What the Caked Crusader chose to bake to this week (15 Mar 2008)

Some bands could only ever come from certain places – for instance, could the Beach Boys be anything other than Californian? Could Kraftwerk be anything but German? And could the Housemartins be anything but British? I listened to The Housemartins this week for the first time in perhaps 15 years and the jangly pop coupled with eccentric lyrics were still as alluring as ever. Wikipedia describes their lyrics as an odd mixture of Marxist politics and Christianity – which makes it sound rather dull - trust me, it isn’t. And I’m not sure that in my “yoof” when I played their records to death (ah, vinyl – those were the days!) either of these themes would have registered with me. All I remember are the jangly guitars and the rather strange looking group of men, all of whom looked like they could be time travellers from a 1950s gritty Northern TV drama.

You can’t go wrong with either of their albums – London 0 Hull 4, or The People who Grinned themselves to Death.

Strangely, I never liked anything any of the members went on to do post-Housemartins namely, The Beautiful South and Fatboy Slim. Music, tsk – it’s a funny old game......