Julie London: The Best of Julie London - The Liberty Years

It was from Steve Brown that I first heard of Julie London, at university. It seemed an unusual recommendation, and that's probably what made me curious — always important to check out music that you wouldn't hear on John Peel. But I cheated at first, and bought a cassette of Julie London that I gave to my dad to listen to in the car on his way to work. "I've liked all the music you've bought me before, but this just isn't for me."

It didn't sound like it was for me, either. But I never forgot about Julie, and her name cropped up from time to time. Was she some kind of gay icon?

You can guess what's coming next, can't you? Yes, I was in Fopp and saw this compilation going very cheap. It was one of no less nine CDs I bought on 20th December 2000.

I found myself in a record shop yesterday. Well, I found myself very near one, and decided to drop in, as Rough Trade East is supposed to be one of the best in London. I was hit by that disorientation: so what do I do now? Where do I start? Is there anything I want/need to buy? Best not to browse too aimlessly lest I get tempted by something inessential (another Julie London compilation going cheap, say). I saw a Krautrock section, and was impressed that they had a good few Cluster CDs. If they'd had Agitation Free's second album, I might have got that, but no. So I decided to check if they had any rarities by The Clientele or Alasdair Roberts — the two artists of whom I count myself as a fan at the moment. Faced with multiple 'C' racks, I experienced a twinge of truculence: you expect me to flick through all those manually?! Where's the list view? Then I remembered that I spent most of my adolescence flicking through racks, and it would be interesting to see how it felt again. They had three Clientele albums on CD — not bad — but nothing on vinyl. By then I'd been in the shop for ten minutes, and was getting twitchy, so I left, forgetting about Alasdair Roberts (but I made up for that by buying a record of his at this evening's gig).

As for Julie, maybe she was a kind of postmodern feminist icon, rather than a gay one, because a fair few of her songs seem to be about exploiting sugar daddies and generally getting her own back on men who treat her poorly by somehow rechannelling their evil desires against them.

Stop Press: ah, now it comes back… Julie's Cry Me a River features as the 1955 entry in Stephin Merritt's 100 best recordings of the 20th century. So that may explain why I had the gay thing in my head (ahem, not that there's nothing more to Stephin than him being gay, of course).

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