Pink Flying Saucers Over The Southern Alps

Very smart clean vinyl with a great cover.

I dug out Pink Flying Saucers Over The Southern Alps the other day.

Check this out:

Side 1.
The Chills, Heavenly Pop Hit
Tall Dwarfs, Sign The Dotted Line
J.P.S.. Experience, Shadows
Able Tasmans, Hold Me 1
The Clean, Draw(in)g To A (W)hole
Verlaines, The Funniest Thing
The Bats, It’s A Lie
David Kilgour, Uplift

Side 2.
Chris Knox, Meat
Straitjacket Fits, Bad Note For A Heart
3Ds, Sing-Song
Headless Chickens, Railway Surfing
Bailter Space, Fish Eye
S*P*U*D – Go Ape
Skeptics – Sheen of Gold

Now that’s a great album. Yes, compilation. And yes perhaps compilations don’t – quite – count. They’re not supposed to be in lists of great albums, technically. But this is my thing. I sit up to write this. I wonder about what I’m going to say each week. And this week I couldn’t move past this album. I picked it up a few years ago in a second-hand store. I remember it from back when it was released; a revelation to listen to in a friend’s garage. Never bought a copy myself, almost didn’t need to – these songs were all just imprinted on my brain. After one, two, three listens they were there. A few other great Nun compilations deserve a mention. I still have the CD of “Pop-Eyed” a good NZ music comp from back in the mid/late-90s. Some wonderful stuff on there too.

But this to me is it.

Because apart from anything else, 1991 was about the year I really discovered the music that Flying Nun was offering, had offered. And that music – then, as now – some of it was/is the best  music I’ve ever heard in my life.

Like any good compilation of assorted artists this sent me off to find albums, to see bands live, to get obsessed with particular artists. But I always returned to this little sampler, this catch-all that tells its own story.