The Assembly ended up being a one-off idea, which is a shame, because this turned out to be one of the very last great singles of the synth-pop era. The idea behind the Assembly was that Vince Clarke was going to work with a revolving door of singers performing his own material. It made perfect sense, since his brief tenure in Depeche Mode (writing nearly all of their debut album Speak and Spell but leaving before the band managed to record its followup) and the short-lived duo Yazoo (with the underrated powerhouse singer Alison Moyet, who never again sounded as good as she did on their two albums Upstairs At Eric's and You and Me Both) suggested that maybe he wasn't the easiest guy to work with. But the Assembly only managed this one single with singer Feargal Sharkey before being consigned to the scrapheap of ideas. Sharkey, fresh from the recently dissolved Undertones, sings the song in the same Northern Irish Soul Man mode that he's used on The Sin of Pride, but it's a better fit here than it had been on that album. This song also easily beats the crap out of anything on Sharkey's two utterly wretched solo albums. While Sharkey went on to the ignominy of those albums, Clarke hooked up with an unknown singer named Andy Bell with whom he formed a new duo called Erasure; improbably, considering the instability of Clarke's earlier career, they're still releasing albums today.

I bought this 12" single from the cheap bins at University Records in Lubbock around 1986, to go with my U.K. 7" import copy of same. Black Images was local college station KTXT's soul and R&B show. That Sire's promo department pitched the single there instead of to the late-night new wave show The Outer Limits is probably a big hint as to why this single stiffed.

-Stewart Mason

While most people who weren't there will never perceive of it as a Golden Age of Pop Music (and I'm not sayin' it was either), it will nevertheless take years to track down all of the worthwhile stuff that came out of the "college rock" explosion that started when REM, Burma, The Replacements, The Dream Syndicate, etc. etc. inspired kids around the country to pick up guitars. Of the hundreds of bands that sprung up, there were plenty who were never able to secure significant distribution for their records. There were even more that never had the wherewithal to press up vinyl in the first place. Their legends survive on well-worn cassette tape stored in boxes in closets or in the memories of middle-aging former scenesters. (Here in my neighborhood there were some pretty damned terrific outfits like the Moving Van Goghs and Klyde Konnor who recorded minor masterpieces that exist only on cassette.)

The Keepers, from Boston by way of my wife's college town of Oxford, Ohio, are just another story of "Local Band Makes Beer Money, Not Much More" (the liners have all of the whys and wherefores of their lack of success), but fortunately Chuck Warner has issued this CD which compiles live stuff, radio tapes, and demos (as well as four tracks from an early vinyl release), that we might have a chance to hear an exceptional band that would have sounded great on a bill with the Dangtrippers or Wishniaks. And yeah, I think that's worth preserving.

Trivia: Band member Craig Stevens was the brother of the Cavedogs' Brian. Figures.

Band members: Do you know where the master tapes of your old band are? Maybe you should check on that.

I believe this was the Mekons' last release for Virgin, a pair of 7" singles featuring four songs, including the terrific "Teeth," a manic post-punk rocker with a killer fiddle line that's an early indicator of the country-influenced direction the group would take during their mid-'80s renaissance. I tracked this set down on eBay last year as a gift for my wife, who heard "Teeth" on her favorite radio show, exactly once, some 18-20 years ago, and had neither forgotten the song nor been able to locate this version of it. (An alternate take, "Another Set of Teeth," is a bonus track on some reissues of the Mekons' second album, Devils Rats and Piggies A Special Message From Godzilla.) That show, incidentally, is Little Hits reader and occasional commenter Jon Bernhardt's Friday morning indie-rock showcase Breakfast of Champions, on WMBR, Cambridge, 8-10 a.m. Eastern, archives and podcasts available at www.wmbr.org/shows/boc.html and highly recommended to anyone who's spent more than 10 minutes at this site.

My own extremely minor Mekons connection: for several years at an old freelance gig, Mekons/Rumour drummer Steve Goulding was one of my bosses. Steve would no doubt be the first to tell you that this barely even qualifies as name-dropping.

-Stewart Mason

People forget this these days, when ambient instrumental music tends to be disdainfully lumped in the "new age" bin and forgotten (and rightfully so, since much of it is genuinely awful), but in the late '70s and early '80s, this type of music was considered positively cutting-edge. It wasn't, of course -- see "Satie, Erik" -- but after Eno's early experiments in ambient music, many interesting post-post-punk albums (almost all of them in the UK and northern Europe) included those influences. One of my favorites is Virginia Astley's 1981 album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.



The daughter of British film composer Edwin Astley, Astley was all but unknown when she recorded this album, having only been part of the never-recorded cult trio the Ravishing Beauties (whose other two members, Kate St. John and Nicky Holland, went to some success as members of the Dream Academy and Tears For Fears, respectively, plus Nicky did a couple of pretty good AAA solo records) and doing some session work with her brother-in-law, some dude named Pete Townshend. That's Virginia's piano all over "Slit Skirts," for example. Supposedly originally written as demos for the Ravishing Beauties, the 10 songs on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure are piano solos with occasional woodwinds, backed with tapes of the sounds of the pastoral English countryside. "It's Too Hot To Sleep" is the closing song, fading out to the sound of insects cheeping through the night. Astley's classical training (and, perhaps, her father's cinematic influence) is obvious here: it's subtle, but there's a logical progression to this tune as opposed to the aimless meandering that so many similar records feature. Astley has maintained an extremely low-key career since her brief moment in the British indie spotlight, but this remains by far my favorite of her albums.

-Stewart Mason

Ah the early 80s, when the only cloud in the sky was the dark threat of nuclear holocaust. My tribute set would include "World Destruction" from the Afrika Bambaataa/John Lydon collaboration Timezone, "Party at Ground Zero" from Fishbone and... "Sally."

"Sally" is the record most emblematic of the Little Hits ethos for me – bought with nothing to go on besides its DIY cover art, but this radio-station reject turned out to be a rather worthy purchase. It's a new wave mash of ska rhythms and sassy female pop vocals, No Doubt decades early.

Hard to find out much about NRC, who also give their name spelled out as Nuclear Regulatory Commission. What info is there on the web indicates they were from Tennessee and earlier released an album and another single. Songwriting for Sally is credited on the label to "V. Kadavr."

-Zach Coleman

Personally, I tend to run hot and cold on Human Sexual Response, but they're one of my wife's absolute favorite bands. (One of her fonder concert memories is a show at the Paradise, our neighborhood rock club, where they gave away a dish drainer set from Woolworth's as a door prize.) Even as a fan of odd voices, I find Larry Bangor's affected, theatrical vocals kind of irritating on some of their songs, and I don't find the lyrics as transgressive as I think they were supposed to be, but then, it's been a quarter century and writing a song called "Buttfuck" maybe doesn't have quite the same zing these days. "Pound" is one of the several HSR tracks I really like, though, because it works up a good post-punk dance groove that showcases what a great drummer Malcolm Travis was. "Pound" is from their second album, 1982's In A Roman Mood, which for some reason has STILL never been reissued on CD, but this is an extended dance mix taken from the b-side of the UK single of "Andy Fell."

-Stewart Mason

It was announced today (Saturday, May 6, 2006) that Grant McLennan died in his sleep this morning. There's been no further word, although little is needed. I think The Go-Betweens are a staple band for most of us here at Little Hits, one that's so much a part of our musical lives that we don't even necessarily think of them as one of our "favorite" bands. Our thoughts go to Grant's family and friends.

-Stewart Mason

I bought Before Hollywood in a used record store in Wichita over 20 years ago. I was quite surprised to find it there; I had read a glowing review of it in Trouser Press, but had just assumed that I would never actually see a copy. It is an uncommon treasure indeed, one of those rare records that grows in richness and beauty with every listen over a period of years, a characteristic it shares with virtually all of the Go-Betweens' astounding catalog. There's magic in here...

-Jon Harrison