The Cigarettes – Bingo (1997) – LITTLE LOST CLASSICS

Before starting this report, a warning: maybe it doesn’t make the slightest sense to you. And that’s okay, most of the things written here don’t make sense to anyone but me, after all this is nothing more than a fanzine 2.0. Given the message, let’s go…

I’m currently listening to Bingo between one tear and another. I’m actually dehydrating. Not because of Colares’ sad lyrics, but because I’m having a particularly emotional day and because this first Cigarettes album takes me straight back to the time when the personality of this old fool was formed who even today, approaching half a century, still cries listening to music , reading books, watching movies or plays.

It was the 90s, and there was a ghetto-shaped universe populated by strange beings, with their striped shirts and bowl hair (hahaha), the latter a mark I never reached, replacing it with an invariable bald head – and then a Black Power like Rob Tyner or dreads like Adam Franklin, in short, capillary questions are beside the point.

As I said, it was the 90s, there was no internet, I didn’t even have a telephone, so to enter this ghetto universe of noise and strange beings, you had to go to concerts, buy CDs or cassette tapes, find photocopied fanzines and the like. And in one of those ways, or all, I don’t remember, I got to know Cigarettes first, then your Bingo and “Under lights”, “Annabel Lee”, “Naturally sad”, “Friendship”, songs that I learned to sing so long ago and that are still here today, bringing me to mixed smiles and tears.

The same midsummer madness who launched Bingo in 97 there was a crowdfunding campaign just now to press it on vinyl, celebrating its 25th anniversary, a campaign that I didn’t join because the round earth rotates and today there are two strange and noisy little beings that depend on me.

And it’s all right, after all, the biscuit came out of the oven and at this very moment someone must also be experiencing the same flood of emotions as me while Colares sings “You know the time is running fast over me and over you…”

There are stories that time does not erase. This is one of them ❤