Burton for not making this a camp classic but instead an affectionately amusing piece about the man who has posthumously been dubbed the worst film director in the world. It would have been easy to camp it up: Wood (Depp) was a director, after all, who claimed to have gone to war wearimg panties and bra underneath his uniform. A director...

Thursday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

64. THE SPECIALS FEATURING RICO: A Message To You Rudy/ Nite Klub (1979) Their debut albun would include cover tributes to Jamaican heroes The Maytals and Prince Buster, but this cut was originally made in England by Robert Livingstone Thompson, aka Dandy Livingstone, in 1967. The Specials' version was more low-slung, showing off trombonist Rico Rodriguez,...

CULT RECORD: NICK DRAKE: " PINK MOON " (1972)

As lovely in photographs as Ophelia about to float down the river, with the gentlest voice and most delicate sense of phrasing to come out of the Renaisance Faire of late '60s English folk rock, Nick Drake is a perfect muse for arty girls and boys just cracking their first volume of Keats's collected letters. It helps that Drake died in the dark bloom...

CULT MOVIE: GLORIA (1980)

Although the idea of teaming tough-talking gangsters with smart-mouthed kids isn't exactly new territory,  the casting of Gena Rowlands ( the late director's wife) as the tough-talking  gangster's moll is what carries the film. A family is wiped out by the mob for giving information to the FBI, with only the seven-year-old son surviving....

Wednesday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

66. THE FLAMINGOS: I Only Have Eyes For You/ Goodnight Sweetheart (1959) The Flamingos had been recording since 1953, cutting records for Chance, Parrot, Checker and Decca with varying degrees of success, usually concentrating on original material. But when the Chicago-based vocal group signed for George Goldner's End label in 1958, Goldner suggested...

CULT RECORD: ULTRAMAGNETIC MCS: "CRITICAL BEATDOWN" (1988)

In the infinitely bizzare and colorful pantheon of hip hop, the Ultramagnetic MCs stick out like a caucasian at a Farrakhan rally. Combining an old-school Bronx flavor with futuristic funk and dusted, off-beat rhyme flows-- patented by the master of metaphor Kool Keith (a.k.a. Rhythm X)--these space cowboys have always marched to their own drummer,...

CULT MOVIE: DEATH IN VENICE (1971)

A work of genius or an extra large helping of Venetian ham? Visconti's film tends to be underrated by those who overrate the Thomas Mann book it was based on-- it is not, to be frank, one of the author's major works. The writer in the original is here portrayed as a composer-- loosely based on Mahler, whose music adds much to the film's operatic effect--...

Tuesday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

68. THE WHITE STRIPES: Fell In Love With A Girl/ I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself (2002) The Stripes at their most bubblegum and jukebox friendly, but also at their rawest- not for nothing did a Beeb advert use the track as an example of how one of their headstrong radio jocks might scare people at a wedding party. Behind the title, it is deceptively...

CULT RECORD: PERE UBU: "THE DUB DANCE" (1978)

Before punk hardly even existed Pere Ubu had gone a step further. The basslines are filaments of dub, coated and werded-out by synthesizer artist Allen Ravenstine; the guitars lurch in sluggish psychedelia as if under the influense of Can; big David Thomas's birdy voice is a freaky sideshow of arresting seriousness. But put together, you don't hear...

CULT MOVIE: BARTON FINK (1991)

This Coen brothers film works as a very sharply observed black comedy complete with their favourite vignette of a leader with a Hitler complex: a tyrant behind a desk at the other end of the room from the viewer and the central character. Goodman is a joy to behold in the kind of ( the smoothtalking, unreasonably affable psycho) he would reprise in...

Monday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

70. RAY PRICE: Crazy Arms/ You Done Me Wrong (1958) At a time when his contemporaries were busy reinventing themselves as rockabillies, Ray Price took a stand with his first glorious beer joint shuffle, and it knocked Blue Suede Shoes from the top of the US country charts. A record that reeked of stale cigarettes and beer puke, it almost poured its...

CULT RECORD: CYPRESS HILL: "CYPRESS HILL" (1991)

Like Public Enemy, Cypress Hill arrived with an impressive enough mix of noise and menace to change the soundtrack of hip hop. The difference is, what Cypress brought really sounded like noise. While Chuck D and Flaw drove a finetuned, James Brown-powered 98 Olds, these cartoon-voiced gangstas did their drive-bys in a low-rider Chitty Chitty Bang Bang....

CULT MOVIE: FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1997)

Too weird to win over the masses, too rare to sink without trace, Gilliam's Fear And Loathing... is a healthily bizarre curio. Devotees of writer Hunter S Thompson's account of his drug-fuelled voyage around Vegas with his Samoan attorney will love this, even though it can't quite capture the laugh-out-loud quality of the book. But if you don't like...

Sunday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

72. THE CHANTAYS: Pipeline/ Move it (1963) It's hard to believe that this supremely laid back instrumental was originally called 44 Magnum. Released on the tiny US Downey label as the B-side to an all-but-forgotten vocal track, Pipeline was flipped on its Dot re-issue, to catch hold of California's emerging surf music craze. Even today, Pipeline remains...

CULT RECORD: NUGGETS (1972)

There has been an incredible boom in reissues of old psych crap these last few years, but the truth is that this trend is three decades old. In 1972, Lenny Kaye put together a two-LP compilation for Elektra called Nuggets. It pulled together a variety of "lost classics" from the '60s by bands such as Texas's 13th Floor Elevators, California's Count...

CULT MOVIE: THE EXORCIST (1973)

Regularly voted the scariest movie of all time, thanks to William Friedkin's taut direction, wonderful performances ( especially from Jason Miller as Father Karras and Burstyn, who damaged her spine carrying out one effect) and the gripping source material by William Peter Blatty (who has a cameo as the producer of the film Burstyn is acting in). Many...

Saturday

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

74. HARRY J ALL STARS: Liquidator/ La La Always Stay (by Glen And Dave) (1969) When fledgling producer Harry Johnson recorded one of his first tunes at Studio One's facilities in Brentford Road, Kingston, little did he know that his work would soon be celebrated by a scene of shaven-headed white boys in London. Yet Liquidator was the archetype of skinhead...

CULT RECORD: MARIANNE FAITHFULL: "BROKEN ENGLISH" (1979)

"I saw an angel with big tits and I signed her." Not exactly the epigram most young women would want to be remembered by, but one which Marianne Faithfull-- the "angel" in question according to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, circa 1967-- has utilized for her own purposes ever since, turning herself into another kind of cliche altogether....

CULT MOVIE: CITIZEN CANE (1941)

One of the many remarkable achievements of this all-time great is to define the way we see media moguls. Not just William Randolph Hearst, whose life partly inspired this, but also Murdoch and Maxwell; all are seen through the refracting lens of Welles' fictional creation. Yet Welles (and writer Herman Mankiewicz) also smuggled details of the star's...

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