EMBARRASSING CORNERS OF THE RECORD COLLECTION

Post 101. The worst thing in the world you can possibly imagine... I'm not sure that bad record purchases really count. On the other hand, now that I come to mention it...

I was a bit rubbish as a student, if truth were to be told. Despite going to art school I was as square as square could be, especially when it came to music. Whilst many of my fellow inmates would go off to scruffy and frankly scary looking dives and listen to bizarre bands with names like “Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry”, and collect LPs with black and white sleeves from shops that I was to frightened to even go into, I would meekly go out every so often and rashly spend some of my grant cheque on about 4 LPs a term that I’m now thoroughly ashamed to even admit to ever owning.

Music was never a massive part of our home life at that stage in my life, I was more of a telly fan, and so, apart from seeing stuff on the telly and occasionally listening to Phil Wood* and Mike Sweeney on Piccadilly Radio, or hearing what got played at the Youth Club, I was fairly oblivious to much of the music scene. We did, of course, have the obligatory “music centre” in the living room but it was hardly the busiest piece of equipment in the house. Dad had his “Country & Western” tapes which he seemed to like, and mum had a few LPs of musicals she enjoyed, and I used to listen to SF themes or Bond Film soundtracks as covered (or “murdered” if you like) by James Last that I used to occasionally be bought cheap from the newsagents, because those were the things I was most interested in.

When I was very young, my sister, being a teenager at the back end of the 1960s, used to buy singles and some LPs and occasionally I’d be allowed to sit in the front room as she played them. They are probably long-lost now, but sometimes I’ll hear a snatch of something and the memories will flood back. I seem to remember Zager and Evans’ single “In the year 2525” and the Monkees “Headquarters” LP being two particular favourites.

I was introduced to Heavy Metal when I was about 17 when many of my friends were building guitars and setting up bands and telling me of strange sounding things like “Sham 69” or “The Buzzcocks” or “Black Sabbath” and “Led Zeppelin” according to taste (although they were an eclectic bunch) and I happened to mention I’d enjoyed a couple of songs that I’d seen performed on one week’s “Top of the Pops”. This led to my first “proper” album (i.e. One that wasn’t a soundtrack) which I got as a birthday present; “Killing Machine” by Judas Priest. I even went to a couple of concerts, where my then taste for velour jackets (which actually had no prog rock roots – I wouldn’t have known what it was back then) didn’t really fit in with the studded leather and denim crowd. (Strangely enough, I rediscovered “Priest” a few years back after about twenty years of shameful denial and found an awful lot to like. Whether it was just the nostalgia or the familiarity of it, I can’t be sure, but I spent a rather happy afternoon rediscovering much of their early work when I picked up a “Greatest Hits” album in one of those now defunct high street record shops which led to me reacquiring about half a dozen of the albums I had on vinyl.)

So when I went off to college I had a black and white portable television, but no sound system apart from the mono tape player on my clock radio and the tape deck in the faithful old MkIII Cortina.

I had started to buy records by then of course, the sort of middle-of-the-road tat that any self-respecting art student would have rightly poured much scorn upon, but in order to listen to them I would have to transfer them onto cassette during the holidays. Whilst I was doing this, dad would occasionally come in and say “I like your music” which should obviously have been the kiss of death to any aspirations I might ever have had for having any kind of “cool” taste in music, and probably should have given me a big clue about the standard of my then musical tastes, but I was just too busy just liking what I liked.

Back at college, my neighbours and great friends Leigh and Mike both had proper turntables and would occasionally compete with each other with small contests as to which of them had the loudest stereo, so Leigh’s Mike Oldfield albums would attempt to drown out Mike’s Motorhead. Strangely, Mike, who was a huge Heavy Metal fan was also the one who introduced us to The Bangles…

Odd times.

“Shekshazzaweppon!”

Meanwhile I would go out and buy (to the barely concealed sniggers of derision from my very good friends who were ever-so-slightly cooler than I was) bizarre albums like Giorgio Moroder’s “Metropolis” score (which apparently won Razzie Awards for Worst Original Score and Worst Original Song once upon a time) or the “Ghostbusters” soundtrack (heaven help me…) or Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome”, a double album that seemed to last about 40 minutes. Frankie were (kind of) popular amongst certain folk back then, and I did like “Two Tribes” a lot, but it’s still inexcusable. Any appreciation for “Relax” was destroyed for me forever by one long night when the chap inhabiting the next room to me once played it at full blast non-stop all through the night as he did his “lerve thang” with some young woman or other. Eventually, I got up at 6:00AM and drove home, now hating the tune with as much passion as I hope he showed his girlfriend.

Weirdly, during my student years, I loathed The Smiths and was pathetic in my mockery of them, only to find that once I had moved back home, I really missed hearing them and almost immediately went out and bought most of their albums which remain favourites to this day.

Buying less than cool albums, however, was still a bit of a hard habit to break, apparently because even as late as 1989 I would still buy LPs that now seem like utterly bizarre choices to me, like Pat Benatar’s “Best Shots” which I really can’t imagine I played more than twice, so I probably bought it because I heard a single from it, or liked the cover photograph (although I can’t imagine why, looking at it now…) 

“Shekshazzaweppon!”

Later on, as my vinyl collection was superceded by one on CD, I was still capable of criminal acts of musical purchasing. I remember an odd night driving over the Pennines when I heard three excellent sounding tracks back-to-back on my radio, which quite cheered me up. They were, you’ll probably be alarmed to discover, Cat Stevens “Matthew and Son”, Kim Wilde “Kids in America” and George Michael “A Different Corner”, possibly a great a triptych of naff musical choices as it is possible to find, I’m sure some of you might well be thinking. Nonetheless, the next time I was in a record shop (when such things still were the place to go), CDs by Cat, Kim and (er, rather sadly) Wham! were duly purchased to add to the shelf of “stuff I rarely listen to, but quite like to know I can if I want to”.

I do have some better CDs, though.

Honest!

Incidentally, I was reading online a couple of days ago someone describing having bought a CD at Christmas for their nephew, trying to expand their musical tastes no doubt, and being faced with a look of bewilderment only to be told “He downloads all his music, so he’s probably never seen a CD before…”

If that doesn’t make you feel a little bit frightened, then you’re probably a heck of a lot younger than I am, although it did remind me of my former colleague who had to endure gales of laughter when he tried to demonstrate how to play a favourite 7” single for his daughter, hoping to play her the original of a new cover version that she quite liked. She refused to believe it when he told her that this was how all popular music used to be purchased, apparently, and he slinked away feeling terribly old.

*Phil Wood, whose most memorable and beautifully eccentric jingle I can almost perfectly recall even now:

Wood, Wood, Wonderful Wood.

He’d be here all day if he bloomin’ well could.

As it happens he’s here from ten until noon

(“Plus forty five minutes, you flippin’ buffoon!”)

Oh sorry! ’til twelve forty-five's what we meant

For the more discerning listener, and the executive gent!