David Newton is a prized man-about-town. The former member of English pop group The Mighty Lemon Drops has spent the last few years producing albums for a wide range of unconventional LA-based bands, ranging from The Happy Hollows and Death to Anders to The Little Ones and The Blood Arm. He’s also returned to making his own music under the moniker David Newton & The Mighty Angels, releasing the five-track Paint the Town EP. It’s with great pleasure that we present his vinyl must-haves for Record Store Day 2015!
Five Of My Favorite Records
Here are five of my favorite 7″ 45’s. It would be impossible to condense my all-time favorite records into a mere five, so here are the five that sprang to mind.
1) Bob & Marcia – Young, Gifted And Black (1970, Trojan Records)
An absolutely fantastic record. At the time they would ship Jamaican reggae recordings to the UK and add strings to them in London, and this is one of the earliest and best examples of that process.
2) Subway Sect – Ambition (1978, Rough Trade Records)
Subway Sect, even though they were around at the same time as (& played with) a lot of the early UK punk bands, they really were something different. Vic Godards vocal, Rob Symmonds angular guitar work, and a great song.
3) The Pop Group – She Is Beyond Good And Evil (1979, Radar Records)
They only made one real album “Y” in 1979 then broke up. They reformed a year or so ago and made another record, 36 years later, and it is fantastic. I am including this as I saw them play (twice actually) in March. They were amazing, and REALLY loud!.
4) The Boys: Brickfield Nights (1978, NEMS Records)
I will admit that I am not a huge fan of power-pop (certainly not the skinny-tie variety), and The Boys often get tagged into that category, but they were (are) way beyond that. This is punk-meets-Phil Spector, really. The album that this opens, “Alternative Chartbusters,” is one of my favorites ever.
5) Television Personalities: A Sense Of Belonging (1983, Rough Trade Records)
Just brilliant. Dark, but brilliant. Dan Treacy changed my life. Not just with his music, but he saw something in the music of my band The Mighty Lemon Drops really early on and he was basically our mentor. I sometimes wonder that, if it wasn’t for Dan, I might still be hauling bricks up ladders on construction sites. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but…
