9. Soul CoughingEl Oso
I think the reason it came to my attention was because it was in-step with the times more than what they’d done before. I didn’t really hear their first or second albums. It was really hard trying to pick an album from the late 90s, because if you go down the Missy Elliott route, you’re kind of nailing your flag to a particular mast. There were so many different strands coming together. You don’t want to nail your flag to a Radiohead mast because you don’t want to come across as a Radiohead nut, or an R&B nut. Great trip-hop surely happened in the mid-90s rather than the late-90s.
I was just going through what came out in ‘97, ’98 and ‘99, and in the end I think the most enduring album from that era was El Oso. The opening song ‘Rolling’ is just mad! You can still play it on 6 Music and people go: “What the fuck was that?!” I do a Saturday night show at 9pm through to midnight. When Craig [Charles] is finished, you can just drop in ‘Rolling’ to open the show and you’re away. It’s the kind of song that gets people shouting “tuuuuuuuunne!” and “I can’t believe you played Soul Coughing!” on Twitter.
