30 songs

Middle age - in the sense of being forty-something, as opposed to being medieval - is a chronological situation which I have embraced without regret or wanting.  I give far less of a shit about things these days.  Some people might find that sad or even reprehensible.  They might argue that indifference is a crime.  That by becoming disengaged from what's happening in the world, being (even more) socially misanthropic and by re-embracing political incorrectness, I am in some ways doing something wrong.  In a world in which ill-informed, polarised, over-simplistic, bite-sized opinion-spewing is the fabric of social media, I daresay my attitude would arouse much castigation.  Fortunately, the not-giving-a-shit state of mind in which I dwell allows me to waste no amount of worry over what people think. I'm not saying I am a calmer person - I frequently feel irritated and annoyed by life, contemptuous of much of what happens around me - but I do feel like I h...

I don't think that thoughts of my own mortality really started to take seed until I was well into my 40s, so it would be taking too much poetic license to try and link that to a new attitude I started to develop towards music as I approached middle-age.  I was only 39 in 2009, when this next part of my autobiographical music-loving journey begins.  Nonetheless, there is some coincidence. It occurred to me that I had not seen in concert some of the bands or artists that I had loved from (in most cases) my teenage years and it started to feel like I should do so before they die.  I suffer from mental blocks that can last years or even decades, where I tell myself something negative about music and then close my mind to it without review for far too long.  A few examples: Deciding that Springsteen was rubbish once he released the relatively disappointing Tunnel of Love in 1987 and followed it with the mediocre crap of  Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992....

If this entire blog isn't self-indulgent enough, then this post certainly will be.  That's because it is likely to end up as nothing more entertaining or interesting than a homage to a band that few readers (let's face it, that 'few' still might be ALL readers) have heard about. My possibly unreliable memory suggests to me that during one of my years-long phases of eating the same breakfast every day, one particular box of Cinnamon Grahams unexpectedly housed a free CD of songs by lesser known alternative rock bands.  On reflection, it might have been a music magazine, but the cereal box story has a more curious coating to it (see what I did there?)  Anyway, on this CD was a track called The Same Deep Water as Me by a band with the enigmatic and inexplicable name of I am Kloot.  And ultimately, this became what might just be my favourite song of all time. With the aid of the internet - for our story has now taken us to 2005/6 - I found out that I am Kloot had re...

We like to take the piss out of British people who like cowboys.  People who don the boots and check shirts, who unselfconsciously own a Stetson and attend line-dancing classes alongside other couples who you suspect would be swingers, doggers or naturists if they were any more uninhibited.  ('They're sex people, Lynn!')  Country and Western is almost as unfashionable and frowned upon as folk or prog rock, so you might be thinking that someone sad and crap enough to produce a blog like this would be a fan.  Not quite.  C&W is a bit too cheesy and whiney for me, with too many mentions of whisky, good old boys and the singer's daddy.  But some music genres work better when they are diluted or mixed with something else.  I feel a food analogy screaming to be applied.  Garlic maybe.  In its purest form, country music, like folk music, is just a bit much.  But so much stuff I like has country and folk influences, usually alongside blues....

In 1997, Fever Pitch was released.  Nick Hornby added a romance and a narrative to his original novel in order to make it work as a film; and, just as importantly, he added a soundtrack.  Now, The Who are quite possibly the most over-rated classic rock band of all time, having churned out for the most part a load of tosh that was either bland or just plain pompous.  But there're enough diamonds in the rough for a creditable Best Of... album and the one I have on record somehow fails to include Baba O'Reilly.  If you know it, you'll know that iconic intro... you probably don't know (I didn't until I looked it up just now) or care that Pete 'It was research' Townsend played it on a Lowery Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ using its marimba repeat feature.  Credit to Pete for the finger-work and credit to Nick Hornby for using this at the point in which the film's main character Paul, as a young boy, prepares to go to Arsenal for the first time on his own.  As h...

Had George Orwell written a follow-up to 1984, it might have been a post-dystopian vision of a future in which Big Brother had been banished and was still 5 years away from inauspiciously returning to the public eye with his own game show, the Thought Police had became impotent in the face of a laddish culture that was legitimising perving over the naked female form and British popular music was enjoying (briefly) its last era of true greatness. Orwell's book would be called 1995. I compiled a list at the time of all the albums I bought (or copied) that had been released that year, because (a) I was astounded by how many I had, (b) I was astounded at how good they all were, and (c) I like lists.  In a futile effort to reconstruct that list now, I've reflected that 1995 had in fact provided the vintage crop in the middle of a 5 year fertile period.  Between 1993 and 1997 these albums found their way from shop - usually HMV in Brent Cross or Edgware or a small independent musi...

So, Dalboy visited me at university shortly after the Greyhound pub /embarrassing coming together of ex-girlfriends debacle and no doubt I updated him on all that nonsense as we shared a few beers at the student union on the last Friday night of the Autumn term.  Dal is a good listener and patiently tolerant of someone talking far too much about their women triumphs (few) and woes (many).  That list of names really tested his factual recall, but he coped well and even remembered a broad-smiling flame-haired girl called Jenny, who I'd mentioned to him in a letter about a month before, when she turned up and said hello.  Consistently generous, he insisted on going for a wander - even though he didn't know anyone there - so that I could talk to her and even chance my arm and ask her out (though not to the Greyhound).  She said 'absolutely', Dal came back and congratulated me and on the Sunday we (me and Jen that is, not Dal) had our first date at the Boozy Blues Bar ne...

Like many songs covered so far, this one has more than one connection to the time.  To get the far less significant connection out of the way first... I was introduced to The Beautiful South and their 1990 LP Choke by the last girl I went out with before meeting my wife.  Given the crapness with women described in previous posts, you might find it incredulous that I ever went out with ANY girls or that I ended up finding one at this point who'd be forgiving enough of my still reasonably inept dating skills to condescend to marry me.  The girl that I had a brief, confusing and doomed flirtation with was called Violet Elizabeth.  Or Sarah.  I was never sure, because she was a self-professed fabricator of information.  I was in my third year, gloomily aware that my tenure at university was coming to an end and propulsion into the rat race - one in which I had no idea what job I wanted to do - was a mere 9 months away.  I was also eager for a relationshi...

For #16 I originally planned to use The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me.  Can you imagine how fucking depressing that read would have been.  It would have been apt though.  I did spend half the time in my 2nd year at university wallowing in the most irritatingly, mawkish and egocentric self-pity, a state of mind that only Morrisey could have sound-tracked.  And having resisted Bern's evangelism over The Smiths for several years, I was now ready to be won over. But when I wasn't disappearing up my own arsehole in order to fetch the nails that I required to metaphorically crucify my tortured soul upon the cross of maudlin introspection, I was actually really rather enjoying that time. Therefore, a song which reminds me more of those moderately shit-stained halcyon days was The Sundays' Here's Where the Story Ends.  In fact the whole album.  Another recommendation from - and another gig with - Bern.  The Sundays' guitarist had clear...

Just before the end of my first year at university, my mate from home, Bern, sent me a couple of tapes which caused the next seismic shift in my attitude towards music.  Perhaps, he had heard me proclaim, in the naïve and stubborn narrow-mindedness of my youth, that all contemporary music in the late 80s was shit and that only 'old stuff' was worth listening to.  In terms of what was in the charts, I was unarguably spot on in my assessment.  Compare episodes of Top of the Pops from 1980-2 (regularly featuring Madness, Blondie, Bowie, Kate Bush, The Police, The Jam, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Dexy's etc...) and 1987-9 (packed full of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and insipid dance-orientated crap).  What I didn't know, but Bern did, was that outside of the regular charts, but populating the Indie charts and alternative rock scene, there were bands that most people had not (or not yet) heard about, but who were pretty fucking brilliant. One TDK90 tape had REM's 198...

Prog rock attracts a particular type of person and when I started at university I was drawn into a group of people who to an extent fitted that type.  Only to some extent though, because let's face it, Prog rock is the last refuge of the socially uncool.  Which we were.  Defiantly and proudly so.  I'm not quite sure who WAS cool there, the land managers and rugby fraternity in their cords, smart jumpers and starched collar shirts or the ripped jeans, floppy haired, sit-on-the-floor studenty students, indulgently parading a plethora of affectations including recently self-appointed nicknames. We weren't cool, but we were pretty far from the sort of social misfits whose introversion was a defence against an unforgiving outside world as opposed to our introversion, which was a lifestyle choice borne out of contempt for the attention-seekers and fun fascists. Certain types of music appeal to certain types of people.  There's a brashness and arrogance to Hip Hop...

John - my mate John as opposed to John Lennon - set up the drum kit in his bedroom, draped towels over the snare, toms and high-hat and stuffed a duvet into the bass drum.  He explained to me that I had to cross one hand over the other, hit the high-hat in rhythm with the music and in every series of 4 taps I had to thump the peddle on 1 and hit the snare on 3.  He then proceeded to play Imagine on his electric keyboard, helpfully making a point of accentuating the chords on that 1st and 3rd beat within a bar and then he sent me off with a pair of drumsticks and told me to drum along on my thighs to the songs we were intending to play in our band. Imagine wasn't going to be on the set-list.  It was just a simple, mid-tempo plodder that served a purpose in teaching someone with no musical ability to play the drums.  A Hard Day's Night was a more challenging prospect, only because of the speed, which made it impossible for me at that stage to maintain a consistent...

When A Fairytale of New York first came out at the end of November 1987, about 3 million MTV and VH1 plays ago and back when the word arse was more likely to be bleeped out than faggot , it was a no-brainer ideal choice of Christmas present for the waitress I fancied at The Beefeater.  Liz Marah hated everything we played in the kitchen and caused my attraction to waver no end with a confession that her favourite band was The Beastie Boys, but having Irish parentage meant that The Pogues would prove to be a safe bet if I was to buy her any music.  Plus, it was only about £1.50, so a minimal financial risk as well.  It didn't actually work in terms of securing a date (not a proper one anyway), at least not for another year when she asked me to go out with her on (ironically enough)Christmas Eve, which I did, but had lost interest by then after too long wallowing in a futile state of infatuation during my time at The Beefeater (so that wasn't a proper one either.) That i...

Baw ba-now ba-now ba-na-na-na, baw ba-now, ba now, ba na-na-na…. That Robbie Krieger riff belted out of the 80s ghetto blaster in our 6th form common room and thus commenced my realisation, ignited at that moment and swift to come to fruition, that most of the best rock music ever recorded came out between 1967 and 1971.  In that time, The Doors released six albums of incomparable brilliance.  These days, rock bands struggle to push out two mediocre albums in that amount of time.  This is not just the stereotypical middle-aged moan.  Things WERE so much better in the old days and even more so between '67 and '71. Although I'd already discovered Dylan, that was a bit of an aberration.  That didn't spur me on to explore other music from the 60s and 70s.  It was an anomaly.  But Roadhouse Blues proved to be the gateway riff to a religious-like conversion to the cult of classic rock that was so zealous in its fundamentalism that I cast aside ...

If family mythology is to be believed, my Dad quite liked Bob Dylan when he was in his teens.  And then I came along before he turned 20 and popular music paled into insignificance.  Dad's indifference became borderline contemptuous over time.  But he didn't throw away his tape of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits and I found it in a cupboard in the dining room when I was 15. Like anyone in the 80s with a school music teacher who affected coolness, I sang (ok, mimed) along to Blowin' in the Wind and was told about Bob Dylan at an early age.  Nothing is more guaranteed to put you off any particular music than having an adult wet their knickers over it while attempting to inflict it on you. So, when the tape started, I thought, oh yeah I know this, folk protest songs for bearded saddos (our music teacher was a bearded saddo).  Blowin' in the Wind, The Times they are a-changin' and then another school music lesson staple, Mr Tambourine Man. And then....

I'm sure that one sex-obsessed psychologist or another would have claimed that the first famous person you ever develop a crush on as an adolescent forms the template for everyone you are sexually attracted to in the future.  If they didn't, then I'd like to throw my hypothesis into the psychological debate.  Test the theory.  Ask yourself first, what's your type?  Then who was the first person you fancied?  Do they match? In my case, the waters are muddied somewhat by an early thing I had for Catwoman (Julie Newmar that is, not Lee Meriwether and definitely not Eartha Kitt, especially given the rhyming slang connotations.  And Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway were yet to fill those latex suits).  But I don't believe that I was in love with her.  After all, she tried to kill Batman.  Also, I was heartbroken when Raquel Welch was strangled to death with rosary beads in the 1973 film, The Three Musketeers.  But really, the first famou...

So my Dad knew this bloke from Thailand or Korea or thereabouts who sold bootleg cassettes for a quid each, anything you wanted that was in the charts, with glossy colour Xerox copied inlay cards and labels on the tapes with artist and album title all spelt more or less correctly.  And I sold them at school for two quid each. This was in 1984 and 1985, the last great years for albums in that much-panned decade.  The most popular orders included Springsteen - Born in the USA, Kate Bush - Hounds of Love, Dire Straits -Brothers in Arms, Tears for Fears - Songs from the Big Chair, Phil Collins - No Jacket Required, Sting - The Dream of the Blue Turtles, Marillion - Misplaced Childhood, Prince - Purple Rain, Tina Turner - Private Dancer, Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, Madonna - Like a Virgin.  Not a bad line-up, eh?  There were other even better albums available in those years, notably a couple by The Smiths and REM, but few people (Bern being...