I fucking hate it when people go to gigs and talk all the way through the bastard things. If you don’t want to pay any fucking attention to the songs, then piss off to another fucking pub. This is Edinburgh, there are thousands of places to go, so why don’t you just piss off somewhere else? Secondly, it’s just plain fucking rude.

So what could be more mortifying than to find myself at the Kays Lavelle gig at the Village in Leith last Friday, actually being the one talking too loud all the way through the fucking show. It wasn’t my fault, or at least to a certain extent it wasn’t. At least, there were mitigating circumstances anyway. Basically, because we ended up talking to this really nice couple outside, they talked to us inside, which is fine. Except that they talked really loud, were far too nice to tell to piss off, and very difficult to just quietly shuffle away from.

So basically, I am a coward and found it easier to be rude to Euan who was at least four metres away instead of the person a foot away chattering in my left ear, for reasons of basic proximity. Pathetic excuse isn’t it?

Anyway, I think the band had other more pressing problems, with some deranged old bag, a bottle of Buckie and a fistful of Es down, cavorted somewhat unpleasantly in front of them. You know when not-even-slightly-sexy-not-even-a-little-bit people try and do sexy dancing? It was like that. Actually it was worse – imagine someone who has clearly spent a lifetime jamming her wrinkled body with drugs and booze and nicotine, is probably pushing forty but looks nearly sixty, it at once saggy, emaciated, pale, malnourished, smothered in makeup, and with a crooked lear that would put the fear of god into the penis of even the most diseased gigolo? Now imagine trying to play heartfelt, emotional music with this gargoyle gyrating threateningly at you from a distance of mere feet away – I bet Euan never wished more sincerely for a grand piano in his life.

Anyway, the talky people left halfway through the Kays set, so I was able to enjoy the rest of it with minimal humiliation. Despite their fears for their stripped down lineup, just guitar and piano with Graham the guitarist playing a little drums from time to time, I thought they sounded excellent. There was something a little harsher about the guitar sound, for being so naked, and the general silence in the room served only to emphasise every droplet of piano. Once I’d managed to get my head out of my arse and actually listen to the bloody show, I really enjoyed it. I think Euan has a bigger, more anthemic sound in mind for the band, but I liked their spare set at the Village: there was lots of empty space to let the chords breathe.

It was a great night in general, actually. The Village is a really nice pub, and there are very, very few venues in Edinburgh that are nice places to be irrespective of the music. The importance of this is that indie kids – mostly blokes – will never be able to get girls along to Henry’s, because it’s a shit bar to hang out in if you aren’t really there for the music. And if we ever want to get big audiences for independent music in this city we have to reach out beyond the devoted fans because there just aren’t enough of us to go around. We need to get the people involved who are only kind of interested. So there. Rant over.

Check out Dylan’s excellent pictures here.

The Kays Lavelle – Swanfields
Hothouse Flowers – Shut Up and Listen
The Wedding Present – Always the Quiet One
The Coathangers – Shut Tha Fuck Up

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