Dot Allison was one of the true idols of my late teens. As the singer for Glaswegian E-comedown country-dub balladeers One Dove, her platinum bob and ruby lips, and ability to play otherworldly waif and sussed raver at the same time, made her seem impossibly glamorous – and even more importantly, the breathy purity of her voice as she sang “and where it is dark, there are ghosts / that give me hope” (in "White Love" – perhaps the greatest lost pop song of the 1990s) soothed me through endless adolescent traumas.
new music reviews
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday.
howard.male
Why do Fol Chen make me feel so happy? To begin with it was just a smile that crept across my face when I stumbled across their barmy animated video for "No Wedding Cake". This mini-epic features a lip-synching fish, some lion-headed dancing girls, and an owl that ends up stealing the bleeding heart of a goat-horned man. Another promo, for the sprightly "Cable TV", has five mini-skirted girls going through the girl-group motions. But, needless to say, Fol Chen are not a girl group, so that made me smile some more.