Various Artists: Good Vibrations; A Record Shop, a Label, a Film Soundtrack (Ace/Border)

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The Outcasts: You're a Disease
Various Artists: Good Vibrations; A  Record Shop, a Label, a Film Soundtrack (Ace/Border)

We'll have to wait for the acclaimed bio-pic to get the full measure of the life and times of Belfast's Terri Hooley who started his record shop Good Vibrations at the height of what is euphemistically called "the Troubles" and, as self-confessed hippie, found himself a convert to punk.

His shop spawned a label and gave us, among other classic songs, the Undertones Teenage Kicks.

This soundtrack album compiled by David Holmes (who writes notes on many of the song) cuts a wayward swathe from Hank Williams' I Saw the Light (the first song Holmes remembers being moved by) Niney The Observer, the Shangri-Las, the Animals, the Upsetter, Bert Jansch (Angie) and of course the alternative Ulster sounds by the Outcasts, Stiff Little Fingers, the Undertones (Teenage Kicks as noted) and Hooley himself.

This is a scattershot colection of great singles or forgotten gems (the Animals' Outcast), country music like Pear Shaped by Woody Jackson (who appears in the film playing this song), and Brisbane's Saints sharing disc-space with the b-grade 1970 psychedelic rock of Ramases (from Sheffield).

And Suicide.

Quite a scrapbook of sounds, but a scrapbook nonetheless. 

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