RE-PRESS: CD ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 2018
- 1990 GIVEN THE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL ‘C’ SERIES TREATMENT, RIFFING ON THE ORIGINAL ‘C86’ FOLLOWING PREVIOUS BEST-SELLING COLLECTIONS C86 (2014), C87 (2016), C88 (2017) AND C89 (2018).
- 63 TRACKS CHARTING THE RISE TO DOMINANCE OF THE INDEPENDENT MUSIC SCENE, AS ONCE SHOESTRING ARTISTS AND LABELS BEGAN TO FIND AN AUDIENCE BORDERING ON THE MAINSTREAM.
- INCLUDES MORE HOUSEHOLD NAMES THAN EVER – THE CHARLATANS, THE LA’S, OCEAN COLOUR SCENE, BOO RADLEYS, SPIRITUALIZED, ETC – ALONGSIDE SCENE FRONTRUNNERS LIKE PARIS ANGELS, WORLD OF TWIST, NORTHSIDE, THE SUNDAYS, FLOWERED UP, NED’S ATOMIC DUSTBIN AND THE SARAH RECORDS ROSTER.
- ALSO DIGS DEEP INTO THE LESSER-KNOWN 1990 UNDERGROUND, REVEALING COUNTLESS HIDDEN GEMS AND EXCITING REDISCOVERIES.
Some time since punk rocked the British musical scene to its foundations and caused an eruption of independently produced records, the scene and a new generation of figurehead artists began to let ambition in and head overground, playing to increasingly larger crowds, working with bigger budgets and selling more copies, finding a footing in the UK’s Top Forty, venturing into the USA and, ultimately, creating a mainstream audience now primed for credible, guitar-tinged pop. Meanwhile, an underground revolution in clubland began to push towards the commercial same space, resulting in an inevitable fusion of songcraft and dancefloor aesthetics.
‘C90’ captures perfectly the moment these tribes began to coalesce. From the opening, club- friendly rendition of The Charlatans’ ‘Polar Bear’ to The La’s knowingly backward looking ‘Timeless Melody’ and all points in-between, this is the sound of a scene dropping the raincoats, dropping acid and aiming for domination. 1990 was the start of a new decade when the Indie scene was dominated by Madchester and the arrival of Shoegaze and with nods towards grunge and what would become known as Britpop, plus hints of a proto-laddism peering out from between the cracks in a post-Smiths aesthetic, the sound of 1990, it could be argued, set the tone for the remainder of the decade.
