I Wasn’t Always Like This, Y’Know
I don’t know how it happens exactly, but I guess most people don’t become music obsessives overnight. It took over five years for me to truly lose the plot, I think, and it didn’t start all that auspiciously.
The first time I remember really wanting to buy an album, as opposed to listening to various things my parents played, was Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger. I was about eight at the time, and loved The Reflex when I’d heard it on the radio. My Mum liked Duran Duran too, so we went out one day and bought the album.
Duran Duran – The Reflex
I don’t remember the extent to which I loved it at the time, but I do remember a very formative bonding experience as Mum and I went home and sat down especially to listen to it for the first time. Mum and I are very similar – both incredibly fucking stubborn – and we didn’t always have the easiest of relationship because we tended to lock horns an awful lot until I chilled out a bit in my mid to late teens. It still happens occasionally, but rarely in an even remotely serious way. In any case, it was good to sit down and experience that first listen excitement together back then.
It was mostly Mum’s music that I really got into to begin with, actually. Duran Duran was the first, but I liked her Tina Turner stuff (I loved 1984 at about that same age, too, mostly for the ‘savage claw’ reference, although I had no idea what it meant), as well as being really into Born in the USA by Springsteen. It wasn’t until we moved to Singapore when I was about eleven that things really started to kick into gear though. Basically at that age, I was into pop, I guess, but Singapore was when it changed.
Things started very dubiously indeed. I seem to recall really liking both La Bamba and Never Gonna Give You Up (in all seriousness). I got quite heavily into Erasure – Two Ring Circus and The Innocents – and The Pet Shop Boys, as well as, erm, Michael Bolton, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Hornsby & the Range, Meat Loaf and even some Phil Collins. Don’t ask, because I don’t know.
Los Lobos – La Bamba
Erasure – Hallowed Ground
By the time I left Singapore I was fourteen and the tide had comprehensively turned, however. I don’t know why or how it happened, but it did. For some reason I shifted away from the slightly camp and occasionally downright vapid radio pop towards some things that were clearly a sign of things to come. I started making mix tapes for the first time too. I may have gone to Singapore as a pop slut, but by the time I came back to Vienna I had become what I suppose would be recognised these days as an embryonic indie kid. I had no precedents exactly, so it wasn’t indie that I got into, but my music taste certainly began to lean towards the more boisterous and the slightly more difficult, as well as developing a significant taste for Americana.
Before we returned to Vienna I was already a huge fan of The Pogues, The Waterboys, The Hothouse Flowers, was getting much more into Dylan and some of the easier Tom Waits, some Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and The Eagles. I was making a lot of mixtapes by this point and by the time I got back to my old school, on the verge of turning fifteen, I was sharing tapes with some of the girls I got on best with (it was always the girls back then, too).
Hothouse Flowers – Give it Up
By this point I started buying a lot of my own vinyl. I bought stuff by U2, more Springsteen, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, the new Pogues album, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Bob Geldof & the Vegetarians of Love, and REM. Mixtapes were now a pretty big deal, in that way they are at that age, and I started to get more obsessive about traipsing to record shops and digging out things I was looking for in particular. After three years back in Vienna, until the age of seventeen, I began to resemble something more recognisable as a normal British teenager, although I was still much more MTV than NME, which we just didn’t have over there. I’d got into Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, more REM, more U2, Billy Bragg, Kirsty MacColl, bought my first Nick Cave album, started exploring more Tom Waits, bought The Stone Roses, Talking Heads, and all sorts. I’d still never bought a 7″ single though, but they just didn’t really sell them in Austria.
In the Summer of 1993, before I went off to univerisity at seventeen, I started to earn enough money to buy CDs consistently for the first time, and I spent much of that summer in the newly opened Virgin Megastore in Vienna, haunting the listening post. I bought Morrissey, The Manics, Blur, The Tragically Hip, The Harvest Ministers, The Lemonheads and the Levellers.
Manic Street Preachers – La Tristesse Durera
The Tragically Hip – Pigeon Camera
By the time I went to uni in Manchester I think I was pretty much all the way over the edge, and had become a music fanatic. I spent loads on tapes (cheaper than CDs and less unwieldy than vinyl, which was vanishing at the time) of albums by James, The Lemonheads again, Radiohead, Mudhoney, the new Pearl Jam and Bjork. I also saw The Pogues live in concert for the first time, and on the way out the support band, who I’d missed, were handing out cassette samplers, so I took one. They were called the Newcranes, and I still have it. It’s good, too. I also, that year, bought an album by a group called Engine Alley solely on the basis that Steve Lillywhite, who produced them, had also produced Kirsty MacColl, The Pogues and early U2. I even went to see them by myself at a pub called PJ Bells on Oldham Street, now long-since extinct.
And there, I think, the story ends. Or starts, depending on how you look at it. Once you’re hoarding promo albums by support bands, going to gigs on your own and buying albums solely on the strength of the producer, then I think it’s safe to say that you have gone over to the dark side. You are now an obsessive, a collector, a hunter, a scavenger and a hoarder, a total fucking bore, an addict. Whatever you want to call it, I was one by then. And fifteen years later I am only getting worse.
The Newcranes – Man’s Inhumanity
Engine Alley – Infamy
A musical journey! Capital!
I’m a bit older than you and I recall that the first 7″ single I ever bought was “All Out of Love,” by Air Supply. I think I was 9. Then I bought “Ready for the 80s” by The Village People (b/w an appalling homoerotic anthem called “Sleazy”). The first LP was “Get the Knack,” by The Knack, and I call still remember that it had a bewildering song on it about Siamese twins. Then it was Loverboy (the first concert I ever attended, when I was 12 or 13 I guess) and Def Leppard, Quiet Riot, Van Halen, etc. Sigh.
The tide began to turn for me at Easter 1983, when I went to Florida to visit and aunt and uncle who had MTV. It was at their house that I first saw the video for “New Years Day,” by U2 and “Red Skies,” by the Fixx, and I was intrigued by these dour, pallid, serious-minded young lads. The big turning point came in summer 1984, though. I had just broken my arm in a fall and my father was driving me to the hospital. I was in significant pain, but we were listening to the radio in the car and “Pride,” by U2 came on. That was it. I bought the “Pride” single first, it had a sky blue cover with a picture of MLK on it and an instrumental b-side called “Bass Trap” which I still like. Eventually I went and bought “The Unforgettable Fire” LP, and it was unquestionably my alt-rock gateway drug. I listened to that album every single day throughout the 10th grade (when I was 15-16), first thing after waking up in the morning and first thing after getting home from school. I frankly harboured a sort of unhealthy obsession with U2 from then until “The Joshua Tree” came out. But it was my liking for U2 that introduced me to The Chameleons, The Waterboys, The Alarm, Big Country, Bowie and Talking Heads (the last two through the Brian Eno connection).
When “The Joshua Tree” came out I was disappointed at how “commercial” it was, and I was put off by Bono’s messianic posturing. Nevertheless, I went to see U2 play live at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY, and I recall that I was about 200 yards from the stage, watching the concert on jumboscreen TVs. It was an outrage. I wanted the intimacy of the “Live at Red Rocks” concert, and I got . . . this. The love affair ended, and I pretty quickly moved into different territory. I bought “Signals, Calls and Marches” by Mission of Burma (it was already about 8 years old by then but I had just discovered it) and “Daydream Nation” by Sonic Youth hit me like a ton of bricks. I played “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” by the Pogues until the vinyl wore out and I remember being a big fan of “Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits, at first because Bono had endorsed it in Rolling Stone, but later on its own merits. Then I started picking up on some of the great UK indie going on then. “Happy Head” by The Mighty Lemon Drops was big, and I bought “Stutter” by James based solely on the cover art (I still remember “An earwig crawled into my ear / Made a meal of the wax and hairs / Phoned friends, had an insect party / But all I could hear was the bass drum drum / All I could hear was the bass drum drum. Brillaint). Shoegaze and Brit pop kind of passed me by until much later. During the 90s it was all Nirvana, Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Grant Lee Buffalo, Pixies.
Now I’ve become something of an Americana enthusiast myself. I think Grant Lee Buffalo may have been my gateway into that genre. “Mighty Joe Moon” is still just a brilliant record in my opinion. And now I’m even starting to like Tom Waits and Nick Cave, as well as some of the other idiosyncratic songwriters out there, like Scott Walker and Mark Hollis. Def Leppard just doesn’t do it for me anymore, but I can still play air bass, with full-on white man’s overbite, when I hear “Turn Me Loose,” by Loverboy.
Fuck me…..that saves me buying the autobiography when it come out.
Consider your sould well and truly cleansed my son.
I must go on a diet….my fingertips are now so chubby that I sometimes hit two keys at the same time without knowing it….
CONSIDER YOUR SOUL WELL AND TRULY CLEANSED MY SON.
Its great that your musical tastes have evolved into something that most rational people would consider to be more acceptable. I dont suppose there’s a chance you could do the same with your choice of football team???
I grew up in a very musical family (my father was a session guitarist & bassist – one of his claims to fame is way back before they went global he played/jammed onstage with The Beatles when they played Abervagenny, South Wales – & pretty much all my aunts & uncles played an instrument or sang) so music was all over the place. Literally. Because of my father I know where I was when Elvis died, when Lennon was shot; he got me into writing (lyrics originally, then poetry & prose) as I went with him to gig rehearsals & practice sessions, TV appearances & the like, & sat in the background sketching out lyrics to instrumetal breaks; I learnt how to work a mixing desk & light rig at his gigs; & he ultimately bought me my first (& still owned) Gibson copy, full effect board built ito the body, patent pending, only 1000 ever made, electric guitar. Which I entirely never properly learnt to play because my fingers were & are too big for the fret.
Curiously, however, the obvious one, The Beatles, was never really on his radar (except for Rubber Soul) as my father much prefered Lennon’s solo stuff. As a strange result of his ‘denial’ of this arc of music (include The Beach Boys, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Dylan, Bowie, etc.) my musical heritage took shape with my father’s influences (tons of Country both nashville & the darker variety, 70s experimental funk, The Everley Brothers & their ilk, Walker Brothers, Elvis, & so on) in the background & my friend’s loves & dislikes firmly in the foreground.
Sure, I listened to a lot of the popular stuff as a real young kid – Duran Duran were a favourite – but an old Canadian mate of mine got me into The Beatles & The Beach boys proper in his basement, where we’d play pool & eat his mother’s home-made ‘American’ confectionary & snacks listening to shelves & shelves of original 45s & LPs & 78s. There is where I really got an education in 50s & 60s music. At the same time my father was slowly embedding a grounding in me of the more 70s experimental & leftfield stuff.
When I was about 9 or 10 I discovered Prince. Yes, I know Toad. Whatever. But, it made sense re: the funk, the dirty Disco & the heavy guitar work my old man had been laying on me. I remember my mother attempting to get a hold of Prince’s album Controversy on vinyl for my birthday – I had the cassette version, I now wanted the real thing (I used to, as a kid, but the tape first to see if it was any good. If it was, I’d buy the vinyl. Tapes were cheaper, see, less money wasted on shit). The guy on the phone took the piss out of her for pronouncing Controversy as is written; he was adamant it was pronounced “ConTROversy” & alwmost had my mother hanging up on him for being a cock.
My rather obsessive collecting spree of Princely output led my father to make the leap to Hendrix & so, from about age 10 or 11 he started buying me Hendrix albums – strating with Smash Hits (a compilation) & ending with the Band of Gypsys 1970 album. Which, amazingly, I still have, despite the sell off of most of my vinyl a number of years ago.
I was also going through the likes of Primal Scream (the original stuff, pre-Screamadelica), The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, The Smiths, Kitchens of Distinction, James (pre-release James, too, mind you), Siouxsie & The Banshees, all the usuals leading up to the C86 & beyond era, until I discovered the likes of The Wonderstuff et al (I’m still fairly sure I was the first person to buy their debut 12″ & LP in my smallish town as I dragged a handful of reluctant mates to their gig in Cardiff Uni & they all came out converted). You know, the entire pantheon of properly ascribed nametagged “indie”.
Around this time my musical appreciation split in two directions, I started looking back through the brief Punk back catalogue AND fell in love with Tom Waits. I think I was 15. I didn’t look back from there, really. A good friend of mine got into Waits at the same time & we’d obsess over his records, learning the words off by heart & generally start making people’s lives hell at parties by plopping on a Waits track in the middle of some indie wall of sound.
From Waits I leapt onto Beefheart, Zappa, Rabbit (a 70s obsession of my father’s) &, madly, to The Butthole Surfers, Dead Kennedys, Big Black, Sonic Youth, the Sub Pop et al rosta & beyond.
Of course, Pixies had a seriously HUGE impact on me when I was about 16, too.
From there, really, I have been an instincive buyer & listener. I was always into the Country sound/Americana style of music because of the stuff my parents always played every Sunday while lunch cooked. The bombastic side of my appreciation came from the 70s Elvis collection & the musicals played on constant rotation during street bar-b-ques. So it has never been a problem hearing saccharine drenched anything in any genre/style, unless, of course, it is genuinely dire horse shit.
I’ve embraced pretty much all aspects of the musical spectrum over the years (Girls Aloud, take That, Spice Girls, Rick Astley – yes, Toad, me too – Wham!, Spandau, Pet Shop Boys, etc & so on) – although, curiously, I have NEVER taken to New Order. No Idea why.
So, I’m thankful for my old fellah’s very wide collection of music tastes & his actual ignorance of others – if he had liked, say, The Beatles as much as he likd Elvis or Willie Nelson, then I would have missed the delights of Django Reinhardt. Plus, it would have taken a lot of the joy out of actually discovering these bands, especially The Beatles, on my own. That I have my Canadian mate Chuck to thank for, as well as Charles Manson. Charles Manson?
When I’d done my A-Levels & left home to live with a girlfriend, on a year out of ‘education’, before going to Uni (I never did end up going), I ended up working in Forbidden Planet (comic, video & book store) during the day & during the night I studied Criminal Psychology – something I had always had a hankering after. Part of the study included a case study of psychosis & I could pick anyone I wanted to write a paper on (very American, I know). Up to this point I had read hundreds of these ‘true-life’ crime books, getting some (albeit 3rd hand) insight into the inner workings of serial killers & the like. I chose Charlse Manson, specifically because of his relation to The Beatles’ music he had cited as ‘talking’ to him pre-Tate massacre. Reading absolutely everything there was on the subject & listening to The Beatles White Album (amongst others) over & over & over, week after week, I really seriously began to understand the connection between music & listener (i.e. it is ultimately all interpretive BUT that is fundamentally the deciding factor in why something, ahem, ‘talks’ to you & encapsulates you) & aqlso appreciate the utter craftmanship involved in producing such music. I’m not going to go into an analysis of Beatles’ music, but suffice to say I can understand why people were blown away by it when each album’s progression came out into the public domain.
I’ve been really lucky, I guess. All my life a lot of really tuned in people have passed superb music my way & as a result I’ve gone hunting & digging &, as I said, I now operate on an intuitive basis when plucking new records & bands from the avalanche available.
Now this is saving me a lot of money….that’s now 3 bios (auto or ghost-written) I dont need to shell out on.
The first single I went out and bought with my own pocket money was Wouldn’t It Be Good by Nik Kershaw, and I still think it’s a great song.
Not long after that, possibly with the Band Aid christmas single inbetween, I bought Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’ epic soft-rock opus Easy Lover. I’ve always had impeccable taste in music.
There have been one or two people I’ve known who have been key influences on developing my love of music. One particular girl in school introduced me to The Smiths, The Cure, James, Lloyd Cole, REM and Violent Femmes. At around that time I developed my fascination with obscure acts – mainly to show off in the first instance, but quickly learning that the value of a band’s recording contract is often in converse proportion to the quality of the music – and found The Blue Aeroplanes, The Milltown Brothers and The Frames for myself.
A few years later I found myself in Cardiff, working in one of the city center’s enormo-pubs and up to my hips in Cool Cymru: Manics, ‘Phonics, Catatonia, 60ft Dolls, Super Furries. I also had (still have) a Canadian mate with an extensive CD collection and a penchant for mixtapes, which was my main introduction to less mainstream acts from across the pond. Pixies, Nada Surf, Tragically Hip, more REM..
Nothing else significant happened until Edinburgh and all the malarkey associated with that.
First album I ever bought? The Top Gun soundtrack, on cassette aged ten. that was the first Christmas, and they’ve been much the same ever since, when I really wnated some albums. Amongst those I got that first ‘music’ christmas was Different Light by The Bangles, which has actually dated quite well…and eaten Alive by diana Ross, which hasn’t.
Then aged fourteen, I got into ‘indie’ music and I didn;t really look back…I imagine if i was twenty years older I would have written a fanzine, but it’s a hell of a lot easier with blogging…
Eh, you got nothing on me. My first love was Air Supply. I’m going to go kill myself now.
I forgot to say the actual first record I bought myself, with my own money, was the When Doves Cry 7″. Everything up until that point was fuelled by my father’s neverending generosity (he knew a music anorak when he birthed one) & my cun-i-av sleeve tugging, along with very perceptive Birthday/Christmas/etc. gift buying.
i’m so old that i can’t even remember the first album i bought, but i do remember my first obsession. a boy i had a big thing for introduced me to todd rundgren via something/anything and i was hooked. i bought every album he put out until the early 80s. he was definitely the most influential musician i ever listened to, in fact he was kind of the pioneer of all these diy guys who sit at home and make music in their bedrooms, only he did it thirty years or more ago.
i will admit to a healthy hall and oates fixation, carly simon, james taylor, neil young and jackson browne. in the eighties i found the music scene to be way too air-supplyish and journey-ish for my taste and i got into really old stuff, jazz standards and such. i came back to life in the mid-to-late 90s and i’d say the love affair with music has been steadily intensifying since then, only now i’m drawn to smaller and smaller bands and tinier and more intimate venues. the thought of going to a coliseum or stadium gig makes me want to throw up!
Duran Duran were one of my first musical purchases too. Only it wasn’t via my mother, but rather my sister (who dreamed of marrying Simon Le Bon, only to be crushed when he married Yasmin).
I’d never been introduced to bands via friends or boys until college, sadly. My parents are a bit younger and did things a bit backward, so while my mom would play the Cramps or Kate Bush for me when I was five, I’d never heard an album by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix (or anyone else that important, really) until I took the initiative when I was around twenty. My first record (bought by my parents when I was three) was Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” and I think my first cassette was the Vanilla Ice…erm…debut, but after a childhood of rebelling against my parents’ punk tendencies and enjoying dance music/rap, I transitioned to rock when we moved and my walkman could no longer pick up the frequencies of my usual rap station.
Indie didn’t happen until college, when working at our campus radio station taught me about options beyond mainstream radio, and that all the records I hadn’t heard of at the used record shop could actually hold some good possibilities. Interestingly enough, though, it was watching punk videos at 1am on Saturday nights during high school that introduced me to the (International) Noise Conspiracy and the Hives, opening up my taste to garage rock and taking me out of an emo phase. For that, I’m appreciative.
Toad, maybe you’ve mentioned it before and I missed it, but were you an army brat? I’d never thought to ask why you lived in so many countries, but I’m curious now.
And does going to shows alone and tracking a producer’s work really make you an obsessive? Fuck me, then. Christ.
I’ve rarely gone to shows alone (I’m shy, see) but I have ‘tracked’ a producer’s work.
Mark Kramer, or Kramer, of (as far as I am concerned) God.
His passion for music was/is incredible & he’s been involved with some of the most notable bands over the last 15 or so years. The easiest point to begin with him was as a bassist in The Butthole Surfers for their rather destructive European Tour back in the late ’80s – the one I fkng missed & the one where they destroyed the Newport Leisure centre 20 miles down the road from my old home town.
The money he made for that led to him opening his Noise New York recording studio – the only reason I ever wanted to go to the US when I was a kid, as he had an open door policy & openly welcomed people through the doors to shake hands, drown in coffee & generally shoot the breeze. From there he started the Shimmy Disc label & over the years (prior to Shimmy Disc being bankrupted/bought out by the Knitting Factory label & following a crippling legal ‘divorce’ from Ann Magnuson, his Bongwater partner) discovered, managed, toured with as sound engineer & musician, produced & mixed the likes of:
Galaxie 500 (whose entire oeuvre he produced), Low (whom he discovered & produced), Danielson Famile, Will Oldham’s Palace Songs, Daniel Johnston, GWAR, King Missile, Dogbowl, Paleface, Beck, Dot Allison, Shockabilly, B.A.L.L., Bongwater, Ween, Half Japanese, The Fugs (played bass on their reunion tour), Allen Ginsberg (yes, the poet), John Zorn, Alice Donut, Jellyfish Kiss, Urge Overkill’s (their “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” hit single for Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Penn & Teller (he was a sound engineer/score writer for a host of their Broadway shows & won a Tony as a result + was in a band, The Captain Howdy, with Penn + Deborah Harry & Billy West (of Ren & Stimpy fame) – notable for their cover of Always Something There To Remind Me & for having a song written for them by Lou Reed), When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water, Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Eugene Chadbourne, Rebby Sharp, The Nightjars, Daevid Allen (as in Soft Machine & Gong), Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine), Damon & Naomi, Das Damen, Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, The Black Keys, David Sylvian + stupid amounts of others), Syd Straw, Shonen Knife, Fred Frith & Milksop Holly. Amongst a hell of a lot more.
Of the original (approx.) 103 vinyl & CD releases (there were some videos & merchandise items released on the Shim catalogue numbers also, which buggers up the chronology a bit) I have 85 of them. There are also a shit load of off-shoots & one offs & etc & so forths that I have my hands on (I used to buy direct from Kramer/Shimmy Disc, then from Shimmy Disc Europe when the $ hit the floor, then Knitting Factory when SD was sold, then Ebay when I couldn’t find anywhere else & there was this one German guy & a Dutch guy who seemed to be forever selling their SD back catalogue off…).
Now, following some self-imposed wilderness years, a clutch of sporadically released but brilliant (if you like psych-pop/rock, that is) solo albums – including one I’m seriously looking forward to: The Brill Building, his f5-year effort to bring new life to a collection of hit singles written in the Brill Building in the late 50′s & early 60′s.
&, yes, I would consider my appreciation of this guy’s work obsessive.
Nevermind all that, Billy West was in a band with Deborah Harry and Penn??
Sure as hell was. He played lead guitar.
Wait, what’s wrong with La Bamba?
I jus got Richie Valens compilation (and in Singapore too) and it’s a darn sight more exciting than much modern music I’ve heard recently. Don’t remember the La Bamba movie giving such an impression of him being able to hold his own in the wide-boy badass rocker greaser recorded lo-fi and loud dept. I think Clinic must have heard this stuff though.
Were you in Singapore when Los Lobos played there? It was a school night I think but I heard they blew the roof off the place – a discoteque in Orchard Rd – and their version of La Bamba that night was a 20 minute garage rock version that foxed all those Rick Astley era people who probably thought it was a novelty record unaware that Los Lobos are a crack unit who know their Hank to Hendrix and Waits and Thompson and muchos more.
See I’ve only recently found that out. I always thought of them exclusively in relation to La Bamba (the radio version, too) and only recently discovered there was a hell of a lot more to them than that.
Seven and the ragged tiger was the first album I bought too and I was around 9.
Paul (Spacehotel)
http://www.myspace.com/spacehotel