Monday, December 20, 2004

Map Of The World



Whoever ran the small indie label, Medium Cool, in the late eighties I salute your good taste. You released records by only a handful of bands but what a great collection of bands: The Waltones, The Raw Herbs, The Popguns, The Caretaker Race, and The Corn Dollies. Sadly your pockets didn’t appear to be as deep as your knack of spotting a great band so none of the bands created more than a ripple in the deep pool of pop but still you left a whole bunch of excellent music behind, even if it is difficult to find.
The Corn Dollies took the sound of early R.E.M. added touches of violin and didn’t fit into any of the indie genres that were in vogue at the time. Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens produced their early singles and after Medium Cool folded they released their only album “Wrecked” on Midnight Music. Midnight also put out in France a compilation of all the band’s singles, which is where today’s songs come from.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.tt.net/mcool/

redrosesforme said...

Thanks for the link. Sadly it's a different Medium Cool records. I was referring to a UK label

Tom said...

Forever Steven is a great track. I ran a three week series on this under-rated band a while back! Top stuff.

Anonymous said...

Oh how great was Medium Cool?! I think the Waltones were my favourite from their roster. And i used to have a Medium Cool poster on my wall. It advertised 6 of their releases using a picture of Mohammed Ali and the caption "Six Rounds With The Greatest"!

Russell

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the comments on my label. As JamesK has pointed out, I'm sort of celebrating the 20th anniversary with a website about Medium Cool, it's groups and my experiences of the eighties independent scene.

The individual release pages and the main story of the label are not yet finished but there's still plenty to see at -

http://www.mediumcool.info

regards,

Andy

PS I often think our posters were better than the releases!