Door Marked Summer

I was playing "Sunflower" by The Springfields earlier today and realised I had to do my summer mixtape now, because summer is only a week off for me. I've been working on it most of today and originally I was planning to do another 2-disc set, just like last year, as I had more than 160 minutes of music to start with. But after I'd trimmed it down to one cd of 60s songs and one of newer stuff, I decided to do just one cd - in theory making it twice as good... These are the songs I scrapped:

Aberdeen - Super Sunny Summer
The Groove Farm - Crazy Day Sunshine Girl
BMX Bandits - Come Summer
The Explorers Club - Don't Forget the Sun
The Clientele - These Days Nothing But Sunshine
Fireflies - Summer Has Gone
Pas/cal - Summer Is Almost Here
Cub - Summer Samba
Skywave - Summertime
The Love Letter Band - Popgun Summer
Po! - Summer Pudding
Brent Cash - Good Morning Sunshine
The Chrysalids - Sunny Guitar Pop
The Dagenites - Now That Summer's Gone
The Shangri-Las - The Sweet Sounds of Summer
The Impact Express - Sunshine Day
The Hollies - Everything Is Sunshine
Hearts and Flowers - Try For the Sun
Marianne Faithfull - Morning Sun
Gemini - Sunshine River
The Stillroven - Sunny Day
The Rare Breed - I Talk to the Sun
The Millenium - Some Sunny Day
The Zombies - Walking In the Sun
Samantha Jones - Surrounded By a Ray of Sunshine
The Looking Glass - Silver and Sunshine (How Wonderful Is Our Love)
Margo Guryan - Sun
The Factory - Try a Little Sunshine

Thus making up a 'lost' mix on its own. Look at the final tracklisting below and decide for yourself if I was right to choose those songs instead. There has been a lot of deliberation on my part, for the record. What I've been trying to imagine is walking around the streets of Auckland with these songs in my ears, and those that didn't feel right I skipped. There are some old favourites by The Springfields, The Summer Suns, The Autumn Leaves, Jan & Dean, Revolving Paint Dream, Marine Girls, Skypark and The Sunshine Company. A few bands from the Lost Jukebox series, like the peculiarly named Fluff and Fargo. New music from The Sea Lions and Cocoanut Groove. Recent discoveries like Inner Dialogue, and The Stolen Picassos who've just been featured at Fire Escape Talking and the Cloudberry blog. Roque also posted the absolutely wonderful cassette track from The Ammonites! Be sure to check out the interview with the former bandleader. "Your mind's somewhere else but your lips are smiling" is a title of a post on this blog, but the line is originally from Louis Philippe's "Hot Summer Evenings" from the classic Ivory Tower album. And I'm especially pleased with the inclusion of The Sunsets as the penultimate track - with the title track from the Hot Generation! comp of Australia & New Zealand garage groups! "We live to be free, give our hearts to the sea." The cover pic is part of the documentation of Hreinn Fridfinnsson's The House Project (1974) - a conceptual work built around the inversion of a house, with wallpaper, curtains and all the rest on the exterior of the house instead of the opposite. This was done in Iceland, which is of course very far away from New Zealand, but it's a convenient metaphor for the inversion of the seasons that I will soon experience. The rest of you will have to wait another few months. Which is also how long you'll have to wait to hear this!:

(Both pictures should be enlarged on clicking.) Unless you can prove that it is already summer in your part of the world of course, and I'll give you a download link.

Imagine zooming in on the door of the house, just maybe it will say 'summer'.

EDIT: Ok, so the wait is over since it's 'almost' summer, at least in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere. I'm only at CLOUD 91 so far, so I have some catching up to do to make this 100...

CLOUD 100 V/A - Summer's Just a Kiss Away