B-sides worth the flip
The tracks that never got the single treatment and probably should have.
An hour spent on the wrong side of the record. B-sides were an accident of the format — something had to go on the back — and the accident produced some of the most interesting music of the era that had them.
The episode is organised by how a song ended up there. The one too long for radio. The one the label did not understand. The instrumental. The joke that turned out to be the better song. And the category that produces the real finds: a band’s own favourite, put on the back because nobody expected anyone to hear it.
There is a section on what happened when the format disappeared. Streaming has no back, and the songs that would once have been B-sides now become bonus tracks or never get finished at all. The episode is unsentimental about this, but does not pretend nothing was lost.
Longer than usual, because it kept finding one more.
