I’ve said before on this blog that my descent into music obsession was a relatively gentle one.  It was sort of like boiling a frog.  One year I was making slightly more mixtapes for people than most of my other friends and then, merely twenty years later I’ve quit my job, burned my clothes and disappeared off into the depths of the Forest of Musicdale with nothing but a spear and a loincloth for protection. And it was so gradual I never even noticed it happening.

Tracing this kind of mania back to the very start is kind of tricky.  I mean, I remember liking children’s programmes, but only under duress.  Even at age four I thought I was far too grown up for that sort of thing, so if my mum ever caught me singing along or doing the actions I used to hate her for a bit.

I progressed from children’s television to liking songs which were borderline children’s songs, but nevertheless in the pop charts.  The first songs I actually remember liking at all were probably Shaddap Your Face by Joe Dolce (for obvious reasons) and Shakin’ Stevens’ This Ole House (oh fuck off, I was five).  See?  Still basically children’s songs.

I can’t remember the first actual song I really liked, although my parents could probably tell you a lot more.  Tina Turner’s 1984 definitely appealed, as did Rio by Duran Duran and We Gotta Get Out of This Place by the Animals.  There are still pretty obvious, although decreasing, links to the kind of music which would appeal to children in there; lyrics about “beware the savage claw” and lines like “we gotta get out of this place” are probably an easy enough sell to kids.

But the first time I actually remember hearing something on the radio and actively wanting to buy it was probably when I was about eight years old or so.  It was a bit of a bonding moment with my mum if I recall, as she had pretty much the same reaction the first time we heard The Reflex by Duran Duran.

I don’t remember if there was any excitement about the release date, but I do remember the anticipation when we actually brought the record home for the first time and put it on the record player.  I have no idea if there was dancing, although knowing my mum there almost certainly was on her part.  I have no idea if I even liked the album.  But it’s definitely the first time I can ever remember actively wanting to buy an album for any reason at all.

So that was where it all started: with Tina Turner and Duran Duran.  And it was years before my dad’s far more hipster-friendly music collection even got a look in.

Duran Duran – The Reflex

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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