The tale of the unreleased album from Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong as seen in the pages of the NME... If you read the NME cover-to-cover every week in the mid-to-late-noughties, you’d be familiar with the music now known - uncharitably - as 'landfill indie'. Some take offence to this term - whether it be the bands themselves (understandably), or the fans who grew up with these tunes as their soundtrack. It’s somewhat of an unfair categorisation, as the timeframe includes s

Or ‘How Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys botched their 90s revival’... The Beach Boys’ career is littered with unreleased and unfinished albums, as is many of the individual members’ solo careers. A few of these albums have taken on legendary status, no more so than 1967’s Smile, which still receives rabid attention and discussion despite it being ‘finished’ in 2004 by Brian Wilson, and given an official reconstruction from the original Beach Boys recordings in 2011. Other unr

The story of the short-lived Prince Paul imprint from 1991... Prince Paul, the Stetsasonic DJ and legendary producer with De La Soul, was at his commercial peak in the early ‘90s. Coming off the huge success of 3 Feet High And Rising, he was highly in-demand as a producer and remixer for other big artists such as Big Daddy Kane, 3rd Bass and MC Lyte, and even turning down work with acts like The B-52's and Prince due to his insane workload at the time. His management, Rush (R

A (very) brief history of SST: SST Records was founded by Black Flag leader Greg Ginn to put out their first 7” (Nervous Breakdown) after it failed to generate much interest from other labels. Housed in a sleeve illustrated by his brother Raymond Pettibon (who soon became a highly regarded artist in his own right), Ginn and Black Flag sold the 7” locally and at shows with other Californian bands such as Minutemen, whose debut 7” (Paranoid Time) was the second release on SST.

Reflex Records was established by Hüsker Dü and friend/record store owner/sound engineer Terry Katzman as a ‘reflex’ against their 3 song demo being rejected by local Minneapolis label Twin/Tone (the story goes that the three owners all liked a different song, so they passed as they couldn’t come to a unanimous verdict). This led them down the DIY path, in which they released their first single themselves, the Statues/Amusement 7” in 1981. They soon began releasing records an

View the top 40 here! We’re excited to announce that SECRET SAUCES has teamed up with the Official Charts and a coalition of various charity shops across the UK - from the big chains such as Oxfam Bookshop and British Heart Foundation, to the local hospice shops - to bring a brand new chart tracking the inventory of music in their shops, on the Compact Disc format. Unlike other charts that are based on album sales, this chart is based on donations, compiled from data from ove

Every ranking, from worst to best! Starting a website to accompany the SECRET SAUCES fanzine, I thought about other music websites and what sort of stuff they publish. I don't particularly care for writing reviews, and I certainly don't care for giving anything a rating out of 10. I noticed that most sites love to publish ranked lists of an artists' discography - it's an epidemic of music journalism alongside the creeping use of Chat GPT-written slop, and clickbait shite (see

A selection of picture tickets from 1987-2007. My dad kept most of his gig tickets, mostly existing loose in a drawer for 25 years or thereabouts. Eventually, he decided to buy a photo album to place all the gig tickets in chronological order, a task I gladly helped with as a kid. I had been to a few gigs by this point (and my tickets were kept too) so I sort of knew what I was dealing with, but even then it was fascinating to see in their physical form - the art of the gig t

It’s probably the only library in the world with multiple TVs simultaneously showing music videos and boxing matches, while ‘This Is The Day’ by The The plays and people gasp in delight, “have you seen this?!”. There’s certainly no stereotypical librarian imploring for “hush!”. It can only be the Rock & Roll Public Library, with its entire contents being a cleverly curated sampling from the archive of Mick Jones (The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, Carbon/Silicon), which not only