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...