A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
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A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #40
My record collection [323] El May - The Other Person is You (LP)
El May is the working name of one-time almost Luna member Lara Meyerratken and was released in 2014 and is an album that might have slipped through the net since Dean’s contribution is as one of many additional vocalists on one track.
But it made it into my record collection since I managed to pick up a new copy on Discogs for just over a fiver, and I’m very glad I did since it is a rather lovely piece of work. I should have known because I’d already bought her first self-titled album (as a download) in 2012.
Lara was briefly a member of Luna around the time of Romantica, brought into the band to “help [them] capture the sounds of [their] new record, to play the fake strings, sampled trumptes, mellotrons and other keyboard sounds” (Dean Wareham - Black Postcards).
Dean and Britta’s contribution to The Other Person is You is to the track My Policeman is an Addict listen out for them…
Luna’s Sean Eden adds his guitar to a few of the tracks too.
At the London date of Luna’s 2015 reunion tour El May played a short and lovely support slot switching between guitar and keyboards.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/028
- Artist: El May
- Title: The Other Person is You
- Format: LP
- Bought on Discogs for £5.49 plus postage
My record collection [324] Tom Rapp - A Journal of the Plague Year (LP)
This is my second copy of Tom Rapp’s comeback album from 1999, this is however the Blue Matter re-issue from 2022.
The album was produced by Damon and recorded at Damon & Naomi’s Kali Studios and features both Damon and Naomi,
The album has part of a painting by Welsh artist Frank Brangwyn, although I haven’t managed to figure out which painting. We have a Brangwyn/LNER poster of Newcastle on our wall, but it’s quite different from whatever is on the front of this album.
I just remembered that in my collection I also have a photocopied “supplement to A Journal of the Plague Year” which I guess must have come with the CD - although it’s A4 and hasn’t been folded… so maybe not it contains copies of newspaper articles and obituaries and a piece on Screaming Lord Sutch… to be honest I haven’t quite figured it out!
The LP doesn’t have the bonus track of Tom reciting 60s drug stories.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/105
- Artist: Tom Rapp
- Title: A Journal of the Plague Year
- Format: LP
- Bought from a Discogs seller for £14 in 2025
Previously in my record collection:
This coming week on AHFoW
7th February 1990 - Galaxie 500 in Bristol
Back in 2014 completely out of the blue, Stephen got in touch with me and emailed me some photos he’d taken in February 1990 of Galaxie 500 at the Bierkeller in Bristol on tour supporting The Sundays.
11th February 1990 - Galaxie 500 in London
Galaxie 500 were supposed to be supporting The Sundays in London, but a late postponement meant that they instead played a hastily arranged headline show at The Falcon… nobody told me and Ken so once we’d read the CANCELLED notes on the doors of the T&C we headed to the Mean Fiddler while Galaxie 500 played The Falcon…
I think one of my fondest memories of being in the band was when we were opening for the Sundays in England and Harriet [Wheeler] lost her voice and cancelled the London show at the last minute. Rough Trade scrambled to get a gig for us in London that night and came up with a pub; I think it was called The Falcon. It was packed and instead of the big stages that we had been playing with the Sundays we were back to being in our usual atmosphere of a tiny sweaty rock club. It was a really relaxed and completely fun gig-- it just felt like we were cut loose from music business responsibilities and could just play music! I guess the music going well was always at the center of my best memories
Naomi Yang (Temperature's Rising, 2010)
You can hear the full show here… I find it hard to listen to!
12th February 2020 - Luna at KEXP
Shortly before the world went to crap in 2020 Luna were in the KEXP studio to record a session
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or8cvA_1iEI
Discoveries and rediscoveries
This week I’ll whine about how things were better in the past by looking at a few posts on “blogs”. There aren’t actually many blogs still around… I think things get called a blog but that’s not what I see. I’m thinking of the blogs of yore, from the days when ordinary people wrote for themselves and like-minded individuals… for free! They weren’t too busy trying to monetise their content or to increase engagement.
I was looking through my collection of bookmarks and pulled out a few examples (some only exist in the Wayback Machine so there might be some slow page loads).
Should it stay or should it go - 13th February 2007 - Brian
Why do you need a four-disc box of everything Galaxie 500 recorded? I'm not entirely sure: in their short lifespan they showed minimal growth, cutting three albums with a lot of sonic overlap and enough extra material to fill a fourth disc, semi-ironically titled Uncollected, that sounds a lot like the other three CDs. Don't get me wrong - I love this band, as well as the groups that the members formed later (Luna and Damon & Naomi), but logicially you should be able to get by with one, maybe two albums. Or maybe just the trio of studio efforts without any of the detritus.
Thing is, it don't work that way. You need all of this stuff; or should I say, I need all of this stuff. It's complete, see, and that counts for something. I'm not sure what, but it's there. Like the "Collect and Win!" games at McDonalds or on the backs of cereal boxes, these weighty multi-disc items are about more than the tracks contained within. It's the tidiness of having the whole story, sort of a novel that plays in stereo.i
Shake Your Fist - 6th August 2006 - Amy
I remember where I first heard Luna's version of "Bonnie and Clyde." It was maybe my second week of grad school and a friend had taken me with her to meet an old friend for dinner at his apartment in Evanston. We immediately hit it off. It's much more common now for girls to be music geeks than even 10 years ago, and I used to meet snobby indie boys who seemed surprised and even annoyed to meet a girl who not only knew what they were talking about, but often knew more than them. This wasn't the case with this guy--let's call him Dan. We chatted enthusiastically and somehow got on the subject of Galaxie 500 and Dean Wareham's continuing adventures in Luna. I confessed I wasn't enough of fan (I didn't even own any G500 at this point) to have bothered to keep up, but Dan insisted on playing Luna's cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde," a hidden track on Penthouse. I loved it right away: the "All Tomorrow's Parties" dirgey groove, the fervent violins, Wareham's painfully correct French, Laetitia Sadier's straightfaced responses, and most of all, those hiccupped yelps in the background. It sounds like it was a riot to record. I forgot about "Bonnie and Clyde" for a long time, but a month ago Luna released the covers album, Lunified that includes both the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker mixes, along with a slew of other well-chosen covers. The guy who once reframed "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste" knows how to respect his heroes and predecessors without taking the slavish imitation route.
Music Arcades - 16th May 2008 - David
I found it was especially fun to crank it up at the start of this album, because of the long, long fade in, where you start to think "hey, that's quite loud now" and yet it keeps getting louder, and louder. Later that year I invited some friends back late at night to continue a drinking session, and put this on right at the start. Jo M said, "Hey, Galaxie 500!". That was only the first or second time we'd met, but we've been friends ever since.
This is Our Music also sounds great on a cheap in-car cassette system with slightly broken speakers. That's where I listened to it most, with the cassette on a continuous loop, playing this and Today, one after the other, after the other. It's all one song!
Tangents / Fifty Thousand Reasons 22: Naomi Yang - - John
At the end of the 1980s I hated American rock with a vengeance. I hated overground and underground American rock. I hated college boys in checked shirts, talking about Neil Young and the metal records they’d grown up on, and the bad punk they adored. I hated Galaxie 500 because they made it that much more difficult to adopt this extreme position. Galaxie 500 did not seem like any other American rock of the late 1980s, and I thought their songs were lovely.
Galaxie 500 were the only American group of the late 1980s that understood about space. They were at odds with all around them, without making a big deal of it. They belonged to a whole other tradition that stretched from the Velvet Underground, through Tim Buckley and Big Star’s third, Jonathan Richman and Television, through the Feelies and Bongos, to David Roback (via Rain Parade) and Kendra Smith (via the Dream Syndicate) in Opal to a place where guitars really do gently weep. A place in the sun for everyone shaped by the pop underground via records made possible by labels like Rough Trade, Postcard, Factory and Cherry Red.
Because Midway Still Aren’t Coming Back… - 22nd October 2007 - Matt
Anyway, suffice to say when I found this combination of Galaxie 500 and top notch 'free off of a magazine' flexi disk I was as happy as happy can be. This particular flexi was given away with a magazine called "The Catalogue" which I have to admit I'm not familiar with and comes with another tune from a New Zealand band called "Straitjacket Fits".
Anyway, I digress. Galaxie 500 were part of the late 80s American shoegazing invasion and owe more than a nod (in this recording at least) to bands like Spaceman 3. For a couple of years the band swirled around the UK, banged out a Peel Session and made a lot of friends, not least Liz Phair who cited them as an influence. Unfortunately Rough Trade, their label, went bust in 1991 and that rather spelled the end of the band in the UK at least.