Rough Trade Shops is releasing a compilation album of the best music released by the indie label over the past 40 years.
Entitled Recorded At The Automat: The Best of Rough Trade Records, the album, which is released March 23, will cover the early years of Rough Trade, when Geoff Travis first started the label in 1978, later to be joined by Jeannette Lee. It includes the likes of Swell Maps, Robert Wyatt, The Fall, The Raincoats, The Smiths, The Strokes, the Libertines, Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens.
Historically, AC/DC have triumphed making the best of a bad job. When Bon Scott, the charismatic singer who fronted the band on their rise to fame died in London in 1980, they responded the only way they could. Namely, heavily: employing a new singer, and turning Back In Black into one of the 10 biggest-selling albums of all time. “Oblique strategies” aren’t something you imagine the band have a lot of time for, but their pragmatic problem-solving has often yielded spectacular results.
Tuesday night, I went to see the War On Drugs guy again. I mention this, in relation to Mark Kozelek and Sun Kil Moon's Hackney show, because Kozelek doesn't stop mentioning it himself for much of the two and a half hour show; a show which, by the by, is one of the very best and certainly most surprising I've ever seen him play.
