55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
When he was young, fit and able, Dad loved to
walk. The chronic leg problems he suffered in
later life were a particularly cruel blow. By
the end he was struggling to even shuffle
around the house. I, on the other hand, would
rarely walk if there was some form of
transportation available. I was lazy and I didn't see the
point. Gradually, though, during my late 30's
and early 40's, I began to see the point. And
now, getting out and stretching my legs is a
fundamental part of my day. Even if I don't
have a planned destination, I do it just to
walk, something I wouldn't have dreamed of
when I was younger, fitter and more able..
Over the past year, hugely inspired by
similar posts from blogging chums C and
Singing Bear, I've taken my camera out with
me upon occasion and shared the results.
Here's a walk from July 2014.
The reason I mention this now, is that during
the course of my research for this series I
unearthed a set of photos taken on the self-same circular riverside route 16 months earlier, in January 2013, not long after a coating of snow. You might even be able to recognise a few of the locations if you flick between the two sets. Our
part of the world has been almost entirely
snow-free since then. Click on any of the shots to blow 'em up.
-----------------------------
In this series I've featured Pop, Rock,
Reggae,Dark Country, Minimal Techno, Motorik
Madness and Jazzy Post Rock, so since we're
nearing the end, how about a little 21st
Century Prog? 'The Mardi Gras Turned Ugly In
Seconds' is taken from Regal Worm's debut LP
'Use And Ornament'. Hear more of this band's
incredible music on their Bandcamp page
(here).
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
My self-imposed rules going into this series
(I do like a self-imposed rule) were; a) No
tunes that have previously graced these
pages, b) No appearances from any of my all-
time favourite bands, c) One song per artist,
d) No photos I've shared before and e) No
stories I've told before. As '55 From 55'
winds down, I can say in all honesty that
while none of the above rules have been badly
broken, some of 'em have taken a bit of a
bending. We're now into the years where I was
really having a proper crack at this blogging
lark after initially just playing around with
it and therefore I realise that I'm at a
greater risk of repeating myself, so these
last few posts will be more in the nature of
a general rounding-up of present day life in
and around Swede Towers.
A while back, I found myself musing (here) on
the total number of places I've called home
so far in my life. In October 2011, after a
few frustrating legal delays, I, along with
Mrs S, moved into what I calculate to be my
14th home. We're in a small village, though just a
mile across the marsh from the nearest town.
Our house used to form part of a much larger
one, but the two were divided in a roughly
two thirds/one third split. We're in the one
third bit and we call next door 'the big
house'. In the second half of the 19th
Century the building was the village shop
and close inspection of the brickwork,
internal and external, shows the ghostly outlines
of where original configurations of doors and windows once were. This is
how the it looked back then.
I'm currently sitting at the window above the
lamp, which is presumably positioned to
light the shop window. The lamp is long gone,
as is the window. Below me now is our street
door.
-----------------------------------------
Baltimore's Lower Dens have just issued their
third LP, 'Escape From Evil'. The record is
the follow up to 2012's 'Nootropics', which
featured the fabulous motorik driven
'Brains'.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
In 2010 I hit 50. It was a year that began
with an unexpected work related triumph and
ended in deep personal sadness. In the
Spring, at the company's annual conference, I
was named store manager of the year, in front
of 3000 of my peers. The award was a complete
shock and came with a significant financial
reward. On the day, though grateful, my mind was elsewhere. After Christmas 2009,
Mum's condition had deteriorated sharply. Up
to then she'd still been quite active, but
now she couldn't walk more than a few steps
and was unable to leave the house unaided.
Her medication was no longer keeping her
illness under control.
Mum encouraging me to take my first steps in 1961.
I applied for a period of unpaid leave from
work, which was eventually granted, and spent the next 6 months staying with Mum for
4 or 5 days a week, while professional care was given by daily visits from District Nurses. I bought a collapsible
wheelchair that I could throw in the back of
the car and, when she felt up to it, took her
out for country drives, trips to the coast and pub lunches. Throughout this period her
health waxed and waned and she spent a number
of short spells in hospital, 'to recharge the batteries'. It was a
privilege and joy to be able to share so
much time with Mum during those months and when she passed away in
December, the grief was, and is,
exceptionally crushing.
-----------------
My
most prominent musical memory of
2010 is from Friday June 25th, when
Mark E.Smith strolled onstage at Glastonbury,
wearing one glove, to join Damon Albarn, half
The Clash and the rest of The Gorillaz for a
storming, glamtastic, 'Glitter Freeze' from
the 'Plastic Beach' LP. It's just perfect, from Mick Jones' welcoming, '..alright
Mark?', onwards. The only thing missing from
the performance is MES's classic spoken intro
to the studio version of the song - 'Where's
North from 'ere?'.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
My Cousin and I, both only children, grew up
in the same house in Walthamstow from her
birth in 1963 until the mid-1970's, her
family lived upstairs and mine downstairs.
Over the intervening years we've remained as
close as brother and sister. Since the late
1980's she's lived in New York where she and
her husband now have three fantastic kids of
their own.
Our local, when we're in New York.
Each Summer the New York contingent of the
family come over for a couple of weeks to
visit my Cousin's Mother, who's now in her
mid-80's. In 2009 they spent a week of their
stay at Centre Parcs and invited my Mum along
to share their holiday. Mum had a great time,
still in relatively good health and was
clearly invigorated by spending time with the
kids.
Road trip. Driving out over Brooklyn Bridge.
In October of 2009 Mrs S and I took ourselves
off to New York once again, to catch up with
the family on their own patch. I'd finally
cleared all of my record shop debt over the
previous couple of years and our belts
weren't quite so tight. The pressure
for continued financial growth at work was
immense though. The company expanded at an alarming rate, results were everything - and
needed to be achieved by whatever means
necessary. I could do the job and do it quite
well, but I was increasingly uncomfortable in the corporate world.
Manhattan from the road.
While in New York, Mrs S and I caught several
concerts, but were frustrated to note that
Vic Chesnutt was playing the Bowery Ballroom
on October 26th, the night we were due to fly
home. We'd seen Vic live a couple of times on
previous visits, though this time he was
touring on the back of his new LP, 'At the
Cut', with a fine band comprising members of
Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black
Emperor. I hoped for snow so that our
departure might be delayed and allow us to
attend, but we flew out, as planned, on a
mild clear evening. Maybe we'll catch him
again next time, I thought.
Tribeca.
'At the Cut' is an intense piece of work,
dark and raw, nowhere more so than on
'Flirted with You All My Life', a song only
matched by Nick Drake's 'Black Eyed Dog' in
terms of its utter bleakness. Tragically, there would be
no next time to see Vic Chesnutt. He took his
own life two months later, on Christmas Day
2009.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Mum showed remarkable resilience after losing
Dad in 2007. Her broken hip recovered well
and she kept herself very busy. She'd always
been the outgoing one and now threw herself
into voluntary work in the WRVS cafe at the
local hospital and at a couple of charity
shops in town. She also built on strong
friendships with several near neighbours. I
kept Dad's car and drove down to stay with
her at every opportunity, taking her shopping
once a week and to the hospital once a month,
for a consultation with a Myeloma specialist.
Outwardly she was coping well with being
alone after over 50 years of marriage, though
an Aunt let it slip that Mum had mentioned
that she found the deafening silence in the house very
difficult to adjust to. Dad had always been a
very noisy man! He sang, whistled, drummed
and generally crash, bashed and walloped his
way through life. Mrs S will be happy to
vouchsafe that his son is following in his
Father's noisy footsteps!
Unshaven scruff. 2008.
I was busy too. I'd been given yet another
coffee shop branch to open (this one on a
trading estate) with another newly
recruited team. On my many drives to and from
Ipswich to visit Mum, I listened to a lot of
spoken word - audio books, comedy, Radio 4. On the
rare occasions that I actually played music, it was
usually a Minimal Techno compilation. 'Enfants' by Ricardo Villalobos is minimalism taken to the Nth degree and the
perfect tune to take out on the road when
your brain is full to overflowing. The looped
sample is taken from Christian Vander's 1995
choral reworking of Magma's 1973 prog-rock
classic, 'Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh'. This one won't be for everybody.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
When Dad's car failed its MOT at the end of
2006, the garage told him that it was beyond
repair and, after a few months cogitation, he
bought a tiny second hand Daewoo Matitz to
replace it. He was initially reluctant buy another car at all, finding driving increasingly
tiring, but at 76, unable to walk more than a
few steps and too stubborn to entertain the
idea of a motability scooter, a car was the
only way he could leave the house and go
anywhere with Mum, who had never learned to
drive.
Mum & Dad in 1953, two years before they were married.
One afternoon in May of 2007, after Dad had
pulled up in front of their house, Mum
started to get out of the car, but caught her
foot in the seat belt and rolled, rather than
fell, onto the grass. It was a drop of around
nine inches, but enough to break her hip.
Until this point Mum had been a very active 73 year old. As a result of
standard tests before her hip surgery, it was
discovered that Mum had Myeloma, failing
kidneys and a weak heart. Serious problems,
but manageable with medication, at least in the short term. Dad nursed Mum with great
tenderness as she convalesced after her hip operation, which was difficult for him given
his own poor mobility. He did his best to
hide it, but I could see that he was really
shaken by her accident and subsequent
diagnosis. By the November of that year,
however, she was recuperating well and was walking again with the aid of a
stick.
Riding a miniature railway. 1964
I was alone at work on the evening of
November 25th, cashing up at the end of a
hectic day in the coffee shop, when I got a call from Mum's
mobile phone. The line was very poor and it
took her several attempts to make me
understand what she was saying. Dad had been
taken ill. She was with him at Ipswich Hospital. Come quickly. Then we lost the
line. I was 45 miles away and didn't own a
car. I threw the takings into the safe and
headed to the train station, arriving just as a
train was pulling out. It was a 30 minute
wait until the next one. 45 minutes later my
phone rang again. It was Mum, the line even
worse than before. She was in the back of an ambulance.
Dad was being taken to Colchester Hospital, a
further 20 miles away. I heard the siren wailing in the background, then we lost the line again.
Their last holiday. Cromer 2005
I left the train at Ipswich and got a taxi
across town to pick up Dad's car from outside
my parents' house, then drove on to
Colchester. Throughout the train journey I'd
been trying to get hold of Mum again with no
joy. I tried and failed once more when I reached the car park at Colchester
Hospital. It had been nearly two hours since
I'd spoken to her and I had no idea where in
the hospital she and Dad were. The staff
at reception couldn't locate them at first
either, but were very helpful and phoned around various parts of the hospital for me. Finally an orderly called me
over and asked me to follow her. She ran off
quickly, which alarmed me, and I struggled to
keep pace. We ran down corridors and up
stairs - I'd never been inside Colchester
Hospital before and was completely lost. She
suddenly stopped running and opened an
unmarked door. Inside was a tiny room where
Mum sat in the corner cradling a cup of tea,
a nurse at her side. Mum looked up as I
entered the room. She was pale, wore a blank
expression and seemed terribly, terribly
small. She was in shock. As I stood in the
doorway, catching my breath and looking at Mum in a state of confusion, another nurse, standing to my right, put her hand on my shoulder. '.....I'm very sorry.....' she said, '.....we lost him
10 minutes ago.....' I was too late. Dad was gone.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far.
In late 2005 I was shunted from my comfy nook in the bookshop to open a new coffee shop branch, situated within the walls of a soulless shopping centre. I recruited a brand new young team for the job, all of whom wanted Radio 1 on in the staff room - Radio 1! I hadn't listened to daytime Radio 1 since...., well since I was their age! It was awful! I initially considered gouging my eardrums out with a rusty spoon to alleviate the tedium, but over time I eventually managed to relegate the majority of the aural wallpaper to the background of my consciousness.
Taken by my Cousin's 6 year old Daughter. 2006.
A Radio 1 programme that I did actually quite enjoy and which was the soundtrack to our late close every Friday evening, was Pete Tong's Essential Selection. Tong was no John Peel, but after the daytime drivel I'd been subjected to for hours on end, some of the tunes he played sounded positively cutting edge. Occasionally, Tong would spin a genuine cutting edge selection. One Friday evening in 2006 for example, he introduced me to 'Simpler' by Pete Heller, a minimal prog-house classic that still gets me dancing in my head every time I hear it. Mind you, if you think this is minimal, wait til you hear what's coming up in 2008.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far.
Something I obviously never experienced during my years working in record shops was corporate jargon, though as a store Manager in a rapidly expanding coffee business, I quickly found myself bombarded from above by all manner of meaningless mumbo-jumbo. This was a company where every thought was encouraged to be of the blue sky variety, wages were ring-fenced, conversations car-parked, staff incentivised, meetings facilitated, changes action-planned, information cascaded, coffees up-sold and cakes on-sold. Goals were achievable, stretch targets attainable, but progression was, ultimately, glass-ceilinged. Oh, and woe betide any person caught thinking inside the box.
------------------------------
I've been a fan of The Sea and Cake for a very long time, but my absolute favourite Sea and Cake related LP is 2005's 'Who's Your New Professor', nominally a solo album by Sam Prekop, although ¾ of the band contributed towards its making. It's a platter that matters here at Swede Towers.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Though it might initially appear an
extravagance, a trip to see my cousin and her
family in New York worked out to be far more
affordable than a holiday in the UK. I was in
the fortunate position of being able to pick
and choose travel dates to ensure the
cheapest combination of flights and when I
arrived in Manhattan, I ate with the family
and slept in their spare room - free bed and
board!
On a one-man mission to eat all the snacks in my Cousin's apartment. 2004.
My main indulgence while in the Big Apple
was, not surprisingly, music. There are
always so many gigs going on - and all in
such close proximity. Also, at that time
there were still a lot of great record stores
in town, all of which had cheapie bins to
lose hours rummaging through. My general rule
of thumb was to not spend more than $1.99 on
a CD. Though I'm sad to note that it has
since closed down, Bleeker Bob's was never
one of my favourite stores, the staff were
legendarily surly. That being said, while
wading through a pile of dusty cardboard
boxes in a darkened corner of Bob's during my
2004 trip, I did unearth a promo copy of 'The
CBC Sessions' by The Hidden Cameras for the
princely sum of 89c!. My kinda price.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
On moving to Norfolk in 2002 I met Mrs S,
though at the time we were both otherwise
attached and it would be another three years
until we became anything more than just
chums. We began exchanging music tips almost
immediately though. The brooding 'Down Below
Him' by Chicago's Low Skies was one of the
first tunes she pushed my way.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
In January 2002, after 18 months with the
coffee company (and in a echo of my first
record shop job in 1981) I was offered the
opportunity to manage my own store in
Norfolk. The branch was located within a
bookstore, the perfect environment.
Occasionally, authors stopped in to sign
stock while on promotional jaunts, in some
cases hosting a reading and Q&A event in the
evening. If I was on shift, I'd be sure to
offer them a cuppa. Here I am with Our 'Enry.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
By the time my record shop closed in March
2000, I was in considerable debt. When asked,
I always say that I had 10 really good years
and 4 of increasingly swift decline. I should
have pulled the plug around 1997, but when
you're in the middle of it, you can't see the
wood for the trees. And you always think it's
going to get better.
In the Summer of 2000 I managed to secure
employment in a newly opening branch of a
modest sized national coffee shop chain. (15
years later, the same company is now a
massive global brand.) As some regular
readers might be aware, I am something of a
coffee nerd and while my new employer's
particular blend is nothing to write home
about, I was really looking forward to working as a
regular team member, able to leave work at
the end of every day with no stress or
worries. It lasted three days. The store's Manager walked out mid-shift, never to return
and, purely because of my age, I was asked to
take responsibility for the store (and ten
staff) until a replacement could be found. I
knew nothing about the company, ordering
procedures, rotas or budgetary constraints.
I'd barely even learned how to make a cup of
coffee, but somehow I struggled through for a
few weeks until a new Manager was recruited.
New York, October 2001.
After the uncertainties of the latter years of
my business, it was a joy to receive a weekly
pay packet and have a regular holiday
allowance. I had debts to repay, but, with
careful budgeting, I planned a trip to see my
cousin and her family in Manhattan at the end of October, coinciding with a couple of Bob Dylan gigs. One
morning, on the way to work, I stopped off in
our local Lunn Poly travel agents to book the
ticket for my flight to New York. The date was September
10th 2001.
------------------
Halifax Pier formed in Kentucky in 1998 and,
by some accounts, are still musically active,
though the last recordings I have by them
date back to 2001. 'Lightly Noise' is from
their second (and last?) LP titled 'Put Your
Gloves On and Wave'. If I made you a CD,
Minidisc or Cassette compilation at any point
in the early noughties, this tune would've
been on it.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Dad drops by to see if there's any Frank Sinatra records in the sale!
Making the decision was by far the hardest thing. A
friend who was with me, swore that she
actually saw a weight visibly lift from my
shoulders when I said the words out loud for
the first time - I'm closing the shop. I
informed my landlord, accountant and bank
manager who were all incredibly supportive.
At the end of trading a few days later, I
removed the Oasis, 'Standing on the Shoulder
of Giants', window display and replaced it
with three words, each letter printed on an
A4 sheet of paper for maximum impact -
Closing Down Sale.
The photo from my last piece of local press, under the headline, 'End of the Road for Mr Music'.
Over the next few days I was genuinely
overwhelmed by the number of kind comments,
phone calls and good luck messages I recieved
from customers old and new, some of whom no
longer even lived in the town, but had
shopped with me in the past and had somehow
heard the news. Three pieces were written
about the shop in the press and I was also
interviewed on local radio. A chap of a
similar age to me, with whom I'd only
recently been discussing our mutual love of
red wine, came in on the Friday afternoon and
handed me a bottle. 'I've been saving this
for a very long time' he said, 'but I want
you to have it, with my best wishes for your
future'. It was a 40 year old bottle of
Rioja. I eventually opened it a year later
and it remains the finest wine I've ever
tasted.
Behind the counter, or where it used to be, after everything was gone. I spent 14 years of my life in that little space.
On the evening of Saturday March 25th, after
a hectic and emotional week, I closed the
door for the last time and sat in the
old place in silence. The following morning,
I started dismantling the racks, boxing up
the stock and generally stripping the place
bare. It took the best part of a week to
complete the task. I'd been 26 years of age when
I started the business and now I was three
weeks short of my 40th birthday. 14 years,
gone in a flash. It didn't seem possible.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Promotional bits and bobs. The ridiculous amounts of stuff that record companies gave away. Quite apart from advance copies
of singles and albums, in my time I was given bottle
openers, pens, writing pads, bottles of
plonk, hip-flasks, towels, cameras, denim
jackets, cuddly toys, mugs, tea-pots, mouse-mats, baseball jackets, hats, sunglasses,
presentation discs, concert tickets, hundreds of t-shirts,
thousands of posters and many more strange
and unconnected things that were used to plug the
latest releases. Most of these items would
come decorated in the band's logo or a sleeve
design and the majority of them I would give
away to genuine fans of the bands in
question, as a thank-you for their custom. I often wonder how many of those freebies
subsequently found their way onto eBay, when
they were discovered at the back of a cupboard, years later.
1999 was my last full year of trading. HMV
and Virgin were busy undercutting each other,
supermarkets were selling CD's for less than
cost price and a new phenomenon called file
sharing was beginning to take hold. It was a
very stressful time. No-one knew the full
extent of the financial hole I was in, other than my
accountant and bank manager and they were both pleading with me to throw in the towel. As midnight approached on December 31st, I took a walk along the prom, which was buzzing with people who were out and about to usher in the new millennium. I left the crowds behind and wandered to the quieter end of the beach and looked out into the darkness as the waves crashed in. I still hoped for a miracle, but in my gut I knew that the game was up.
-----------------------------------------
In 1999, ace UK post-rockers Fridge briefly
signed to Go! Beat Records, who released
the band's third album, 'Eph', as well as a couple of
EP's. Kieran Hebden of Fridge
later found great success trading as Four Tet. From
the 'Of' EP, this is the fantastic 'Remix'.
('Remix' was nowhere to be found online, so
this is my first attempt at using Box. Please
let me know if I've uploaded this incorrectly!)
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far.
A handy aspect of running a record shop based in such a small town was that the local press were always keen to support small businesses. If anything interesting was going on that I wanted to publicise or promote, I only had to pick up the phone and invariably, someone with a camera would be dispatched to record the event. I featured an example of this earlier in this series, when Donny Osmond came a-calling. Sometimes though, it was the local press who reached out to me. That's how I wound up writing brief record reviews in the newspaper for a couple of years. And every now and then, presumably during very quiet news weeks, they'd offer to run a feature piece on the shop. Here's a photo from one such piece in 1998. Times were getting tough though. I'm putting on a brave face. Either that, or I'm burying my head in the sand.
---------------------------------------
There were some excellent David Holmes remixes around in the late 1990's, his re-imagining of 'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next' by the Manic Street Preachers is one of my favourites.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Real gone goatee. One last turn behind the mic, 1997.
Large Virgin Records and HMV stores opened in
a town 10 miles away. Up to now my business
had thrived on my ability to track down,
order and receive any available CD quickly
and efficiently. From 1997 onwards, the tide
subtly turned. Any CD that anyone could
possibly want was only a bus-ride or short
car journey away - why would they wait? The writing was
on the wall, but I was either too close to
the wall to read it or was deliberately
looking the other way. Those superstores,
only 100 yards apart, became engaged in an
ongoing battle to outdo each other and caused
considerable collateral damage to the
independent record shops in the town. 10
miles down the road, the ripples steadily began eroding
my business away too.
Sierra Leone musician S.E.Rogie died in 1994,
soon after recording what would become his
final LP, 'Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana'.
The album was finally released in 1997 on the
Real World label. This is the beautiful title
track, 'Dieman Noba Smoke Tafee'.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
I had helping hands in the shop every now and
then, but for the majority of the time I was
a sole trader. This meant whatever the
condition of my physical or emotional health
at any given moment, I still had to be behind
that counter, smiling at everybody who
stepped through the door. It was particularly
difficult to work through relationship
upheavals, one of which occurred in 1996. My
emotional trauma at that time also meant that
I wanted to keep very busy after work, so I
hit the gig circuit harder than ever before, running myself pretty ragged in the process.
There are a larger quantity of surviving ticket stubs in the
family archive from the period '96/'97 than
for any other. And many more have been lost
over the years.
I didn't get to the first UK Ramones show in 1976, but I was there to say adios amigos at the last one, 20 years later.
One man I've never seen in concert is Joe
Henry. In 1996 he issued 'Trampoline', one of
my favourite albums of the decade, probably
of all-time. 'Trampoline' marked a distinct change of
musical direction following a series of
accomplished alt-country releases and the LP perfectly reflects the slightly woozy
fragility I felt for much of the year.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
Belting out 'Powderfinger' and 'Mr Soul' during a Neil Young tribute night.
By 1995 I'd been through Madchester, Rave and
Grunge, now Brit-Pop was at its peak. I
didn't know it at the time, but my shop was
riding the crest of its final wave. Business
would never be this good again.
A few surviving ticket stubs from the year in question.
1995 was the year I first stumbled upon Chicago post-rockers Tortoise, via a
marvelous 12" single 'Gamera'. The following
year the band would release their groundbreaking
2nd LP, 'Millions Now Living Will Never Die'
and they are currently working on their 7th studio album.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
A while ago, I wrote a bit about about a band
I and a couple of mates put together in 1980
(here). For my sins, I was the singer in that
band. It's probably the greatest regret of
my life that I never learned to play a
musical instrument, so to make up for my lack
of talent, I surrounded myself with people
who could actually play and nominated myself
as the person who would stand at the front
and make unpleasant noises into a microphone. In 1994, 14 years after the demise of my
little band, from my vantage point behind the
counter of a small record shop, I once again
found myself in regular close contact with
local musicians. I did anything I could to
assist, encourage and promote their bands and
solo endeavours at the time and it's a source
of great joy to know that many of them are still making music today.
Every now and then a local charity gig or
private party would crop up and I'd ask a
handful of those hugely talented young
players if they'd mind backing up this old
fool while he belted out a couple of good
old good 'uns for old times sake. They
invariably said yes, bless 'em. This explains
why you'll be seeing a couple of shots of me
clutching a mic over the next few days.
Here I am bangin' out 'Like a Rolling Stone'
at a friend's garden party in 1994. Note the dramatic return of facial hair!
------------------------------
I enjoyed a couple of tunes from Failure's
debut album, 'Comfort', in 1992 and third LP,
'Fantastic Planet' in 1996, but, for me,
1994's 'Magnified' is by far their best effort.
The band's sound on 'Magnified' packs a massive
droney wallop, particularly impressive when
you consider Failure were a three piece. I caught a memorably deafening performance at the tiny Borderline venue in London, a few days after the album's release.
55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
In September 1993, Virgin Records
chose Madame Tussauds in London as the venue for the retail launch of Belinda Carlisle's new LP, 'Real'. As was the norm
for these events, the alcohol flowed, the
nibbles kept coming and the album blasted
from a specially erected sound system. There
was no sign of Belinda though.
After a while, several small groups of shop
managers and buyers fell into individual
conversations around a large central room. A
man appeared with an expensive camera hanging
around his neck and gradually made his way
around the room, stopping to arrange each
small gaggle of people into a group pose,
while not actually taking any shots. We were
slightly baffled. He arrived at our group and
we asked what was happening. 'Belinda's on
her way...' he replied, grabbing a couple of
us by the shoulders '...you stand there...and
you stand there....' And he was off to do the
same to the next group, standing a few feet
away. After a few minutes, the photographer
re-emerged, this time accompanied by Belinda
Carlisle herself. As they moved from pre-posed group to pre-posed group, Belinda
paused momentarily at the front of each, just long
enough for the shutter to click, then moved on. She walked
up to us, beamed at the camera, 'click', and
walked away without saying a word. That was it. 'Real'? Surreal more
like. Then again we were at Madame Tussauds,
perhaps she thought we were waxworks.
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From the final Gun Club LP, 'Lucky Jim',
here's the sad and beautiful 'Idiot Waltz'.
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