Wiped out

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

It's getting on for thirty years (okay, it's 29) since I first played Wipeout with my excellent friend Tim. The basic premise was ... well, you raced anti-gravity ships around tracks, picking up weapons and other enhancements as you went, and tried very hard to be faster than the computer-driven opponents. The graphics and speed of play were literal game changers back in 1995. As was the soundtrack, which included a selection of high-octance dance tracks. We almost always raced to Chemical Beats by The Chemical Brothers, over and over again, for hours at a time, into the small of the night.

There's a moment from about 2:10 in this where Ed and Tom introduce a sort of protracted phasing of the top-line melody, producing something akin to a Doppler shift. On our favourite race track, this would usually line up with an echoey section of tunnel, in a way that just seemed so very ... right.

Two years later, the sequel came out (Wipeout 2097) and from then we raced almost exclusively to an instrumental mix of Firestarter by The Prodigy. A better track, in most objective terms, but not quite as good for anti-gravity racing (although the intro was great on the starting grid). This little clip gives you a sense of late 90s gameplay, although I can't help but point out the player here, whoever they are, misses the turbo start off the line. Rookie error.

Finally

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

I've been blogging for nineteen and a half years and yet somehow this is the first time I've managed to feature this track on the 9th of September. Honestly. Someone should have a word with my line-manager.

All the way from 1983, this is 9-9 by REM. To my ears it still sounds fresh, different and just plain unusual now, more than 40 years later. Imagine how it must have sounded at the time...

The Big Noise

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Remember when broadsheet newspapers used to give CDs away at weekends? Those were good times, weren't they? So often the source of new music or, as is the case for this post, rare tracks or curios from established acts.

All of which pre-amble leads us to a cardboard slipcased CD entitled The Big Noise, given away by The Guardian exactly 21 years ago today. It was produced in collaboration with Oxfam, to highlight the latter’s “Make Trade Fair” campaign. Amongst other things, the CD included tracks from Coldplay, Lemon Jelly, The Chemical Brothers, Mali Music (featuring Damon Albarn and Afel Bocoum), The Sakala Brothers and Ladysmith Black Mambazo (featuring, somewhat incredibly, Archbishop Desmond Tutu). That's quite the line-up. However, it was the other two tracks I was interested in. First up, a rare-ish demo version of Where I End And You Begin by Radiohead.

And as if that wasn't enough, there was also a rare-ish live recording of The Lifting from REM. Originally the opening track on the album Reveal, this version was recorded live by Pat McCarthy at the Museum of Television and Radio, New York City, on May 18th, 2001 (four days after Reveal was released).

There, that was good, wasn't it? Which did you prefer? I miss free CDs... I miss broadsheet freebies in general... but then, what don't I miss? Sigh.