Your mission, if you wish to accept it. (listening to: Belle & Sebastian / If You're Feeling Sinister)

Okay i've decided that the majority of music i'm going to be posting is by bands that got played by Steve Lamacq (and a little by John Peel) during the 1990's and early 2000's before Steve got replaced by the vastly inferior Zane Lowe. When I was at school i'd spend every single night for about 5 years listening to Steve's show on Radio 1, and have a great nostalgia for it as at that time I was really starting to get into music in a big way. Since then a lot has changed in the music world, no more Lamacq on radio 1, no more Peely, no more Melody Maker, mp3 is everywhere and most of my music info i get online.

A while back on the Drowned In Sound message boards (see link on right) there was a huge thread about forgotten bands, and it turned out that they were far far more than I thought people could possibly remember. So many bands that released two or three singles (the first usually on Fierce Panda or Org) and swiftly disappeared (except from record collections). I thought as there are already a bunch of great blogs distributing John Peel's shows, I would use mine to post music by some of the bands that in my mind are completely tied to the Evening Session.

Granted some of the forgotten bands were just crap and didn't deserve to get heard in the first place, but there are a ton of great ones who just never made it, maybe due to record company problems, splitting up, or just because they never gained a big enough audience. It was pretty clear from the original Drowned In Sound discussion that some of the songs that really defined our collective teenage (or non-teenage!) years were by bands that were amongst the least successful and the most quickly forgotten.

I'll be going through all my cd singles and vinyl from the period and posting stuff, as well as trying to go through my old tapes of session tracks to put some of them online. Now I don't have songs by all the bands i'm going to list below (a lot of the names are from the DIS thread), so if anyone out there can help, please don't be afraid to get in touch, my email addy is on the left and my msn username is femtex_bomb @ hotmail.com (remove gaps!). I need any songs from bands that featured on Lamacq or Peel, released records in Fierce Panda in the 90s, featured in NME or Melody Maker and promptly disappeared, etc, etc. Except no Terris, and no Gay Dad.

To expand, as well as some session tracks by bands that you might remember (idlewild, super furrys, blur, pulp, etc), these are some of the bands you might see songs from in the future (depending partly on how good they sound now and not how they sound in my memory):

Angelica, Archie & The Instincts, Arturo, Bellatrix, Cable, Carrie, Cay, China Drum, Coin-Op, CO.UK, Crackout, Crashland, The Crocketts, Cube, Daisy Chainsaw, Dark Star, Fixed Stars, Fluffy, Fungus, Fuzz Light Years, Gene, Girl Of The Year, Halo, Jack, The Junket, Kerbdog, The Kustom Built, Liberty 37, Llama Farmers, Lodger, Marion, Midget, Mo-ho-bi-sho-pi, My Vitriol, New Electrics, Ooberman, The Parkinsons, Perfume, The Pin-Ups, Radish, Redefine, Rialto, Rootjose, The Smiles, Snug, Sona Fariq, Sonic Death Monkey, Starries, Stony Sleep, Straw, Stroke, Symposium, Tampasm, Thrum, Tiger, Turn, Twist, Ultrasound, Vyvyvan, Warm Jets, Whipping Boy, Whiteout, Wilt, Younger Younger 28's

(oh, and apologies for any of these bands that still exist, ahem.)