This is an edited version of an interview I did on another music forum. I've edited it a bit for more coherence, and brought it up to date.
I was born in 1948. I've said so often that the first records I bought were He's a Rebel, Telstar and Love Me Do, in October 1962 – possibly for my 14th birthday – that it's become an article of faith. To the best of my recollection they were the first I bought new for myself, but I'd certainly got interested in music before that, largely at the instigation of the guy who was randomly allocated the seat next to me when I went to Tottenham County in 1959, Bob Burton, and the pair of us maintained the friendship right into the sixth form. We lived near one another in South Tottenham and would meet up on a Saturday to hit the local junk shops – traipsing all over Tottenham and scarfing up anything that was obviously American in origin, stealing as well as buying, then getting back and unloading our loot, divvying it up and playing it, finding out which names and (American) labels of origin were worth targeting and which weren't, basically educating ourselves. At that time there were no books on the history of pop, and the inkies were more or less rewritten press releases, with little or no depth, and we craved information – I even subscribed to Billboard for 18 months or so, wading through all the marketing shit for an odd nugget of info.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. We had a record-player at home for as long as I can remember, but no-one sat and listened to records – at least, not often – and there was nothing in the way of recorded music on the radio except Two-Way Family Favourites, the forces' request show on Sunday lunchtime, where they sometimes played some decent stuff, but I was far more concerned with how to choke down over-cooked cabbage. What records we had would get played at family gatherings or parties (although when my gran was alive, up to 1955, it was more likely to be someone hammering the stand-up piano in the front room), especially at Xmas (when, from an age of singular years, I was granted the annual privilege/duty of going out and choosing some festive 78s; I was fairly long on Tommy Steele and novelty songs, and The Goons; I knew The Ying Tong Song, Bloodnok's Rock & Roll Call Rhumba and I'm Walking backwards to Christmas by heart).
My mother just didn't like music, and my dad (who, judging from a photo of him I have playing a piano accordion, was actually a musician as a young man; he was a man of serial enthusiasms, though, and that may not have lasted long. I heard once, or maybe dreamed, that he had hocked it to buy a wedding ring) preferred ballads. We had several records by Mario Lanza, Malcolm Vaughan and others of that tenor (clever wording, cheers!), but the saving grace was that he loved the Platters, and I guess if anything qualifies for the accolade of first turning me on, it was My Prayer and Only You. Even now, nearly 60 years on, I can smell the dust gently frying on the valves of the record player as they heated up, see the 78s whizzing round, their labels a blur, and relive the way the harmonies and echo and Tony Williams's impeccable, soaring tenor not just filled the room, but expanded it, filled it with possibility.
As I said, though, it was Bob Burton who turned me on to our generation's pop, to the idea of music as something important, defining. I remember him enthusing about Nut Rocker and Monster Mash, among others, and turning me on to Tony Hall's American Top 10 show on Luxy at 7.30 on Friday nights: the show was actually sponsored by Decca, who distributed the London, Warner Bros, RCA and Brunswick labels, and only featured stuff that had been released on those labels over here – which was admittedly pretty much most of the good stuff). And like I said, we set about finding out about the American sounds that we instinctively preferred.
Somewhere in 1962 to 1963, through nicking 45s and being advised and fed demos by the modernists at the High Cross Record Centre, I discovered recent amazements from Atlantic, The Everlys, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, the Drifters, the Impressions, Leiber & Stoller, Del Shannon, Buddy Holly, the Coasters, Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Flamingos, Jerry Lee and Timi Yuro, as well as contemporary Motown, Philles and soul divas such as Betty Harris, Irma Thomas or Dionne Warwick; I also discovered that Frank Chacksfield, Ferrante & Teicher and Lawrence Welk were better avoided. Bob & I schooled each other, swapped scraps of info, and went to (a few, but seminal - see below) gigs together ; we used to walk the two miles back home from school through Tottenham cemetery, arguing about music, and specifically about soul – which we understood as a vocal performance style from what we had read – and the merits of various vocalists, and squabbling over favourite versions of songs. Much like a pedestrianized BCB really.
From the 1950s, my cultural outlook was largely American. the country produced the best movies, the best television, even the best comics – around 1960 I switched from the British story mags such as Wizard, Hotspur, Rover and Adventure to DC (Marvel later) and the magic that was Mad – and the best novels and poetry (although that came later). That's why I chose an American subject for my PhD and wrote an entire novel set in a cultural fantasy of the USA. American records just sounded better, in the same way that the movies and TV shows looked, sounded, WERE better. It may have been the producers (in the UK at this time most records were produced by techy engineers in white coats, and although one of them graduated to suits and pullovers and became Joe Meek, he stood out precisely because he was the only one), the studios, or simply the musical traditions of the session musicians, but even now, with a handful of (non-Meek) exceptions – notably the lightning in a bottle of Shaking All Over – British records of the time have a sound that comes up short. And if you put even a good British recording up against the otherworldly crunch and impact of, say, Runaway or Cathy's Clown – well, no contest.
The Brill building sound and early soul did have a cross-over – basically a bunch of Jewish song-writing teams (Leiber-Stoller, Goffin-King, Mann-Weil, Barry-Greenwich, Sedaka-Greenfield, Pomus-Shuman) who were steeped in, or at least partial to, rhythm and blues, and loved to write for black vocalists – but they were essentially two separate interests (and not the only two, they're just the ones that tend to come up when I'm arguing with revisionists on BCB
). Looking back (and perhaps being a revisionist myself), the Brill building thing was was about craft and cleverness and stories, about creating a believable character and situation, even a whole world in a three minute single. The Drifters were past masters of this: listen to On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Under the Boardwalk, just about any of their singles from 1958 to 1963; or Will You Love Me Tomorrow, or the You've Lost that Loving Feeling trilogy (with Just Once in My Life and Hung on You). It was like a movie, a communal effort from writers, producer and performers to tell a story, set a scene.
Soul, on the other hand, as we understood it then – James Brown, Ben E King, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Timi Yuro, Irma Thoma, Marie Knight, Margie Hendricks, Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles – was, like Blues, which I was just beginning to hear via rereleases on Pye International and elsewhere, thanks to the nascent British blues boom, all about the performance. They could be singing standards, country and western songs, weird pop, all kinds of things, but you knew it was soul when you heard those fuckers sing; the raw emotion of it balled up in your solar plexus, transported you. I started to develop a hunter's mentality about my favourite artists. I did get some records imported - in the case of Timi Yuro's back catalogue, for example, ordered it and had it shipped over, as it was out of print, or unissued over here from one or two shops in the Soho fringes that specialized in imports. I'm trying to remember the names of the shops, but can't, even though I kept going to them through the decade. I've got American copies of Dionne Warwick's and Laura Nyro's second albums, for instance, and Love's first two, because I could not bear to be without them until their scheduled release.
The High Cross Record Centre was the one nearest my home in South Tottenham, and I was always in there asking them about stuff I'd seen in Billboard, to be told it wasn't out yet. I remember waiting ages for the follow-up to the Four Seasons' Sherry (what a great record) to come out. The HCRC was basically a hole in a wall, about 20 sq ft of floor space, and was staffed by guys who I recognize in retrospect as early modernists, but just seemed like smart older guys (late teens, early 20s) to me then. I think they were quite taken by the sight of Bob & me in our school uniforms asking after Motown obscurities, and they took to offering us the demos they had got for distribution to the local DJs (notably the guys at the Mecca ballroom, home base of the Dave Clarke Five, with was just down the road) for half price.
They'd play us the stack of demos – there were no booths (no room), just headphones, and we would yay or nay. This is how I acquired quite a large selection of collectable soul and Motown demos - I sold on about 15 of them for £700 a few years ago – but also how I turned down demo copies of quite a few Merseybeat things. I was particularly keen on female vocalists: I tend to react better to treble sounds than bass as well. I find it more exciting. I don't really have an explanation as to why I'm like that. It's a bit like being left-handed; odd to others, perfectly natural to me. But although I was a fully fledged record nut by this time (mid-60s), I hardly ever went to gigs. I can't remember ever going to see live music on spec. It was always to see a specific act I already knew from records, and certainly while I was at school (until 1966) I never went to a club: I didn't drink, and wouldn't dream of going to a pub when underage. I only remember three package shows that I went to in that period – all with Bob, either at the Edmonton Regal or the Finsbury Park Astoria (later Rainbow): the Tamla-Motown Review with Little Stevie, the Miracles, the Supremes and the Vandellas in 1965, Little Richard with Duane Eddy & the Shirelles, and the Everlys, Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones in late 1963. Also on the bill for those last two, incidentally, was Mickie Most, then a performer. Basically, though, I'm not so much a lover of music as of records. I've never actually totted it up, but in more than 50 years I've probably been to fewer than 80 gigs (although I may have forgotten a few...) and I've acquired about 5,000 pieces of vinyl, maybe 2000 CDs and an insane amount of digitalized recordings.
Bob left in 1965 to go to Uni, and that was the last I saw of him. We had been taking different subjects at A-level and didn't hang out much after we got busted nicking singles in, I think, late ’64. In the sixth form I started hanging out with two guys called Clive and Keith, both still my friends today. We were all three big music fans, but with different core interests. Keith was into the blues, country blues mainly, and Clive loved the Beatles and other British pop, while I was all about Spector, soul and 'good stuff' (Clive's term, not mine :-) ) – basically American music, soul, pop, death records, doowop, rhythmn & blues, high school; We would hang out in each other's houses playing each other stuff and arguing about it. For some reason, we all had an obsession about track lengths, and spent a lot of nerdish energy timing them, staring at second hands. All three of us had started buying albums by then. C & K weren't really into singles that much, while I had getting on for a thousand of them by this point.
In 1966, Clive went to Essex to study literature, while Keith and I to Kent for Social Sciences. And somewhere in there, either just before we went up, or soon after in a weekend back in Tottenham (although my parents moved out to Hertfordshire at Xmas 1964, I used to spend most weekends in Tottenham with C&K and a few others, and Keith, his brother John and I would go to Spurs together), my first psychedelic record crept up on me; East-West, from the album of the same name by the Butterfield Blues Band. I think Keith bought it first, and I did soon after. And at uni, as someone who liked productions and American studio sounds in general, I was all over The Mothers of Invention, Beefheart, the Airplane, Love, Doors, Spirit and so on, as well as the VU and some bands with significantly less cachet today. By this time I was also buying some British singles, particularly Dusty Springfield and various London bands – the Who, Yardbirds, Small Faces and Kinks. Of course, me and everyone I knew was drug-free at this point (except my uni buddy Vic Lam, who introduced Keith and I to jazz - Coltrane, Haden, Gary Burton, Shepp, Miles), so I didn't so much see this material as wow-man-the-colours psych, just new and different sounds. After Bathing at Baxters was a favourite album.
Because I no longer had a pet record shop, and I didn't listen to the radio, I began to lose touch with singles in Canterbury. English psych whimsy just passed me by, although I did like the Floyd's singles. Part of the reason for this was simply personal circumstances; the death of my grandparents and, in particular, my father, and the circumstances thereabouts, knocked me off kilter in the middle of 1967. I was still buying records and going to gigs – it was around this time that I saw Cream at Manor House with Keith and Clive, the Mothers at the Albert Hall, and Beefheart at Middle Earth and the Doors/Airplane at the rRoundhouse with Martyn Dryden, another uni friend and a direct descendant of the poet – but I lost any sense of being involved in any contemporary scene.
I was completely fucked, basically, would be until the mid-1970s, arguably into the 1980s. As the ’60s ended, I was more likely to buy second hand or cut-out singles than what was new, was picking up albums by disintegrating 60s bands (Brit and US) or 'oldies but goodies' style comps (then rare; the Cruising series imported from the States were a particular favourite), plus stuff by bands I've not listened to much since, just because I wanted something new. Once I moved back to London as a wage slave in 1974, spent most of my greatly increased budget chasing down remaindered doo-wop and soul singles from a south London specialist store called Black Wax, until I was Saved by Punk. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
I really hated the term 'progressive rock' when it emerged, as it seemed condescending towards the stuff I actually liked, and because at least one aspect, or arm of it was to kowtow to classical music, get symphonic or operatic, get in 'proper' orchestras. I HATED THAT SHIT. Didn't help that, with a few exceptions (Delius, Sibelius, Berlioz, Debussy), listening to real classical music was a physical trial for me, so much so that I referred to it as gut's-ache music (that was the later symphonic style; all that mathematical and baroque stuff from the 17th century was 'headache music'). There was also the taint of the public school about many of the early prog bands, and I was quite the class warrior at the time. They talked smack about my faves in order to promote their constipated fatuities, so I filed said output in the oubliette. The 'underground' and counter-culture were more my speed: although they have been claimed by goons in retrospect, they had nowt to do with prog. I was well into all that (with the continuing proviso that I had lost my centre, was dissociated and alienated and generally fucked deep down). I was a regular reader of Rolling Stone, IT and Oz as well as all four weekly inkies, Black Panther stuff and other pamphlets, was completely into the Civil Rights struggle in the USA, underground comics (I love comics as much as music), the whole counter-culture idea stemming from the Beats, the experimental poetry and writing and the religious weirdness (all of this pre-dope), but it didn't influence my taste in music much. It was more that my love of music preceded it, opened the underground up to me, or me to the underground. I loved the cinematic story telling and sound-scaping of great pop, the youth and energy of rock and roll, the innocence and beauty of doo wop and harmonies, the excitement of R&B, the power and glory of soul, the unholy racket of acts like the Who, VU and Pharaoh Sanders, and the general attitude that, much later, I would find going back like a golden thread to the beginning of recorded music, the thing that I always respond to, and that I tend to think of, somewhat cringeworthily, as The Spirit, a creative fire that connects with some subliminal part of me. A part that loves a counterculture.
I stayed on at Kent to do a postgrad degree, but Keith and almost all my friends from my year left. Then, early in 1970, I took a room in a large Georgian house in Harbledown, and fell in with a group of druggy fools living in other rooms therein (all four – one only on Facebook - still friends now and with distinguished careers behind them). In August of that year I took speed for the first time, in December acid. Never smoked anything, not even tobacco, until 1972. I lived in a 15th-century house in Faversham with various bozos from the beginning of 1971 to June of 1972. There was no stereo, just my state of the art mono valve-amp record-player (NOT a fucking Dansette), which my dad had bought for me in 1965 (he was an electonics nerd, and actually worked at one time as a toolmaker for a firm making loudspeakers; he knew what he was doing). It played mono singles beautifully (not just my opinion, my friends still speak fondly of it now). I didn't get a stereo system until the 1980s, or indeed a CD player until 1997. I had brought my record collection, and the record cabinet custom-made for it by my dad, from my mother's house because, as a postgrad, I was living in East Kent full time. Also, my mother and I were kind of estranged – after my father died, I was resolute about not being sucked in to being the doted-upon only son of a doting widow in a co-dependent relationship. I thought I might never get out of it, but my HGA kicked in and saved me. I was the only one at 23 Abbey St who actually had a collection, even though I had collected it like a sump rather than an active gatherer. The other guys and gals who lived there had records, sure, but, as they were undergrads, tended to keep most of them at their parents' houses. So generally we played mine, but there was no dictatorship. We all had broadly similar tastes. Anyone could put a record on, it wasn't like there was someone standing beside the turntable.
The seventies, basically my 20s, were a bit of a wreck, featuring a complex love life that eventually led to no sex life for nine (no-)fucking years, as I plunged headlong down the rabbit-warren. In 1974, I relocated back to London, at first to Putney, where I shared a ground-floor flat with a succession of old uni pals, and then, in 1977, to a mansion flat in Cricklewood. They are also, bizarrely, the best documented part of my life, as, in part inspired partly by falling in love for the first time, with a Georgian woman in her twenties who had grown up in Tangiers and met Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Welles, among many others, and in part by the idea of being a writer (I began what would become my novel Mbawe at about the same time), I kept a diary from 1969 to soon after I started my relationship with Chip, in 1982.
The decade also encompassed my entire employment history: two terms as a – very bad – teacher, then, after a year or two on the dole, five years as, first, a market and advertising research guy for Reader's Digest, and then as an 'account planner' in a small ad agency working on the Boots the Chemist account almost exclusively. I gave it all up in 1979. I don't remember much about music in the early 1970s, but I do remember having not a lot of money, which was pretty much decisive. I dumped my PhD in the summer of 1971, and in Summer 1972 we quit the house at Abbey Street. Mike S, who was the only one apart from me to have lived there the whole five terms, and I bought a house around the corner, 27 East Street (it cost £4k and we put in a thou each, mine donated by my mother), and got in lodgers from the uni to pay the mortgage. Apart from those couple of terms teaching O level English to teenage police cadets (which led to some bizarre juxtapositions in my life), I lived blissfully on the NAB until September 1973, when I was more or less forced to retrain (I went to secretarial college to acquire madskillz as a typist and failed to master Pitman shorthand), my dole was stopped and I actually contrived to live on nothing for six months.
Many of my uni friends had graduated and moved on, including Mike, and I was generally having a shit time living on scrounging and borrowing until I got the job at RD in 1974, and eventually moved to Putney. So I wasn't really buying anything, there was nothing much to buy, and I was still listening to the classics of the 60s, or to the light American stuff favoured by the group of studes who had moved into 23 Abbey Street after us, and where I used to hang out a lot, mooning after one or two of the women and waiting for someone to roll a joint. Once I got to London, paid down my debts and started a sideline as a kind of dope-buying agent for a group of friends who weren't as well connected as I (which would eventually develop into a retailing business), I could buy what I wanted and go to gigs (Hammersmith Odeon was but a short bus-ride away), but I still didn't have a pet record shop. I think I mentioned earlier Black Wax, but that was imports and oldies soul and black music generally. I used to go to Virgin Marble Arch (handy from work in Mayfair) and a few places in Soho. I'd stopped buying singles, except second-hand or bargain bin stuff, and much of what I bought (for 10p) I didn't like much.
I was still going American in the mid-70s (with Spirit's Future Games the highlight), apart from For Your Pleasure and the next few Roxy albums, plus a few odd obscurities such as Ninth Wave, but America wasn't putting it out like it used to, and a lot of it – black as well as white –was coke crap. I was casting about. I read the NME assiduously, remember the Mick Farren Titanic articles, and the ones they did about CBGBs. And then came Horses, which brought together dumb-ass rock & roll and modern American literature and made something wonderful and strange out of it, a third or fourth way for a record to be great. And then there were the Ramones. And Television. And Blondie. And Jonathon Richman. I started to wake up.
Everyone I knew who cared about music saw punk at worst as a relief after what had come before. I had read about the Pistols in the NME in 1976, and their career thereafter, but I had nothing to do with the early scene. In fact, I remember the first punk I actually talked to was a guy called Jonathon Sage (later reinvented as Jon Savage) who had been at some kind of solicitors' training course with my gal pal Frankie. It was awkward to say the least; I was a long-hair suited and booted for work, and he was very wary of me. As I said above, I was well into the NME at this point, and while I enjoyed reading about the Pistols, I never heard them – where would I? they weren't exactly all over the radio – until 28 May 1977 at Hammersmith Odeon, in the interval of the Blondie-Television tour (both bands seemed unsure how to function on the huge stage, with TV looking and sounding uptight and nervous, while Debbie was on great form and the band punched above their weight). I was up in the balcony, looking down into what was a vaguely desultory pit, when, during the interval, the guitar intro to No Future came crashing through the PA, and this extraordinary surge of power went through the crowd, a communicable adrenaline hit that you could see, taste and feel. Everyone in the pit was on their feet, every hair I had was standing to attention. I immediately knew what I was listening to, and this extraordinary powerful sound and incantation gave the immediate lie to the idea that these people couldn't play.
It was like a rebirth. No, really.
I was coming up to 29 years old, fundamentally unhappy and out of love with – out of innocent joy with – music, and suddenly there was this extraordinary demonstration of the redemptive power of electric sound. Within just a couple of weeks, I had tracked down a version of Anarchy, bought the Damned album and thrown myself into the records – singles, glorious singles. I had cash, I'd just moved to Cricklewood, and it was a couple of short bus rides to Ladbroke Grove, where Rough Trade became my emporium of choice, and I eventually got on first-name terms with Judy, Pete and Nigel, who took over the shop when Geoff Travis decided to concentrate on the label.
I was never a punk, though, any more than was ever a hippy, a rocker or a mod. I didn't do the fashions, or the clubs. Off-hand the only British punk bands I remember seeing were the Clash at the Mean Fiddler and the Undertones at Aberystwyth Uni, although I was still drinking as well as smoking so may have just forgotten some. I was just thrilled that, for the first time ever, there was a scene going on in the UK that I could relate to, the indie labels were setting up and there was this extraordinary do-it-yourself ethic taking hold: that horrid cosiness that the Beatles-loved-by-mums-and-dads had introduced, albeit inadvertently, was blown away, and there was a real ferment of creativity. Oh, and the criticism about it being 'too basic' and 'inept'? Beneath contempt. Muso shit. I railed against it at the time. It was perhaps the best thing about punk, for me, along with the rediscovery of The Spirit; you don't have to be a virtuoso to make a record; there's more to music than musicality, and art is more important than craft. And Matlock, Jones and Cook were all good players, anyway.
Punk and post-punk bled into each other, and I didn't really make the disconnect until much later. I just kept buying singles, and tended to think of most of the stuff released on the indie labels such as Factory, Stiff, Fast, Postcard and Rough Trade as punk, even though it wasn't the full three-chord amphetamine ramalama – because very little was that basic for more than about three or four months in 1977 anyway. I embraced punk as an attitude, rather than a style of dress – or music really. Just a sense of youthful creativity, Romanticism and iconoclasm swirling around, and unlike in any previous scenes, I had the money, time and inclination to indulge, so I did.
In April 1979, for various reasons, I jacked in my job at the ad agency and said goodbye to paid imprisonment for good. I never took on a salaried job again. I wanted to write, and thought, at 30, I ought to give it a go. I had an agent for Mbawe, and got some good comments, although I was never sanguine about finding a publisher. I thought I could support myself by selling hask (well, it supported my intake, at least) and doing those casual jobs that look good on the dust-jacket of a novel – Kelly Girl (I did secretarial college, 60wpm typing), home cleaner (for an agency), doorman, nightwatchman – don't remember them all. I also wrote stuff for my former employers and for media mags. And bummed off my mother if things got difficult; it was she who lent me the money to get Mbawe printed in 1983.
Basically, though, the retailing was my most reliable source of support in the post-punk years. I knew three other retailers, and we occasionally wholesaled to each other, but each of us had another, deeper source somewhere. Mine was a guy I knew vaguely from uni, a friend of a friend really, who was very well connected, but preferred not to get too involved on a day to day level. He lived a distance away, in the south-west of London - round the corner from an Operation Julie house, as it happened – but fortunately his main business was antiques, and he had a stall in the Portobello Road. I fell into a regular habit on Saturday mornings of bussing in to the market, having a cup of tea and a transaction in a cafe, or plain sight - wads of notes and stuff passed across in carrier bags was a commonplace there – and then walking up to Rough Trade to see what was new there. They knew what I liked, and pulled out stuff to play me. It was just like the High Cross Record Centre all over again.
And another thing about this arrangement that impinged muscially was that my business was with a wide circle of mates who had known me for at least a decade, so there were always people coming in and out of the Mansions, who already looked to me as someone who would play them new – and old – music as well as sell them dope (and get them stoned, feed them curry and provide a slide show, candle spectacular or video - it was a bleeding son et lumiere in that front room some nights.)
Some came every week. One of these, Ed, was a relatively new friend who had married someone I'd known at Kent. He lived in Notting Hill, and was into dance, hip hop and people like the Cabs as well as punk and general raucousness (he had been a room-mate of Paul Mellor, Strummer, when studying photography at art college). Like me, he wasn't remotely musical, but loved records. He'd come round to the Mansions once a week with a six pack to pick up a quarter and play music. He also picked out my first stereo system (he was a studio technician by trade) in the early 1980s sometime, although the record player still saw sterling service.
In the 12 years I lived at the Mansions, I must have had a dozen room-mates – most of them old friends, who had their friends over, while those from the Kentish diaspora who had got further than London found my place a good one to crash in overnight on their way to Heathrow or to stay in if they fancied a bit of excitement they could not find in whatever wretched provincial hole they had ended up in.
Generally speaking, I was more excited by, and involved in, records in the years 1977-1983 than any time before or since, a kind of second teenhood. Not just post-punk; early hip hop, disco, synthpop. Insane dark rock bands like the Only Ones and Doll by Doll. All those British bands that channeled not just the VU, but also Beefheart, Love, the Doors (but never, disappointingly, the Airplane). All those girls picking up guitars, making an unholy racket and demanding to be heard. Not just the Slits, but the Raincoats, the Mo-Dettes, Lilliput, Mambo Taxi, reinventing the girl group sound. Loved the huge sounds of the 12" single, too, the remixes, the dub versions, a grand time to be alive.
Chip and I met around 81-82 through my work and our relationship changed everything, eventually, but there's thirty years of it, nearly half my life, so it's not always possible to say what changes came from that and what from just simply getting older and living. The circumstances of our lives together affected the way I listened to music, but it was never really an issue between us one way or the other. She loved early ’60s American pop, Motown and soul from her teen years – she was 15 months older than me – and we both liked to listen to that in the early years of our relationship, while her record collection was an odd mix of sixties folkie stuff (I've written before about her connection with that scene in the early 60s; she grew up in Soho, knew the folk clubs well, and some of the musicians better - Royston Wood of the Young Tradition took her cherry, at a time he was sharing a house in West Hampstead / East Kilburn with Bert Jansch and John Renbourne. She also had an affair with Martin Carthy, knew Paul Simon, Jackson C Frank, Annie Briggs, and so on pretty well, and was on nodding terms with the other figures in that scene), random singles that had caught her fancy, and early 70s Americana – Little Feat, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, many of which had been 'donated' by her first husband, Michael the coke dealer.
We didn't really do much listening together, on our own, though, and we didn't bond over it. I never went to a gig with her – in fact, I more or less stopped going at all. Once we moved in together (married in 1988, but didn't manage the house together until 1990), and I'd built a floor to ceiling cabinet to house all my vinyl (didn't get a CD player until 1997), music was something I did in a separate room. She wouldn't have a record player in the living room. Occasionally Chip would come in and ask me to play something over if she heard anything she liked, and if she had a favourite, she really loved it. Hey Leroy by the Jimmy Castor Bunch always made her smile, and that, along with Perdido by Snuff Smith, and Who Knows where the Time Goes were the music we chose for our second wedding in 2006 (she had divorced me in 2002), and I guess any of those could be our song - or Stay With Me by Lorraine Ellison. We both loved that.
We married in 1988 and I moved to Bristol in 1990. My tastes in music have changed, developed, shrank and widened over the last two decades of the century – how could they not? – but I think it was more to with being in my 40s (and indeed, later, in my 50s), and married, and having quit dealing, and having a pet for the first time, discovering gardening, and living with someone who was ill for pretty much the whole time and who eventually found all loud sounds difficult to deal with. In the 1990s, my career in partworks (which had come about because I had given a copy of the self-published Mbawe to a friend of Chip, Yvonne, who, on the strength of it, recommended me as a writer to an editor called Sandy Carr, ex-wife of jazzman Ian Carr, who worked for Marshal Cavendish, and I proceeded therefrom to get commissions and editorial work for the next twenty-odd years) was well established, and I fell into a pattern of going up to London for a couple of nights, crashing with friends such as Ed or Howard, fitting in a week's work into a couple of long days, perhaps scoring from one of the three retailers, then buzzing home. I would sometimes fit in a gig, such as the first time I went to see Mercury Rev, or go to shops such as Sister Ray that were close to where I was working in Soho, or Rough Trade West in Covent Garden.
My big thing then were American bands such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr – and later YLT and Mercury Rev – and pretty much everything on the Shimmy disc label (my pal Howard was also, and remains, a big fan), but it was only later in the ’90s that I found a record shop connection in Bristol, when Dean, a guy I met through joining an ultimate team in Bristol because I was desperate for a disc fix and no longer found it easy to get to see my Frisbee oppo, Bill Boyes, in Brighton, introduced me to Barney, a former schoolboy international footballer and white rasta who was working as a reggae DJ and dealing green on the sidelines at the time we met, but soon after got a job in Revolver in the bus station in Central Bristol, which I could reach on a bus from outside my door.
I got on well with the de facto manager, H, who played bass in band called The Heads, and I was shopping there pretty constantly, mainly buying back catalogue CDs from their second-hand racks, but also picking up some tasty vinyl, such as Beefheart's Grow Fins set. I bought myself a CD player for my 49th birthday, in 1997. The spark for this was a new fortnightly partwork I was sub-editing, called Jazz Greats. Each issue featured an essay on some artist or scene, and some great photos, but mainly a selection on cover-mounted CD or cassette of newly remastered out of copyright material by the artist(s) in question. While I had taken my music appreciation, through reading and some archive vinyl, back into the 1950s, and before, to Robert Johnson, say, and was vaguely aware of Glenn Miller and not liking Dixieland much, I had never really listened to popular music from before I was born. And when I heard this material, at first on tape, and later, once I had succumbed to the new-fangled tech at last, on CD, I realized that The Spirit I thought had risen out of the American soil in the post-war boom in fact ran back all the way to the 1920s, at least, and probably earlier, although there were no recordings of it; it is the great joy of the digital age that all this decades of stuff is out there to be enjoyed and wandered in.
Things changed with the advent of the interwebz and, to an extent, the boom in back catalogue releases on CD. I slowly realized that it was indeed what was in the grooves that counted, the sound rather than the artifact: with a few exceptions (none of Phil Spector's 60s productions have had perfect digital remasters), I came around to the idea that the vinyl was disposable if the sound was still available, and selling those demos in 2007 or 2008 was more a case of someone offering silly money, than my actually needing it.
And sometime in the last six years, in a slow and subterranean fashion at first, I've moved my stance from accumulation to disposal. I hardly ever listen to music when I am on my own – which I usually am – and tbh I suspect I'll never listen to 99%+ of my 'collection' again. The only reason I still have most of it – I've given some away to friends and the children of friends – is the logistical problem of selling it. I'm very resistant to the idea of selling the whole collection, as I'd likely get less than a tenth of what I could get if I sold piece by piece, and to some extent I saw the collection as my savings fund. It wasn't so much the cash, though, it's the sense of handing something on, rather than dumping stuff that I have loved and cherished and kept for over 50 years in some cases. Plus, there's not leaving it for my son or partner to deal with. Over the last couple of years, I've set myself up on Discogs, and sold off about a sixth of my vinyl, and one of the odd and unexpected results of this is that I've actually experienced a slight rebirth of my interest in playing the stuff, and paying attention to it.
And here I am.
). Looking back (and perhaps being a revisionist myself), the Brill building thing was was about craft and cleverness and stories, about creating a believable character and situation, even a whole world in a three minute single. The Drifters were past masters of this: listen to On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Under the Boardwalk, just about any of their singles from 1958 to 1963; or Will You Love Me Tomorrow, or the You've Lost that Loving Feeling trilogy (with Just Once in My Life and Hung on You). It was like a movie, a communal effort from writers, producer and performers to tell a story, set a scene.
