Tom Smith

When he's not tearing faces off in various musical projects - 'To Live and Shave in LA' & 'NH Meth' to name two - Tom Smith leads a genteel life in Hanover, Germany, so it's only fitting that he brought Hanover's own 39 Clocks and their sophomore classic "Subnarcotic" to the table for perusal. Their songs of urban decay and rainy night insanities sung - subversively for 1982 - in English set them apart from the German New Wave of the time, and they managed to turn their love of the Velvets, Suic...

Associates – Fourth Drawer Down Returning guest, composer/producer/singer Tom Smith (To Live and Shave In L.A., Peach of Immortality) brings in a band that managed to escape both Rob & Barry’s radar, the darkly expansive and criminally overlooked (at least in the US) Scottish post-punk-pop band Associates. This amazing collection of singles released in 1980/81 defies categorization – but Berlin-era Bowie and mid-70s Roxy Music is a fair comparison. Main men Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine combi...

A voicemail from almost thirty years ago launches That Record Got Me High into orbit – to escape Earth's coming collision with a rogue planet – and to give Tom Smith the space he needs. He needs space, and time, to evangelize for one of those albums that you NEED to hear but haven't: Prehistoric Sounds, the third album by The Saints, who soon after were "Stranded" by their label, their looks, and their members' diverging interests. What happened? They were three years too early with the horns, t...