If I was making you a compilation tape for you right now…

… and I’m not (unless your name is Sheila Sherer), then it would include the following songs, which I have helpfully linked to their youtube videos. (Obviously, I know no-one makes compilation tapes anymore, readers. It’s an editorial device!)

1 Flipper’s Guitar
So imagine if some Japanese teenagers had been marooned on an indie island with only access to early 80s uber-English uber-indie English indie pop (or – possibly – uber-Scottish uber-indie etc etc)? I can see ITV queuing up to make that series. Anyway, Flipper’s Guitar sound like they went thru this experience and, as a consequence, make music that sounds like it’s from a parallel universe where Edwyn Collins and Nick Heyward are treated as Gods. One of my Japanese associates put them on a comp tape for me back in the day, now you can see a video of theirs on youtube. It’s ace and involves trains.

2 Emma Pollock
She was in the Delgados. Don’t know anything about them but I can’t stop playing this. Listen to it and tell me if I’m wrong.

3 Jonathan Richman
If you don’t know JR’s stuff and you’re on this site – well, you’re in for a big treat. It took me about 15 years between being recommended his stuff and getting hold of it in bulk. Don’t make the same mistake. I urge you. It’s slightly hit-and-miss but the best of it is heartfelt, whimsical, wisely childlike, instantly catchy and the absolute template for about a million indie bands, even if they don’t know it.

4 Lucky Soul
South London’s answer to Blondie/Dusty. Still waiting for the great leap forwards. Very good live. Go and see them if you get the chance.

5 Twinkle
Schoolgirl pop genius, covering the heart-breakingly-bleak-yet-somehow-uplifting song made famous by the Toys. No, pedants: pop genius doesn’t require the ability, as conventionally defined, to sing in tune. Keep up. Someone should revive her career in a Smiths/Sandie Shaw-type way. Surely. But who? (She did make some kind of comeback in the early 80s with some records that absolutely no-one bought but that sound to me a lot like some kind of concept album by Kirsty MacColl.)

6 The Pipettes
Our sort of stuff. And Terry Wogan plays it. So that’s good. You don’t want to be indie-obscure forever. Do you? (I wonder if they have ever heard the Poni Tails – brilliant, definitive, late-50s US girl-harmony group. We stumbled across a Poni Tails LP in Levenshulme in about 1993 and we liked it very much. Not apparently available on youtube or itunes, sadly).

7 Lorraine Silver
The comments section, normally the repository of highbrow debate between professors with limited available time, includes some buffoon saying this can’t be a northern soul classic because it’s too pop. His poor wife.

8 Pastel Collision
Because it really was our dream to be put as the obscure-but-brilliant-what’s-this-song track on people’s compilation tapes. Course I know you can do compilations of your recommended songs on itunes these days. But who would trust my taste so completely as to spend £15.60 on downloading some random mp3s?