Charlatans - Some Friendly (1990)

I bought this when I was ill. I can't remember what was up with me but it was genuine for once. I was living in Lewisham and it was wet and miserable. I staggered out to the shops in hope of buying something which might cheer me up a bit, and this was the only album I could find in my local WHSmith which seemed even marginally promising, based mainly on The Only One I Know being so great a single as to have smashed through all of my growing resentment towards both baggy and what I have since come to think of as Austin Powers music. I got the album home and struggled back into bed. It sounded okay, if somehow a bit muted, but I nevertheless played side one again and again because I didn't have the energy to flip the record over; and it was quite a good illness soundtrack, possibly due to the neopsychedelic codeine swirls of Hammond organ reproducing the cotton wool effect of being confined to bed with a fever, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Weirdly, it still sounds as good now, perhaps even better. It may simply be an after effect of my hammering side one whilst feeling unwell, only coming to the flip a few weeks later, but Some Friendly feels a lot like a concept album, specifically one of those with the sides divided between head and dance floor. The first is powerfully immersive, a series of swells and lulls coming to a crescendo with the genuinely incredible Then and somehow reminding me of Faust IV. The second side veers a bit more towards Austin Powers music, requiring a few plays to dispel unwanted images of that fucking twat Mike Myers, but it gets there, and comes to resemble a more populist take on krautrock in a surprisingly short time, particularly Sproston Green, which seems an interesting parallel given that Happy Mondays were essentially a Can tribute act.

Stranger still, Wikipedia describes this as a problematic record with which the band were never particularly happy, not least due to having gone into the studio with only a handful of songs. Nevertheless, for my money it pisses over the efforts of most of their baggy contemporaries, but maybe it's just something to do with listening whilst unwell. It might also be something to do with their Birmingham origins, because Birmingham is better than Manchester.