Pigeonhole by New Fast Automatic Daffodils

Pigeonhole was the first album from New Fast Automatic Daffodils, released on Play It Again Sam in November 1990, after the breakthrough of "Big" had landed them the deal. The Manchester band had formed in Hulme in 1988, when guitarist Dolan Hewison, bassist Justin Crawford and drummer Perry Saunders were at Manchester Polytechnic, with drama student Andy Spearpoint joining up to sing. Their mouthful of a name came from an Adrian Henri poem that crossed a DAF car advert with Wordsworth.

Lumped in with Madchester, they really took their cues from post-punk labels like Postcard, and it shows: this is dance-rock with its elbows out, all loping, hypnotic groove and scratchy guitar. Trouser Press noted that the words mattered less than the drums, bass and groove, with Spearpoint worrying at a phrase until it lost all sense, the way James Brown would. It reached number 49 in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.