Guided By Voices/Robert Pollard.

hi topper....i'm just down the road near oxford.........ya i adore GBV.......but i didnt know they are not that well known in UK.....liked them now for about 18 years.......but only just rediscovered them again

Hey Felix, thanks for signing up!  Cool that the UK has a special event just for GBV/Pollard, I wasn't aware that they had that many fans outside the US.   The thought of GBV karaoke sounds fun.  I'll bet you there's at least one geezer every year that pulls his hamstring from trying to do a "Pollard high-kick" move.

Stick around.

just noticed alot of stuff on amazon US is ridculously cheap compared to UK site.........thanks to you two for puttng up album covers in the "what you listening to " section it has respurned my love of GBV/ robert pollard......going t listento some right now

I get dizzy just thinking about it.

^ The street date was today but I had preordered through Rockathon Records so I got it a good week early.  They have really made a wonderful comeback recently, 5 news singles go on sale at the start of February through Rockathon, I suggest you order through them because they will all ship immediately whereas you get the one-by-one throughout the month otherwise.

I've got way too much GBV and Pollard related stuff, I've probably got every GBV album, every Pollard solo album, every Boston Spaceships album, every Circus Devils album as well as assorted side-projects here and there.

Hello Hello

Tanner (The Truth) actually started a GBV thread long ago (of course, he and I were the only participants), though I can't find it now (does this search function ever work?), and I don't think it's been used for close to a year now.

My GBV adventure began probably about 1993.  I subscribed to Spin Magazine, and read a little blurb about them, not much else.  A little while later in Tower Records (RIP), I found an EP of theirs called "Japanese Spin Cycle", and bought it just because I was curious.  I think it just preceded the landmark "Bee Thousand" album, but I missed all that hubbub because I didn't really like this EP that much to follow them further.  It's about 10 minutes long with 8 songs, and only a couple of them really sounded good.

Fast forward a couple of years, circa 1996,   The album "Under the Bushes Under the Stars" came out, and -- get this -- my local "alternative rock" station played one of the songs on the air, called "Look at Them".  I thought it was a cool song so I went and got the album.  It was much better than the EP, but I still wasn't fully converted into a fan.

The next album "Mag Earwhig" came out, and I got into that one a lot more.  I guess I liked the more conventional rock sound it had (I loved "Bulldog Skin").   I lent it to a friend, and he was impressed enough to go out and buy "Bee Thousand", which he then lent to me.  Then was I converted?  No, not yet.   I thought Bee Thousand was kind of a drag, actually.  I love it now, though.

But then my friend lent me "BOX".  I remember my job at the time had me going to an office about a one hour drive away, for a couple of weeks.  I had a 120-minute cassette containing 4 of the 5 discs of "BOX" (yes, it all fit except for one or two songs).  I listened to that tape every day in the car on that drive and I was totally hooked on it.  Hard to even explain why (I did have some herbal assistance for the ride home, though), but to this day it's my favorite stuff of theirs.

Eventually I started buying up all their albums, even the cumbersome "Suitcase" 4 disc set of 100 unreleased tracks.  Although, each successive album after "Mag Earwhig" seemed to impress me less and less.  I much preferred the early stuff up to and including "Alien Lanes".  There are exceptions of course; I play in a band and "Glad Girls" is one of the first songs we learned, and we still play it today.

So right now I've got every GBV studio album (incl 1 vinyl), several EPs, and about 4 Pollard solo albums, 2 Boston Spaceships, 1 Circus Devils, and a partridge in a pear tree.  I like the latest GBV releases quite a lot, too.


Edited by HolyMoly - January 19 2013 at 12:10