Windmill records released 2 flexis in 1990/1 featuring bands such as The Fat Tulips, Strawberry Story, The Haywains and They Go Boom!. Now they are back with Windmill 3 and the enigmatic Christine's Cat, releasing songs from the original Your Love Is... 5" flexi sessions!
During the 80s indie pop boom, one Glaswegian group flashed like a spark in the night – in the form of a single sided flexi disc on epoch-defining label Sarah Records – before vanishing into the gloom. 35 years after this solitary release, Windmill Records release Like A Summer’s Day, compiling the previously lost 1989 sessions. It’s a revelation, 4 songs from what could have been one of the major groups of the era.
Christine Grant, Kenny Forte and Robert Smith recorded 5 songs in one day that encompassed teenage heartbreak, ripping guitar work more in keeping with Jesus And The Mary Chain or Shop Assistants than Field Mice, Grant’s sugar-sweet vocals and a barbed naivety that rings out through the ages. The eponymous song is built upon an ascending chord sequence and robotic drum pattern with jagged guitar soloing and girl/boy duetting vocals, it’s so classic C8.. 9? The Other Side Of Life has a loping, VU acoustic chug with Grant’s vocal taking center for some melting melancholia that burns brightly in the cursed summer sun.
On the flip, If You Should Go turns up the ballad dial with the acoustics revelling in some lush diminished chords and sparse percussion. So gorgeous. Your Love Is… is the other side of the coin, a fuzzed out to hell guitar and drum pattern commanded by Robert Smith’s vocal sounding dispondant and kicked around in the best way. It’s hard not to think of fellow Glaswegians The Vaselines when Smith’s vocal dovetails with Grant’s, but that has NEVER been a bad thing.
Christine’s Cat’s 2nd wave Indie Pop sound is everywhere in 2025, with bands from Singapore to the USA via Australia approximating what it was like being skint on West Princes Street in 1989.. here’s the real thing.
