We dialled up the Melochronometer, the valves warmed to their friendly amber glow, and when the digital readout stopped flickering it had settled on 1993. What a place to land. Out in the world the dinosaurs had arrived — Jurassic Park took nine hundred and fourteen million US dollars and became, for a while, the biggest film ever made. On American television a bar in Boston shut its doors for the last time, and Cheers signed off in front of sixty-four percent of every set switched on that night; four months later a new Friday-night show about two FBI agents and some unexplained lights quietly began. Down here the charts had gone unexpectedly, gloriously tropical: the biggest-selling single of the New Zealand year was UB40’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, with Snow, Shaggy and Inner Circle all crowding in behind it. And in July, in Wellington, four young men called Shihad put out a debut album called Churn, produced by Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke, which sounded like absolutely nothing else on the radio.
The records were the interesting part, as ever. This ten-song trip has two blokes from London who got caught stealing from a jazz label and were handed the keys to the vault by way of apology; an album named after an unmarked dirt road; and a concept record about a steam-powered car with a vegetable garden in the back. There’s a hit built on a bass slide that doesn’t quite make it to the note, and another one built on a phrase a singer picked up from her mum. Brian Eno turns up on a Canadian record, a band who once made an album standing in a circle round a single microphone in a Toronto church reach for a power chord instead, another band spend two full days on one bass sound and name the album after the regret, there’s a pop single in five beats to the bar, and at the very end Virginia Woolf quietly murders an angel. Two of the ten were made by women who used to be in the same band — but that’s what the show is for. Ten songs, one year, and a reminder that in 1993 the best records were usually the ones nobody had planned.
Tracklist
- US3, Rahsaan, Gerard Presencer — Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) — Flip Fantasia: Hits & Remixes
- Texas — You Owe It All To Me — Ricks Road
- Donald Fagen — Tomorrow's Girls — Kamakiriad
- Jane Siberry — Sail Across the Water — When I Was A Boy
- The Breeders — Cannonball — Last Splash
- Jellyfish — New Mistake — Spilt Milk (Remastered)
- Cowboy Junkies — Anniversary Song — Pale Sun Crescent Moon
- Belly — Feed the Tree — Star
- Sting — Seven Days — Ten Summoner's Tales
- The Story — So Much Mine — Angel In The House
