The Pastels - Songs for Children 7"

The Pastels story goes back to the early '80s, when Stephen McRobbie (known as Stephen Pastel) and David Keegan co-owned a record label called 53rd & 3rd, home to beloved and influential bands such as The Vaselines and The Soup Dragons. They also played in a group named The Shop Assistants together with a girl, Aggi Wright. Stephen and Aggi soon broke off into their own group, which they named The Pastels. They released a number of singles in the mid '80s until 1987 when they released their first LP, entitled Up For A Bit With The Pastels. Early on, the lineup of the Pastels included members of Teenage Fanclub and The Vaselines, and David from the Shop Assistants even joined up for a time. These different groups and their contemporaries pioneered an entirely new genre of music that developed from labels such as their 53rd & 3rd, Subway, Pink, Creation, Glass, and others. The genre was known as a number of different things, early on called "shambling" or "anorak" pop, and now known commonly as Twee or as c86 - after the benchmark cassette compilation named c86 that music mag NME released in 1986. The Pastels released their first single, "Songs for Children," in 1982. For several subsquent years, they released new music only sporadically on a string of various record labels. The Pastels existed as a loose collective of players and their line-up changed frequently.