As I wait for another fine, upstanding artist to find time in their busy schedule to provide me with answers to the Q&A I’ve sent their way, I thought I’d tackle one of my favorite obscure various-artists collections.

Alvin Lives (In Leeds): Anti Poll Tax Trax isn’t by any means what you’d call the most consistent compilation, but I’m a huge fan of cover songs, and I always find it fascinating to listen to how some artists play it safe and do straight-up Xeroxes of the originals while others have the balls to switch up the arrangement or even the melody to make a song their own. This 12-track compilation came out on Midnight Music in 1990 as a reaction against the so-called Community Charge, which was instituted by good ol’ Maggie Thatcher in 1989 and proved so tremendously unpopular that it led directly to her departure from office. Her successor, John Major, alleviated the problem by replacing the Community Charge with the Council Tax system, but Brits can still relive their painful memories by revisiting this CD and remembering just how up in arms they got about it back then.

I stumbled upon this compilation when I was in the UK for the first time, back in 1992, and was scouring through every CD store that crossed my path, looking for all the obscurities I could possibly fit into my bag. This mission ultimately proved so successful that I needed to mail an entire box of CDs home, which was a pricey endeavor, but I don’t regret it for a moment, as just about everything I purchased on that trip remains in my collection to this day. At the time I purchased it, I was familiar with less than half of the artists, but it really only took six words for the disc to find its way up to the cash register:

Robyn Hitchcock does “Kung Fu Fighting.”

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