Purchased at Trinity Hospice, Kensington Church Street, W8, July 2012
Cornershop have been making fun and consistently inventive records on a regular basis since fuck-knows-when, and yet people still laugh at me when I say I like them. This is because back in the late ’90s, they had an ENORMOUS hit with a Fatboy Slim remix of their song Brimful of Asha, which took it hi-fi and bought its charmingly ludicrous chorus to the fore: everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, indeed. Or perhaps not: nobody remembers them for anything else, and it’s a darn shame.
I picked this up in the surprisingly good promo section of a favoured charity shop in West London, and it’s no exception to the “fun/inventive” formula: a compilation of internet singles released by the group over 2011, it’s hugely varied in style and tone, if not, happily, in quality. Bookended by two versions of weird-shit singalong What Did the Hippie Have in his Bag? (‘Bebop and German Jazz’, apparently), it takes in Electro (Non-Stop Radio), Hip-Hop (Milkin’ It), Breakbeat Garage Rock (Concrete Concrete, Who’s Gonna Lite it Up?), Rick James goes Bollywood Funk (Inspector Bamba Singh’s Lament), DIY Hipster Pop (Something Makes You Feel Like, Dedicated) and god knows what else. Well, I know, but it’s late and I can’t be bothered to come up with the generic neologisms to describe it all. Sorry.
Anyway, not to sound like their PR manager or anything (or worse, someone conforming to Q Magazine’s house style guide), write Cornershop off at your peril.
The Daily Record 