One of Monorail’s biggest selling compilations, originally released on For Us records in 2011, now re-issued on our friends’ label, Sealed. Dolly Mixture were the perfect pop group in that they came, blazed out some genre defining, perfect pop singles and dissolved before even recording a debut album. This compilation, however, captures everything you really need to know, their recorded output from 1980 – 1984.

Taking influence from 60s Girl Groups, late 70s power pop bands and a big injection of DIY punk attitude, Dolly Mixture formed in Cambridge in the wake of punk but had a scope that stretched beyond that movements primitivism. Remember This charts their development into the archetype Indie Pop group who were also so much more. As well as the big tunes that deserve permanent lodgings on any pop picker’s turntable (the eponymous Remember This, Everything And More etc) the B-Sides often reveal more fragile, spacious sounds. Dilly Dally Dolly comes across as a traditional folk song for the kitchen sink, bedsit-dwelling early 80s, while Borinda’s Lament’s instrumental violin and piano shows a completely different side to this special group.

Dolly Mixture sit somewhere between the Shangri-La‘s and the Go-Go‘s which appeals to Indie kids, Punks and 60’s girl group fans. Dolly Mixture toured with the Undertones, played John Peel’s 40th birthday party, recorded a wealth of true pop classics, gave U2 a support-act leg-up, wrote songs for Lena Zavaroni and influenced the whole riot grrrl movement, but floored by on-the-road illness, decooled by Captain Sensible and dismissed as ‘the Slits meet the Nolans’ by a UK music industry too hung up on black leather hipness.