ABCs of My Vinyl Collection (Letter F, Part 12)

We already listened to Friends Again in this series, but you can't really have Friends Again without having Friends, right? Friends is the musical outlet of the talented William Jones, and he founded Summerhouse Records in 1986 to release his take on indie pop. Like so many bands from the period, I was attracted to the jangle and the trumpet. There were other great groups that came through the doors of Summerhouse, including 4,000,000 Telephones and Rumblefish, but it's Friends that have been there from the beginning and have continued to release new music now and again even into this decade.

Like the Hit Parade and many other indie bands of that ilk, Friends have always been much a bigger deal in Japan than in their native UK. My favorite song by Friends is third single "The First Day of Spring", and I recommend you seek that out, but I have it on the inferior format and this is a vinyl series. Today I go with "Foreign Money", a brass-heavy 7" from 1994 that also triumphantly opens the 'Sundrowned' album. Sadly, I believe this marks the last release by Friends that came out on vinyl. I'm not sure if this has remained true to this day because I have lost track of Friends in recent years, but through a slew of albums and singles Jones never had a song with the word "love" in it. Because of its overuse in pop music, this was a matter of policy. He always tried to find other ways to express the feeling.

"Foreign Money"