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DOLLY MIXTURE Other Music
SEALED MUSIC
8/10
Indie pop gang’s pick’n’mix assortment
The UK’s hand-knitted response to the Shangri-Las, Dollywhen they backed Captain Sensible on his 1982 hit “Happy Talk”, but the Cambridge trio’s own recorded output (three singles and one-and-a-half LPs) was relegated unfairly to the indie hinterlands. Their out-of-tune guitars and whoa-whoas echoed the romantic smarts of Orange Juice or the Marine Girls; they had similarly killer songs (“Remember This”, “Spend Your Wishes”) and no-one did the DM-boots-and-tea-dress look better. This short-run vinyl collection harvests outtakes and unreleased recordings from the third disc of long-unavailable CD retrospective , versions of The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and Love Affair’s “Rainbow Valley” epitomising their jumble-sale melange of knowing and naïve. Debsey Wykes’ later Saint Etienne guest spots buoyed their posthumous rep, but vintage style like this would never have been charity-shop fodder for long.
