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 #69
It’s Thursday morning and I’m sitting in the garden of a cottage in the Lake District with a warm sun shining down on me and with the sounds of Redpolls, and Grasshopper Warblers (according to Merlin (as well as all the usual suspects). I’m here for the Krankenhaus festival that starts tomorrow. This beautiful weather isn’t going to hold.
It almost always rains when we go to festivals - the two notable exceptions are
- 2014 Indietracks (Dean & Britta played)
- 2025 Krankenhaus (Dean & Britta played)
… clearly there’s a pattern and Dean and Britta should play at all festivals I go to (or I should only go to festivals that they play at).
Galaxie 500 radio interview from summer 1989
Jen has just sent me this lovely 10 minute radio interview of Galaxie 500 from before the release of On Fire. Recorded for “Boston Rocks” on WFNX and touches on signing for Rough Trade, making videos, and the UK music press,
Dean: The English press is bizarre. It's just like really strange.
Damon: That's our, that's our latest new experience. The album just got to England and they're explaining to us what it means. It's a treat to find out.
Dean: Like they ask you really tough questions and you just go, hell, I don't know. So they decide.
Damon: But that's our image. So it's all right.
Dean: So like Melody Maker, the, you know, we tried as hard as possible just to say nothing like philosophical or nothing important, you know, in answer to all these big questions. But then like in the front of the magazine in the content section, it's Galaxie 500, the band that celebrates the demise of youth culture.
I’d guess this was from about August since they mention signing for Rough Trade “in the summer” and that they’re heading to the UK for a show in September.
Jen has a fabulous radio show, Cycles Per Second that you should listen to.
My recorc collection [381] Various artists - The Wire Tapper 12 / MOJO Presents Dream Pop
As a buyer/subscriber to various magazines over the years I used to have boxes and boxes of cassettes and CDs that had been given away stuck to their front covers. For a while my collection included quite a few of these that contained album tracks. These magazines quite often had appearances by Galaxie 500 and Luna, and occasionally by Damon & Naomi. At some point I decided that they probably didn’t warrant inclusion. A couple however slipped through the net.
The Wire Tapper 12 is a double CD that was included with the December 2004 issue of The Wire, the UK magazine that focuses on the more avant garde and experimental wing of modern music. The CD is packed with just what you’d expect from a double CD given away by The Wire. Buried in the middle of disc two is Damon & Naomi’s Beautiful Close Double.
MOJO Presents Dream Pop was given away with the April 2010 issue of UK adult rock magazine MOJO, and is a mixed bag of tracks that supposedly fit into that difficult “Dream Pop” classification that sometimes leans heavily on the dream and sometimes on the pop. Included is Galaxie 500’s Tell Me.
Most of the rest of my covermounted MCs and CDs were offloaded on charity shops a long time ago in a decluttering exercise - including many which I probably ought to have hung on to. These two probably survived because…
- The Wire Tapper 12 is in a lovely cardboard gatefold sleeve and has enough of interest to make it worth hanging on to.
- I think I had actually got rid of the MOJO CD but a copy was given to me by a friend (Jim I think) a few years later who was possibly going through a similar decluttering.
I nearly left these out but since they had rows in my spreadsheet…
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/108
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: The Wire Tapper 12
- Packaging: Gatefold card sleeve
-
Format: 2xCD
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/181
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: MOJO Presents Dream Pop
- Packaging: Jewel case
- Format: CD
My record collection [382] Frances Ha (DVD / LP)
After a couple of misses we finally get to the Noah Baumbach film I do rather love. I suspect that so much of it is down to the charm of Frances, or maybe the charm of the way Greta Gerwig plays Frances since Frances isn’t always charming. But Greta is the film, she’s in pretty much every scene so you can’t like the film if you don’t like Frances and I can understand that some people might not like her. But I do.
I first saw Frances Ha at the BFI in July 2013 and have now seen it twice since and my love of it hasn’t tailed off at all.
Dean and Britta have appearances in the film at a dinner party and also have an “additional music by” credit. That additional music is the Ann Buchanan Theme (from 13 Most Beautiful) which appears early on in the film, and Million Dollar Doll by Britta (although credited to Dean & Britta for the film and on the film’s soundtrack) which plays in the background of a bar scene.
The soundtrack album was originally released only as a pink vinyl promo so wasn’t easy to get hold of so I emailed Britta to ask if she had a digital copy of Million Dollar Doll - she sent me a copy - “Here it is. Let me know if you have trouble playing this since I bought it on iTunes” - which embarrassed me since… I probably could have done that!
I was intending it for my solo album, but they wanted it credited to D&B for the film score. We did it as background music in a bar scene in the film - with no vocals, so you probably won't even notice it. But the film is great! It was quite a last minute request to have the song on the sound track so it's kind of a rough mix. I still might put it on my solo "thing." Maybe give it a fresh mix.
Email from Britta (20th June 2013)
Of course it did get released on Britta’s Luck or Magic - and had a video made for it:
The soundtrack finally got a proper release in 2024, also on pink vinyl, and that’s the copy I bought via Rough Trade’s Discogs for a shocking amount of money!
The film does have a great soundtrack, and so the soundtrack LP is also rather great - as well as (Dean &) Britta’s Million Dollar Doll there’s Chrome Sitar from the hugely underrated T.Rex album Futuristic Dragon; an outtake, Blue Sway, from Paul McCartney’s excellent McCartney II (an album I sang the praises of on AHFoW a couple of years back); Hot Chocoloate’s Every 1’s a Winner.
It also has Modern Love by David Bowie - now I’ve always had problems with 80s Bowie (Let’s Dance and Tonight are albums I find very hard to love) but I’ve come around on Modern Love, and part of that coming around is thanks to its use in Frances Ha, which is so gloriously joyous.
My DVD is a very basic UK release with no extras apart from a trailer.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 13/022
- Title: Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)
- Format: DVD
- Bought from Amazon Marketplace for £1.62
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/109
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: Music From The Motion Picture Frances Ha
- Notes: Pink vinyl reissue
- Format: LP
- Bought from Rough Trade Discogs for… too much!
Previously in my record collection:
- [045] Mistress America soundtrack CD
- [056] Dean & Britta - Mistress America
- [066] The Squid and the Whale soundtrack CD
- [193] Mistress America (LP) - times two
- [294] The Squid and the Whale (DVD)
- [378] Margot at the Wedding (DVD)
This week I finally got around to buying and listening to Radhika’s lovely album Cine Pop - I’d been meaning to for a while but was finally kicked into gear by a short clip of a cover of Galaxie 500’s Flowers she shared on Instagram.
The new (and first) National Park album also arrived from Monorail this week but arrived after we’d left for Krankenhaus. Our house sitter hasn’t yet offered a review :).
Happy 39th birthday to Galaxie 500 who played their first show in a flat in NYC on the 29th August 1987.
I wrote about Galaxie 500’s multiple birthdays here:
https://aheadfullofwishes.substack.com/p/from-the-archive-galaxie-500s-birthdays
OK - that’ll do for me, more Krankenhaus talk next week and then I really should try and re-start my Tuesday posts - as predicted when I stopped them I haven’t used the break to any great effect!