There was a point in the early 90s when it seemed that bands were more famous for their t-shirts than for their music. Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Inspiral Carpets, Carter USM et al seemed to be everywhere, not in music form, but emblazoned on chests everywhere. This sort of t-shirt culture seems to have more or less disappeared now (except in heavy metal circles) but back then, you *had* to wear a band's tshirt in order to proclaim your musical tastes to the world. At the moment the only reason to wear a band's tshirt is ironically, or because the image on the front looks cool. Witness the fact that you can buy Motorhead t-shirts in Topshop, and Misfits t-shirts are worn by people who would run away from Glenn Danzig if they saw him in the street.
Today skinny indie kids are wearing Sonic Youth t-shirts with the front cover of the 'Goo' album on it not because they know who SY are, but because it's a nice shirt. Is this an old man rant? Not really. For a good portion of my heavy metal days I was wearing the classic 'German Army Shirt' bought from army surplus stores across the land - did I have to have been conscripted into the German Army to earn the right to wear said garment? I just find it amusing is all...
Sonic Youth always struck a fine balance between great music and art-wank. Years after I bought Goo, some arty friends of mine went to see Sonic Youth on the South Bank playing with some avant-garde composer and were raving about it. I'm glad I didn't go because I would have been the guy at the back yelling for 'Kool Thing'
I always struggle with Sonic Youth - they were one of those bands that other bands name-check as being a big inspiration, but I always found their albums to be difficult, mixing some really good songs with much more experimental ones which made it difficult to sit through an entire record. Still their best tunes were perfect mix-tape fodder, and between this, 100% and Teenage Riot, they should be on anyone's top 10 of 90s alternative bands.
An example of their wilful eclecticism - I saw Sonic Youth play live in 1993 at the long defunct Phoenix Festival where they played headlined a stage and promptly proceeded to play an entire set of b-sides, obscure cuts and early songs. There was a torrent of people fleeing the tent as Sonic Youth proceeded to bludgeon them with a wall of feedback. At the time I was one of the ones fleeing with ears ringing. Now I would probably be standing at the back applauding...
When you listen to a lot of music, at some point, it dawns upon you that it might be possible to be in a band yourself, get lots of girls, be on the cover of the NME and die of a drugs overdose in a hooker's bathroom (okay, maybe not that last one) I'd been in one band - a really really bad heavy metal band called The Holocaust Pigs. We had one guitar and two vocalists. The guitarist was 12 and had only been playing his instrument (or 'axe' as no one ever calls it) for all of two weeks, we had songs called 'Necrophilliac Hamster' and the moving tribute to sufferers of leprosy 'Decaying Denzil (He's Falling To Pieces) Truly, we were awful. Skip forwards several years to me being 17 and trying again, after hearing lots of alternative bands and thinking 'yeah, these guys know all of two chords. I know almost one chord, how hard can it be.
At about the same time, I met a music teacher who was more than a little eccentric and thought that I should be in a band too, and he gave me the use of the school music room after school to practise, so I roped in the other members of The Pigs (as no-one ever called us) and thus Dog Soup was born. We had all of three songs, one was about being chained to a fridge as I recall, and we lasted for three whole weeks before the rest of the teachers in the school, in their teachers lounge, right at the other end of the school, kicked us out for making too much noise! How rock and roll! This set-back, however, curtailed my musical experiments for a good few years, as I couldn't afford a bass guitar and we had no room to put a drum kit anywhere.
The band that inspired me to these early experiments was Mudhoney. They sounded like they could just about play their instruments, and to disguise their lack of musical ability, they layered distortion over everything which made a nasty garage rock stew that sounded ace to these ears (and more importantly it sounded like I could just about stretch my fledgling musical abilities to match these sounds). They also seemed to be having much more fun than most of the bands that were their contemporaries. They could be a bit hit and miss on vinyl - their albums always seemed to contain way more filler than killer (as some people did say, but these people might have been Sum 41, so we won't go there).
Grunge bands, and indeed the whole Gen-X thing, was often regarded as being primarily distinguished by one character trait, its ability to moan, whine and mope.
There is certainly some truth in this, as anyone who has read Douglas Copeland's Generation X will know - a book which did as much as Nevermind to form the identity of the grunge generation (and I'm using that term both loosely and mockingly. I don't think anyone who was into American Indie music in the early to mid 90's ever referred to themselves as 'Grungers', 'slacker' or anything even vaguely similar, that was for people like Richard and Judy, who once did a hilarious 'How to dress like a Grunger' segment on This Morning, which was more Partridge than Partridge...)
Being a teenager at the time, I'm pretty sure I did my fair share of whining too, but the person who gets the gold medal for it is probably Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. His lyrics, interviews and voice all seem dripping with misery and self pity, and later on in his career, Smashing Pumpkins turned into a sort of overblown Goth band, soaked in pretention. Still, people tended to like him, and there were some rather good videos...
Smashing Pumpkins first album though, was rather good (although they should have let D'arcy sing on more of the tracks)
Ahh, Grunge. Checked shirts (I refuse to say plaid...), dock martens,
torn jeans, loud and miserable music. This was MY musical movement. I
had just missed out on The Summer of Love - and I always found The Stone
Roses to be massively over-rated (hence the fact that they won't be
appearing on this list at all) - and Britpop was 5 years away (and
mostly rubbish too - copy and paste my feelings for The Stone Roses and
apply them to Oasis...) but what I did have was loads of scruffy
American bands with effects pedals playing vaguely down-beat music. And
I loved it.
Soundgarden were one of those bands who sat comforatbly on the line between metal and grunge (In fact it's pretty difficult to define exactly what grunge was, apart from vaguely poppy, vaguely noisy, vaguely American. Yeah, we were all about the vague. Our hair wasn't too long, but it want too short either. We just didn't care...) and in another life had been a pretty awful Led Zepplin sound-alike band (as I found out when I bought Louder Than Love after getting into them, listening to it once and then putting it in the record box along with all my old metal vinyl and never touching it again...)
Because they had that cross-over thing going on, Soundgarden were acceptable to play in our 6th Form Common Room stereo (well, the one in the un-cool part, well away from the kids who got bought cars for their 17th birthday, went skiing and had good skin...) so I seem to remember listening to them quite a lot. It was about this time that I had my first act of rebellion, as I was threatened with being kicked out of school if I didn't get my hair cut, having grown it over the last few years as part of my metal phase. There were a few days of stand-off as I refused, even getting my Dad to come into school and stick up for me (Yeah, that's how rebellious I was...) and facing off against the odious little man who was head of the 6th form (who was also bald, and I suspect slightly jelous of my magnificent lion-like mane)
In the end, sadly, I caved to the pressure and got my hair cut into the signature mushroom cut which was everywhere circa 1993 and the teacher confimed his staus as a petty jobsworth so the moral victory was mine. But for a brief second, I knew how Jesus felt, which is what this song is about*
My relationship with a band in 7 steps (and how to torture a metaphor until it begs for death)
Step 1. First meetings. I got hold of a copy of Nirvana's first album the same week that I bought Metallica's Black Album (the Spinal Tap one...) Compared to Metallica's latest offering, it sounded fresh not moribund, lean and hungry rather than bloated, funny rather than po-faced. Our eyes locked across the floor of Jumbo Records and I was smitten
Step 2. Obsession. I started 'accidentally' bumping into Nirvana everywhere. I opened a copy of NME (My first one had them on the front cover, along with the baffling headline 'Are Nirvana the Guns and Roses it's okay to like') in the 6th form common room and there they were. They were like the cool weird girl who sits by herself in the corner of the party. I was buying bootlegs, rare Tour only cassettes, limited edition 7 inches with awful b-sides, I was starting to have a problem. Nothing creepy mind, not like that thing with Winona Ryder that I started in 1995...
Step 3. Going steady. Suddenly we were an item, we even dressed alike. I got a stock of tartan shirts, ripped jeans, cardigans and Converse All-Stars. Things were going well, Nevermind came out and suddenly everything was cool. Everyone else started to notice Nirvana and I could say with a smug smile 'yeah, well I've been into them for ages'. "Oh you're so cool', no-one said, but I didn't care...
Step 4. The cracks start to show. Nirvana was hanging around with it's cool new friends and didn't have any more time for me. It was also spending a lot of time with that Crazy Lady Courtney Love. We didn't see each other so much any more, and when we did the magic had gone a little bit. I went to see Nirvana play live in 1993 and it was like they didn't care. The sound was awful, they played 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' half way through the set with an apologetic shrug and it seemed like they just didn't care about me any more.
Step 5. Trying to re-kindle things. A belated attempt was made to patch things up with In Utero, but it was plain that things would never be the same again. It wasn't a shadow of how things were before. We tried, but it was becoming apparent that it was over between us.
Step 6. Breaking up. I was hung over on the floor of my friends house when he told me Kurt Cobain had killed himself (I was also in a similar state, by complete coincidence when he told me Princess Di was dead. I had to stop hanging around with him shortly afterwards for the sake of famous people everywhere) and it seemed strangely like the only way the relationship could have ended. With the benefit of years and hind-sight, it wasn't a tragic death of a tortured artist, but rather a sad end to somebody who had mental health problems, a drug addiction and no-one to turn to. I remember being in a club shortly afterwards and the DJ played 'Smells like Teen Spirit' and the dance floor turned into a strangely passive-aggressive mosh pit with everyone slowly slamming into each other. It seemed an odd but poignant articulation of everyones unspoken grief.
Step 7. Moving on. Like that first girlfriend who is so cool that breaking up feels like the end of the world, but afterwards you realise that she opened your eyes to lots of new things, after Nirvana things were never the same. Indie bands were on Top Of The Pops, there were huge amounts of amazing bands getting press coverage, and more importantly being signed to labels, getting albums released and touring the UK. Plus there were at least two amazing albums to listen to and enjoy.
And now I'm bored and old. Nirvana are the band, more than any other, that remind me of my age. I think it's the fact that, unlike bands from that era who are still going, kids in Nirvana t-shirts I see today were not even born when Nevermind came out, and will never see them play on the reunion circuit. And I can say 'yeah, well I was into them first' and they will say 'so what Grandad' and I'll smile a wry smile like I was remembering that first crazy girlfriend*, after whom everyone else I met would be measured...
* Any resemblence to any ex-girlfriends, living or dead, is purely co-incidental
"You should never meet your heroes" or so the saying goes. By now I was going to lots of gigs and was over-joyed to learn that Primus were playing in Bradford. The venue was downstairs at the Queen's Hall (I'm not even sure that it's still open) which had all the charm of the bar from Star Wars, and was a perfect enviornment to see various scuzzy metal bands.
My friends and I were hanging out at the bar, trying to look cool and nursing our pints of cider when we spotted the guitarist from Primus looking puzzled at an arcade machine. My freinds and I looked at each other, not quite believing that one of our idols was standing right next to us. We were a little bit awe-struck. Until we realised he was kinda stoned and couldn't figure out how to work the machine and was just standing there slightly hypnotised by the flashing lights. And then we realised that our idol had feet of clay...
Primus were often lumped in with funk metal, mainly because they had a very bass driven sound, but in reality were a lot more weird than that. Their songs often featured strange characters inhabiting weird worlds. They had a lot more in common with Tom Waits than Red Hot Chili Peppers (and Tom Waits would guest on their 'big' hit single Tommy The Cat')
They also seem to be a love-or-hate-them band, probably due in part to Les Claypool's idiosyncratic voice and strange lyrical subject matter. Also, they sounded a world away from bands like Iron Maiden, Slayer and Metallica. Maybe I was getting kind of bored with metal, but what would take it's place?
There's a moment in 'The Mighty Boosh' when Vince says "Jazz-Funk? That's Funk's retarded cousin," The same thing could easily be said about Funk-Metal. There was a whole movement toward crossover (witness Anthrax teaming up with Public Enemy to produce a tune which was less than the sum of its parts) as if metal was slightly ashamed of itself and seeking to gain legitimacy but melding with other, more respectable genres (Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit et al would do something very similar ten years later with similarly dreadful results)
The prime movers of this genre were the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who, unlike most of those who came after (I'm looking at you Urban Dance Squad, Freaky Funkin' Wierdos and many more) were actually really cool.
My copy of Mother's Milk - the album that first broke them - was ill-gotten. It was stolen from a party at the house of someone we didn't like. There are dim memories of being drunk on cheap cider, petty vandalism, booze being stolen, the whole thing. And when I got home I had this tape in my pocket. I could never listen to Higher Ground without feeling vaguely guilty. I could take this opportunity to confess, but rather sadly, I can't remember the name of the kid who's party it was, so my deed will have to go unpunished, apart from my whole self loathing thing.
The first 4 Chilis albums were a lot different to the ones that came after their big hit 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik' and are a lot more funky, often sounding like a different band. I was much more of a fan of this early stuff, which was my first real taste of musical snobbery - when everyone else was raving about 'Under The Bridge' and 'Give It Away' I was acting like a proto-hipster, quietly remarking that I'd been into them for years and their early stuff was way better. Sometimes I can be such a jerk...
Faith No More's album 'The Real Thing' was another one of those hot tapes that got passed around from person to person. It sounded kind of different to the usual metal stuff we were listening to - almost poppy, which as you will recall was a no-go area for us - but it was okay, because Metal Hammer and Kerrang were writing about them. They even *gasp* sang love songs.
This album is one of those super-nostalgic records - one that sound tracked an exact moment in time - the summer between finishing my GCSEs and starting my A - Levels. Without coming over all 'Stand By Me' it was a great summer, filled with great friends with stupid nick-names (Bod, Bish, Bobo, Crip, Taff...) my first (unrequited) crush and that time we went to see a dead body but got hassled by Keifer Sutherland...
Also, hanging out watching Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes and being exposed to music videos for more or less the first time - ones that you couldn't find anywhere else and certainly weren't shown on Top Of The Pops, which never showed any metal anyway (apart from the odd Iron Maiden track) and suddenly VHS tapes were being traded as eagerly as C90s.
One of the things about getting into any kind of music is how cool it is to explore the genre. Someone gives you an Iron Maiden tape, you head down to the local Morrisons to snap up Powerslave and Stranger In A Strange Land. Soon you have the entire Iron Maiden back catalogue, so you scour the pages of Metal Hammer looking for news of a new Iron Maiden release.
And in the mean-time, you start to explore the other big names of the genre. Soon you are inahbiting the basement of Crash Records, flicking through the Thrash section for the other big names. Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax. Vinyl is bought, tapes swapped and soon you have a pretty comprehensive collecton of the more well known works. But it's still not enough. The reviews sections of magazines are scrutinized even more for things like 'if you like Metallica, you might like this band' and then the more obscure bands, the ones that never make the charts - not even the Heavy Metal Chart on The Chart Show - are part of your ever expanding collection.
By this time I was going to see gigs, stage diving like a proper mosher, with my long hair and my leather jacket. But because the big bands only toured once in a blue moon - and the usually only playing huge venues that involved coach trips - I started going to see any metal band that came anywhere near Leeds or Bradford. And once I saw a band called The Beyond, and fell in love. As far as I know, they only made one album before disappearing, which was a shame because they were great. And pretty obscure too, which gave them a certain aura of cool in my record collection. They were also, perhaps a sign of the fact that I was growning out of my metal days as they were pretty subtle by comparison to a lot of the other stuff I was listening to. Plus they didn't sing about death and the devil all the time.
If Testament were shocking, then Slayer were like a lightning bolt to the brain. The scream at the beginning of this song, the fact that it's about The Holocaust, the noise....
This song is still controversial to this day and to be honest it's still pretty indefensible, especially subject-wise. Slayer flirted with Nazi imagery, and some of the members of the band have said some controversial things. I think that as a teenager who was immersed in war (my reading material was Warlord, Commando and Battle comics, spending Sunday afternoons watching 633 squadron and The Dambusters) I was perhaps lacking the critical faculties to realise that it wasn't cool to sing about death camps in a way which seemed if not glorifying then rather un-critical.
Still, Slayer fucking rocked*. They were the only one of the Thrash bands I was into who never sold out, never stopped playing rough brutal metal and Angel of Death, along with the whole Reign In Blood album (which pack in 10 songs in a punk-rock 35 minutes) is still a cool listen, even if some of the lyrics did make me laugh out loud when I was compiling this list.
I've perhaps been a bit unfair on the whole metal scene in these last few entries. I loved it as a teenager, and it set me on the path to discover all sorts of other music, made me realise that the tribal nature of genres is essential in forming an identity as a person (especially as a teenager)
It's just that it all seems a bit, um, silly in retrospect, a genre that seems designed to be grown out of once you leave puberty - looked back on fondly for sure, but the simple fact is, once you've heard Reing in Blood and Kill 'Em All, as a genre there really is very few other places to go
Of course if anyone disagrees with me, and want to point me in the direction of some more current metal then I'd love to hear it, and my inner awkward teenager would be eternally grateful...
After pushing Iron Maiden my way, one day my friend Crip (His real name was Christian, but he had a gammy leg or something, so he was forever dubbed 'Crip') sidled over to me clutching another C90 in his grubby mits - Crip, by the way had proper long hair, at the time when mine was just a glorified mullet, he wore a denim jacket with patches on it at a time when I was still saving my paper-round money up in the hopes of buying a black leather jacket, Crip was cool.
He pressed the tape into my hands and told me it was by his favourite new band, but, he warned me, they might be a bit heavier than Iron Maiden or Slayer. So I took the tape home and put it in the stereo, pressed play and my jaw dropped. This noise was insane! The cover looked properly satanic (I kind of knew that some strange people looked down on Heavy Metal because it encouraged satanism, and that made listening to it A GOOD THING, but those sort of people also thought Dungeons and Dragons mad people worship Satan too, which plainly wasn't true - all that sacrificing virgins would have gotten in the way of all that dice rolling anyway...)
Ironically, listening back to Testament now, they are probably at the blunt end of Thrash metal, unsubtle, and kind of cliched, but then metal isn't a genre reknowned for it's subtlety, hence it's appear to teenage boys I suspect. Sadly, like most of the metal bands I've mentioned, Testament left their heavy roots behind them shortly after I got into them, turned to making generic rock and went a bit bland. Still, this tune serves as a reminder of the fist time I had heard music that genuinely seemed shocking.
When heavy metal wasn't enough, there was Thrash. It was louder, brasher, angrier, the jeans were tighter, the hair longer. Like a junkie, suddenly normal metal wasn't enough. I needed faster, harder, more more more. I needed Metallica...
By now there was a little gang of us, all dressed in black, hanging around on park benches and drinking cheap cider on a friday night. We swapped tapes of new bands, pored over Kerrang, Metal Hammer and occasionally hung out at one of my rich friends house who had MTV and watched Headbangers Ball. Seek And Destroy was our anthem, we used to sing it drunkenly much like a generation later, other, similarly drunken fools would sing Oasis tunes.
Thrash bands tended to have slightly different concerns to more traditional metal. In the 80s especially, the fact that govenments were corrupt, that pollution would kill us all or if it didn't then nuclear war certainly would. It fitted perfectly with trying to find a world view as a teenager - even if to my more jaded ears now some of it seems hilariously unsubtle, but then to be fair, metal as a genre is hilariously unsubtle.
Metallica are now more famous for being grumpy old men who hate file sharing, acting like primadonnas on documentaries and generally being the kind of people who the Metallica that recorded Kill Em All would have hated. I think that there is a lesson in that, but I'm not sure what it is.
However, Seek And Destroy, and pretty much all of the first 3 Metallica albums, are just about as good as metal ever got. And if you can't find something to love there, there really is no hope for you...
If Iron Maiden made me want to learn to play guitar, Guns 'n' Roses made me want to be A ROCK STAR. I mean, sure, those guys from Iron Maiden made good music, but they seemed a little, well, boring. Bruce Dickinson seemed really posh and the rest of the band came across as down to earth and a little at odds with the noises they made on stage.
Guns 'n' Roses came with swagger, attitude and a guy with a big hat. Plus girls seemed to like their music, and that seemed like something that might be important one day soon, as my teenage hormones prepared to crank themselves up to wreak havock on my poor unsuspecting self.
When I started compliling this list, I listend to a lot of my old heavy metal albums, and a lot of it seemed pretty cliched, some of it downright awful and at least one song made me laugh out loud at how terrible it was (Hello Sacred Reich...) but this tune never quite left my ipod and how could it? That guitar intro is just majestic! It has actual human feelings in it - an aspect lacking from most heavy metal, where anger is the only discernable mood in most bands catalogue - and you could kind of dance to it, rather than just mosh, if that was your thing of course.
This song was, of course, as close to the mainstream as it was acceptable for a young mosher to go. Liking 'trendy' music was anathema to us. Chart songs were death, pop was some sort of lower life, to be mocked, hated and ignored. Every non-metal head was a person to be converted. I used to turn up to parties like a Jehova's Witness with a mix-tape or two in my pocket to try and bring the unsuspecting into the metal fold. At least one tape was flushed down the toilet...
I was about 14 when I discovered heavy metal. My friend Crip (who disappeared and no-one seems to know where he went. If, on the off-chance you are reading this Crip, 'Hello') gave me another tape, this time of Live After Death by Iron Maiden and I was transfixed. Again
Heavy metal, as a genre, seems designed to appeal to teenage boys. The key ingredients (at least of classic heavy metal) are The Devil, War, Murder and violence. All the stuff that your average teenage boy thinks is really really cool. Look at the covers of any Iron Maiden album for example - they have a big ol' zombie on the front for Jebus' sake. How could any self respecting 14 year old not love that?
Plus, the music is loud, aggressive and generally unappealing to anyone over the age of 20. It encourages tribal behaviour in much the same way as football does and there were, at least in my circle of moshers, no girls allowed...
This isn't, by the way, me being dismissive of metal as a genre, I'm just listing the reasons that I loved it so much. Iron Maiden were a perfect gateway drug into the black lands of Heavy Metal - their albums looked like the Dungeons and Dragons books I was reading, they knew that war was simultaneously horrific and totally cool (Growing up in the 70's and 80's, I was surrounded by films like Dambusters and The Guns of Navarrone, reading Battle Action, Commando and Warlord comics)
Plus, suddenly, my Mum was telling me to 'turn that racket down', I got to wear tight black jeans and t-shirts with monsters on them. It was everything I needed.
Iron Maiden were the prefect band to obsess over - their lyrics were full of literary, historic and cinematic references that spotting made you seem cool, Their record paintings were full of tiny little details that meant you could spend hours poring over, just to spot the Blade Runner or Dr Who reference
Musically, they had all the moves that metal heads love, but everyone else can't stand. The pseudo-operatic song structures, the 'widdly widdly' guitar solos that made me want to learn how to play (and then quit shortly afterwards when I realised I was never going to be as good as Dave Murray) and the 15 minute songs.
Pandora's box was open, my hair was growing longer and I was now a mosher...
So far, even though I had liked The Beatles, and a few other bands or
albums along the way, I hadn't found my first musical love, so to
speak. That would arrive at our house in a C90 with a hand written
inlay card (musical piracy was rife in our house right from the
beginning, it would seem) that I would listen to hundreds of times,
introduce me to a band that I would seek out all their back catalogue,
try to decipher the meaning of lyrics of, buy the t-shirt, etc etc
The
album was Queen's Greatest Hits and hearing it, I fell in love. I know
that pretty much each one of those songs is kind of dulled by over
familiarity now (there are even aliens on the dark side of the moon who
can sing the ENTIRE of Bohemian Rhapsody) but hearing them for the first
time was a revelation. So I saved my pocket money and went out to buy
as many other Queen albums as I could, bought biographies, videos, hats,
anything I could with the word Queen on it.
The
mid-80's were when Queen suddenly went huge, but two things always made
me sad. One was that I missed their career defining performance at Live
Aid due to being at a Scout camp (We didn't even have a VHS recorder at
the time, as I recall) and that every album they made after that was
not as good as the ones that came before. I know The Works had some
good songs on it, and It's A Kind Of Magic was a tune, but the glories
of Night at the Opera and News of the World were long gone.
Still,
I had all the albums to listen to at length, and the track that always
stands out, even now after all these years is Somebody to Love. It sums
up what Queen were about - being overblown, preposterous, heart-felt,
and just a little bit ridiculous - after all this is a band that once
had a song called "The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke" - and it's worth a
sing-along every now and then, just for old time's sake
Small decisions can lead to huge outcomes. For instance, if I had decided to eat just a few more slug pellets after thinking they were sweets when I was 4, then I might not be here writing this blog right now. A similar, at the time almost inconsequential, decision could have changed the whole course of my life.
There wasn't a lot of music in my house when I was growing up. My Dad played the Jazz coronet (and was apparently well into his jazz, even frequenting some of the hipper jazz clubs in Leeds in the 60s) but gave it all up in favour of folk music. My Mum had been a teeny-bopper, as I believe the term was, in the 60's, had seen The Beatles play at Yeadon Town Hall, ironed her hair under brown paper to get that essential 60's look and wanted to kill Jane Asher not for her cakes but for her romantic entanglement with Paul. However, she didn't bring that love of music with her into the 80's, or at least not her record collection anyway, so as a consequence there wasn't a huge collection of music for me to listen to when I was a nipper.
There were two records that I remember being obsessed with to the point of knowing all the words. One was The Red Album by the Beatles - yellowing sleeve held together with sellotape, and a shiny new copy of Staus Quo's greatest hits - I think it was called 12 Gold Bars or something like that.
Imagine if I had chosen to follow the Quo, instead of The Beatles. Would I have grown up hating good music? The answer is probably no, I would have developed taste elsewhere, but the point remains, I could have grown up regarding music as background, a disposable product to form only a passing attachment to, rather than a thing that surrounded and shaped my life, provided soundtrack and accompaniment. Sounds rather grand and pompous doesn't it? But when I ask people what kind of music they like, if they don't know, cant list their top 27 albums, cant tell you the first, best and latest gig they attended, then I view them as a person to be regarded with deep suspicion.
So The Beatles. The Red Album - or properly 1962-1966 - was the first music I fell properly in love with, when Paul sang about 'All the lonely people' on Eleanor Rigby, I got the first glimpses of how music could convey emotion, but my favourite song on the album was Nowhere Man. Possibly because my love of The Red Album went hand-in-hand with my love of The Yellow Submarine film, which I watched over and over until the VHS tape almost wore through. I still, however, couldn't quite get my head around the fact that the same band could write Yellow Submarine AND Only A Northern Song. My tiny brain wasn't quite ready yet for such eclectic musical diversity...
Also, when we were at Uni, we had a Fantasy Beatles Covers Album idea. This song would have been covered by The Pixies. Imagine how cool it could have been with Kim singing the lead and Black Francis on harmonies....
Once upon a time, there was a small boy. He was, as all small boys are, obsessed with mud, things that explode and running away from girls. He had a passing daliance with Star Wars (which he would return to with a vengence in later life) but the first truly awesome thing to swim into his purview was a film about, erm, men who bust ghosts.
I was obsessed with Ghostbusters, after seeing it in a cinema which is now a TK Maxx, and even went so far as to fashion my own unlicenced particle accelerator out of two Robinsons squash bottles, a vaccuum cleaner nozzle and a snake belt. I had the sticker book, the view-master, the computer game on my Commodore 64 (although I never could guide Ray (or it may have been Peter, the sprite was so poorly rendered) thorugh the Stay-puft Marshmallow man's legs) and, in the days before VHS tapes - yes, it was THAT long ago - owning the soundtrack was the closest thing to watching the film again.
So it came to pass that the first ever single young Dan owned was the Ghostbusters Theme by Ray Parker Jr, bought from the record counter at Morrisons, back when such things were still, erm, things. Indeed, my copy still has a sticker on the sleeve with my name on it, from when I took it to a school disco, although I have long since lost the means to listen to vinyl.
The song itself stands up pretty well, in a sort of cheesy, borderline camp 80's kind of way, and I'm pretty sure it is the strongest song in Ray Parker Jr's back catalogue (pop quiz - can you name another song by him?)
So as first records ever bought go, I'm not at all embarrased by my choice. The second song I ever bought was 'Hole In My Shoe' by Neil for the Young Ones which would have been slightly more embarrasing to admit to...
Welcome to 40 for 40. I assume you have some questions, so let's take them one at a time
1. What is 40 for 40?
That, my friend, is a a perfect question, put perfectly and with perfect timing. Have an apple. 40 for 40 started life as a playlist on my iPod. I thought, in a wave of oh-my-lord-I'm-turning-40 induced nostalgia, that it might fun to boil down the 18,000 songs into one short list that kind of summed up my musical life to date. One song for every year, to be precise. The more I thought about it, it seemed like it would be fun to blog said list, preserving it for posterity and also it could be fun to write, although not necessarily to read...
2. Sounds good. Then why in the name of all the monkeys are there 120 songs on this increasingly mis-named blog?
Did you not see the part about the 18,000 songs? I decided to split the songs into categories and then award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize. Kind of like the egg-and-spoon race on sports day, although no sympathy prize for the wheezy, unfit kid (my shelves are groaning with those anyway)
3. Is this some kind of stealth autobiography, like some kind of dreadful Nick Hornby thing?
Yes, and in the movie of this blog, I WILL be played by either John Cusack or Micheal Fassbender.
4. I see, it's a bit self indulgent isn't it?
Since my fanzine folded after only one issue, the NME, Select and Smash Hits rejected my articles, blogging is the only way I have to blah on about the things I love. I will fight anyone who disagrees with my choices and if just one person discovers 'Slanted and Enchanted' through this blog, then my job here is done
5. You do realize that most people will think the blog is broken and they are getting an 'error 404' message, not actually seeing the title of the blog?
Only idiots like you would think that
6. Will there be links to this so-called music?
Yes, that's what youtube is for. Apart from the songs that are so obscure they were only released on ca-single in Bolivia. Does that answer all your questions?
