Monthly Archives: September 2012

What I said back then:

The first of the Edinburgh memories – it’ll be interesting to see if they are more numerous than the four years would warrant. The Chambers Street Union was – apparently it’s empty now – a labyrinthine place, with the main bar two floors below ground level. Thanks to Edinburgh’s interesting topography, of course, there was a door in the bar which opened onto the Cowgate [Guthrie Street – ed.] at the back. Sometime in late 1982 or early 1983, I was asked if I wanted a ticket to see this new band who ‘sound a bit like Genesis’ at Chambers Street. I’m pretty sure that I had vaguely heard of them, but the ‘Genesis’ thing put me off, and I declined. Eventually, of course, I was persuaded (‘they’re not that much like Genesis, honest’) to go, and I think it was partly the curiosity value which persuaded me: how did they intend to put a band on in there?

The answer proved to be ‘move some tables and chairs out of the way, and let them play’. The band gathered in a corner; the audience gathered around the bar,some people continued to play pool at the tables in the back, out of sight of the band, and this enormous, face-painted frontman strode in from the front door and launched into ‘Garden Party’. This will be Fish, then, I mused. Stupid name. Gradually, however, Fish and his companions won me over: here was a band on the brink of breaking through, doing a gig probably set up by a friend of a friend for a favour in a cramped basement to an audience of about 50, and they gave it their all. The full theatrical experience, the best sound they could muster, and several encores – I think they played ‘Supper’s Ready’ at one point, but I forgave them. Six months later, they’re in the charts, on ‘Top of the Pops’, and selling out good sized venues. It’s really my only ‘before they were famous’ story, and I mostly remember it for the sheer oddness of the whole thing.

What I think now:

Again out of the original order, so not the first Edinburgh one, but it remains quite a vivid memory – I checked the date, it was April 1982, and apparently the gig was in doubt because one of them had dislocated a shoulder a couple of nights before.  Can’t say I noticed.

I only ever saw a couple of student union gigs – I think the whole thing was a little unfashionable around that time – certainly there were other small venues in Edinburgh for bands to play in, and the Odeon and then the Playhouse once you had graduated to facilities with a proper stage and everything.  It seems strange in retrospect that there really weren’t, and to a degree, still aren’t, custom built venues for rock concerts.  Virtually every gig I saw until the early 1990s was in a converted (or indeed, still in use) cinema, a tradition which had started with the revue shows in the fifties.  Did no-one think that this would last long enough to make a proper venue worthwhile?

The Odeon was reasonably atmospheric, I suppose, although I always thought the Playhouse too big – the inevitable crush to the front when the headline act came on left the back third of the seats empty, which I remember gave the place a strange acoustic – or maybe it always sounded like that.

And the less said about the Ingliston cowshed the better – I’m certain it comes up a bit later, but it truly was a horrible place to see a band.

The Chambers Street Union bar wasn’t really a venue, and neither was the Bristo Square Health Centre, where I saw Uriah Heep and (I think) The Blues Band – I actually have trouble picturing how that worked – the health centre was next door to the Potterrow union building, but there was nowhere in that bar to put a band on, so things happened in what I dimly recall to have been the refectory during the day.  All I know is that there was no space to turn round, and you were awfully close to the action – I’m pretty sure I’ve been sweated on by a pre-Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson, back in the days when he was known as ‘Bruce Bruce’

Since then:

Well, I had a brief Marillion phase, as did much of the UK, then they faded from my memory like so much else that happened in Edinburgh.  Oh, and they really didn’t play ‘Supper’s Ready; I imagine I heard ‘Grendel’.

When I was there in May, I saw for myself that the Chambers Street building is no longer a union, or indeed a bar, although I’m not sure what it actually is now, and I peered quizzically at the Potterrow building and the Health Centre, which appears to have a convenience store in it now.  I still have no idea how they put bands on in there, but I can still taste the refectory macaroni.

Not necessarily a good thing.

What I said back then:

Nothing.  I think that this was no.41 on the list, site and got trimmed.  Shame, there really.

What I think now:

I lived in Edinburgh during the brief heyday of Postcard Records.  I was aware of their work, troche as they say, and I think I was mildly attracted to names like Josef K and Aztec Camera, because I was also nurturing a fondness for the surreal.  However, I think, given my other musical obsessions at the time, I found them somewhat thin and in my mind associated with the likes of Haircut 100.  Again, I find myself wondering what might have been, because once I allowed myself to listen…

I have put this one roughly in the early months of living in Edinburgh period, because I vividly remember the posters proclaiming ‘the sound of young Scotland’ – being in a place where bands like this played and wonderful, mysterious record stores stocked their singles was like living in a dream world for an impressionable youngster.  I cannot figure out how to convey this impression on the boys; if we went to Edinburgh now (I know – I was there in May), they would find it lacking in the things which made it so special to me then.

Back then, almost every street had an independent record shop – Listen in the New Town; my own favourite, Phoenix on the High Street; Ripping Records on South Bridge, the ineffably mysterious GI on Cockburn Street, which was the place to go for obscure Arthur Lee and Spirit bootlegs, but surely never did anything like enough business to justify the enormous floor space – I always wondered what else was going on in there.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface – no mention of Ezy Rider in Greyfriars Market, or (I found it at…) Bruce’s and I could even be found perusing the mainstream bins at Menzies, WH Smith or HMV on Wednesday afternoons, while the rest of the University was playing some kind of sport or catching up on essays.

At some point, which I’ll come back to, my tastes began to widen and vary, and one of the first things I bought was ‘High Land, Hard Rain’.  Even then, I fancied myself a guitarist of sorts, but I could never get anywhere near Roddy Frame’s effortless ability, even with the sheet music in front of me.  Enough to make anyone give up.

Since then:

Aztec Camera and Roddy Frame have been with me ever since – in one form or another, I have owned pretty much everything he’s ever recorded, and there’s something about his writing and playing which resonates with me; even songs which might otherwise be overlooked cause me to go into odd raptures.

I’ve never seen them or him (I’m not sure when Roddy finally came clean and stopped pretending Aztec Camera was anything other than just him doing his thing with whatever musicians might be around), play live, and I have a sinking feeling I never will.  Not because of advancing years (I’m pretty sure Roddy’s younger than me – he certainly used to be), but because no-one out in the back of this particular beyond has ever heard of Aztec Camera, so the chances of a spontaneous visit are pretty much zero.  Thank goodness, and not for the first time, for YouTube.

I remember watching ‘Wogan’ or some such with my parents in the mid-Eighties; my mother was fond of the early evening chat-show, but not so much of the inevitable popular music interlude in the middle.  One evening, we were all watching for some reason, when ‘Working in a Goldmine’ was announced.  Mum’s reaction was a little sniffy, as expected.  Until she actually listened to it.  Proper songwriting, good enough to even cause my mother to proclaim it ‘actually quite good’.

There’s an epitaph anyone would be proud of.

What I said back then:

I’m not going to link anything here – if you can’t find Lennon material online, you’re really not trying.

I’ve done a fictionalised version of this already, but it will bear a little repetition. One early December morning in 1980, I awake as usual in my spartan room in Cowan House (You’ll notice, if you follow the link, that it’s recently been demolished. I managed not to shed a tear…) I turn on the radio, and am surprised to hear two Lennon tracks in a row, followed by the kind of silence which tells you everything you need to know. The subsequent news bulletin is still a little sketchy in the details, but there’s no doubt about what has happened. It’s the first time I have been affected so strongly by something since I left home; indeed, it’s probably the first time I have been affected so powerfully by anything. I can’t claim that he was one of my heroes, or that I had any particular link to him or his music, but this was a seismic event nevertheless. The conversation and the news bulletins were dominated by it for what seemed like weks afterwards – probably only a few days, in reality, and the music charts were full of Lennon for months.

And that’s what I really remember, I suppose – that Christmas period full of ‘Imagine’ and ‘Happy Xmas, War is Over’; Bryan Ferry crooning ‘Jealous Guy’ and those wire rimmed glasses staring out from every record shopfront. I suppose that in some strange way, the 8th of December 1980 marked an end to my innocence – it’s glib to say that nothing was the same again, but nothing really was, after that.

What I think now:

It’s a little overblown, but I stand by how I felt at the time.  I was still a teenager, and it felt momentous.  I also apologise for the abruptly dismissive first line – not sure what that was about!

I’m also not sure what John Lennon means to me now.  As I already noted, I have a child who is partial to The Beatles, but I don’t think that extends beyond the end of the Sixties – I know he’s heard solo Lennon material, but I don’t think he’s as captivated by it.  I come and go – mainly, I find myself wondering what might have been.  More than for any of the other deceased artists in this list, there is a real sense that he might yet have produced something extraordinary or at worst unusual.  I’d have liked to have heard that.

Oh, and the fictionalised version?  It’s a long story, but not one I’m pursuing particularly.  I’ll leave that extract there, but there’s not a lot else I’d want to do with it right now.

Since then:

Not a huge amount, to be honest.  I did go and visit the Beatles museum the last time I was in Liverpool, and found myself more moved by images and sounds of Lennon than I would have expected – I did draw the line at visiting his house, however.  I also belatedly watched the ‘Anthology’ series, but enjoyed Scorsese’s George Harrison biopic much more.  In the end, I suppose, Lennon affected my life, but more in the manner of his death than by anything he did while he was alive.  I was born 10 years too late, I suppose.

What I said back then:

Oh, I wish it wasn’t them, really. Although, having said that it could have been a lot worse. They were – still are, it seems – a decent, hard working bunch of lads from Yorkshire who liked their music loud. Bloody loud. And early 1980, this was the next new thing – the (ahem) New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

I thought it might be a passing phase, something which captured my interest for a few months like everything else I had liked up to then, but this one stuck. Maybe it says something about me at the time – leaving home, fending for myself in the big city, being forced to grow up – I seemed to take refuge in a kind of music which, while viscerally enjoyable, was a long way from the more thoughtful stuff I used to like. It’s a long way even from the recent punk and new wave music which could be just as noisy and obstreperous. For some time afterwards, I pretended to myself that this phase hadn’t really happened, and recently some of it has become fashionable in a kind of post-modern, ironic sort of way. And of course, as with any genre of popular music, there are those for whom it has never been away.

So why Saxon, particularly? Because they were the first. The first band I grabbed at when my friends started liking this stuff – pretty much at random, I think; and the first band I ever saw in concert. So they have to be here. And I remember the noise and the mayhem, the heat and the sweat; and I remember thinking I had never experienced anything like this, and I wanted more. Like I say, visceral. And, no – I’m not really embarrassed, it’s just who I was back then. I might even go and listen to some – for old times’ sake…

What I think now:

I don’t know; I still sound a bit embarrassed by it…  Looking back on that phase of my life does make me smile now – for a short space of time I think I was determined to be the world’s most denim-clad headbanger, and yet, I could never quite carry it off – my hair was never long enough, I never did buy the denim jacket or save up for a leather one.  I never even sewed a beer towel on to my jeans; just not that committed, I guess.  I do hear some of the music now and think that it still stands up, although there’s plenty that really doesn’t.  What was I thinking?  Also, I’d like to apologise to any of my neighbours in halls in the early eighties – you must have been driven crazy by some of this terrible music.

I am deeply impressed that Saxon are still going strong, however – I don’t exactly feel obliged to listen to anything recent, but it’s good to know that you can make a career out of doing that, and still appear to be having fun.

Oh, and I did miss one Saxon memory – in 1982, a friend and I plodded along to the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington.  The less said about the day the better, I think – festivals then were somewhat more basic than festivals now – but I do remember Saxon playing ‘747’, and then an actual 747 passing low overhead on its way to East Midlands airport.  During the wrong song, of course, but it raised a laugh…

Since then:

I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to find and digitally own Saxon material.  I suppose I wouldn’t object to some of it, and I find I do have a copy of ‘747’.  But all in all, it’s a part of my life which has passed by generally unmourned.

What I said back then:

There are several of these memories which relate to what I have, half-jokingly, referred to as ‘rites of passage’ – this is the only one which actually felt like one at the time. I have written about this incident elsewhere, but there’s a little more flesh to go on the bones here.

The period after the Higher exams in my 5th year was a very strange one indeed; there were next to no classes to go to, and the majority of my time was taken up with putting on a play. Well, two plays. That story has already been told [see above], but the striking things I remember about it were slightly downplayed. It was a time of great upheaval in musical tastes – we all changed opinions as often as we changed our socks, and there seemed to be so much stuff around that it was hard to keep track. Then I heard this synthesiser-driven thing on the radio: ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ It appealed to me instantly, and I had the feeling that this was the next thing for us all to move on to. And I was completely wrong.

Everyone I knew hated it, it seemed. But I was unafraid – for the first time consciously in my life, I stood up for what I liked, and didn’t go with the flow. Now it’s not much to be proud of, really, but it felt like I was becoming my own person; and, what’s more, I recognised it at the time. On the day it was released, I did what I had only dreamed about until then – I skipped out of school at lunchtime, got on a bus and went into town. I bought my treasured single, and hurried back to school. I seem to remember making it with only a few minutes to spare; but that may be over-egging the pudding somewhat; no-one was really paying attention at the time. In any event, on it went to the record player in the Drama Theatre – the ‘Buzzcocks’ one – and I felt for the first time in my life like a proper grown-up. I’d like to tell you there was a certain satisfaction in having everyone come round to my way of thinking, but in truth part of me actually wanted this record to be my little secret passion. Of course, it turned out to be the biggest-selling record of the year; but that just proves how ahead of the game I was…

What I think now:

I have a faint suspicion that ‘Follow You, Follow Me’ will turn out to have been a more significant memory of that time, but here it is – it does still feel like something happened around the time of this record, and perhaps I am right in my ten-year-old analysis of it.  I do remember being told that I was an idiot and that I should listen to David Bowie instead – ‘Low’ and ‘Lodger’ were being bandied around, as I recall.  There is a part of me wishes I had paid attention to that advice, because the somewhat limited musical palette I was about to subject myself to for three or four years might have been avoided, but then again, it wasn’t exactly logical that it would flow from Gary Numan, either.  Perhaps I was more enigmatic than I gave myself credit for…

Since then:

I heard Gary Numan interviewed on the radio a little while back, and his genial demeanour and general nice-blokeness prompted me to unearth some of this Tubeway Army stuff.  Well, I’m sort of glad I did, but some of it really hasn’t survived the passage of time very well, I’m afraid.  There are a couple of solid gold singles, though, and they do provoke a faraway nostalgic look in my eye, I’m afraid to say.

Well, that and the short-sightedness.

What I said back then:

Around the time that I was a chronically insecure teenager, my only refuge was the Longacre Players. The slightly-more-grown-up version of Aberdeen Children’s Theatre, we met on Wednesday evenings instead of Saturday mornings, and we did proper theatre – I’m not sure if the story of how we put on Hamlet will appear here or not, but we did, and it wasn’t half bad, he said modestly. Being theatrical types, we were natural show-offs, and because we were putting on a musical – ‘Fiddler on the Roof, if memory serves – there was a piano in the rehearsal room. One or two of our number were properly musical, and able to bang out not just well-known tunes, but also current and even new songs – I remember being impressed at hearing ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ on that piano.

Upstairs at no.31 King Street is, therefore, where I first heard Madness. Not on the radio, or on someone’s tape recording (this was before Walkmen, folks), but bashed out on the upright piano, either by Alec Innes or Rannoch Donald. Upon enquiring, I discover that it’s called ‘The Prince’, and it’s the next big thing. Which it was, really. But this sets me thinking. In 1979, I was listening to Madness and The Specials, to Joni Mitchell and Dire Straits (which reminds me…), to Prokofiev and Mussorgsky, to Ian Dury and The Police, to Tubeway Army and Ultravox, to Thin Lizzy and UFO, to – you get the idea. I find myself wondering whether there is too much music for me to take in today, but it was ever thus. Perhaps my life has simply become more full of other things – I no longer have the time to investigate all the new stuff, when I know I’m never going to get through all the Haydn symphonies… How soon can I retire?

What I think now:

Well, it wasn’t really about Madness, was it? It’s such a clear memory, though – I can picture that dusty upstairs room with its bare floorboards, the piano at one end, green and yellow Aberdeen Corporation buses lumbering by outside, and the carefully studied ennui so beloved of world-weary sixteen- and seventeen-year olds.

And I think my point about there still being too much music still stands.  Very occasionally, something new gets through the noise of everyday life, and makes it past the pile of things I know I enjoy listening to as well as the pile of music (including most of those Haydn symphonies) that I know I ought to listen to – last year it was Manchester Orchestra’s ‘Simple Math’, and I know I wouldn’t have even heard it if I didn’t remember the eclecticism represented by what we used to play, sing and listen to in that room.

Since then:

Well, it wasn’t about Madness, was it?  Still, I retain a fondness for pretty much all of Madness, in spite of Zoe’s studied indifference.  I like that they became National Treasures, because ‘The Prince’ didn’t really hint at that, did it?

Oh, and while I have no idea what happened to Alec Innes (I do know he was, perhaps still is, a proper actor), I was contacted by Rannoch a few years back; delightfully, he had Googled himself, and found my original blog.  Hi, Rannoch.  I’m still at it, I’m afraid!

What I said back then:

Way back then, when I started this exercise, I thought more of these would turn out to be like the Joni Mitchell one; lists of passing memories. Well, this one will be, because when it came down to it, I couldn’t single out one particular moment. So here, in rough chronological order, are the Costello moments:

 Get Happy! – sitting on the stairs at 31 King St, marvelling at the number of tracks on one side of vinyl.

 Bouncing around my parents’ living room, trying to figure out the words to ‘Oliver’s Army’

 Pills and Soap – heard it first in my parents’ car, wondering if they were hearing this vitriol…

 Driving my van along Auchmill Road, being overpowered by ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’

 Hearing ‘Good Year for the Roses’ in Inverness – what on earth is this?

 ‘Spike’ – another Perth Library record – I listened to this on the way to every interview that summer when I was out of work.

 ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ – trekking the back roads home to Tring, yelling along to ‘The Other Side of Summer‘

 ‘Jacksons, Monk and Rowe’ – do you know, I think this string quartet thing might work…

 Buying ‘The Juliet Letters’, and playing it obsessively for a month – this string quartet thing definitely does work, and remains my favourite Costello  album.  Finding out that I’m not the only person who feels this way.  [Note: this is a reference to an article by the magician Teller, now disappeared from the web, if you can imagine such a thing] Quoting bits of lyric from it at odd times; being stared at.

In fact, although I am selective about which bits I listen to, Elvis Costello is as much the soundtrack to my life as Joni Mitchell is – the fact that I seem to like the bits that most people pass by just makes him all the more of a personal favourite – sometimes I think that he writes stuff purely for my enjoyment. I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know the words to ‘New Amsterdam’ or was able to stop myself singing ‘my aim is true’ whenever I meet someone called Alison (I don’t usually sing it out loud, thankfully) – it’s sobering how someone you’re never likely to meet can take over parts of your life in such subtle ways.

But I’m glad it’s him, and I’ve never been disappointed by him.

What I think now:

The ‘way back then’ comment sticks out, because this was originally much later in the 40.  I’ve gone slightly more chronological this time round, so it, and the passing reference to Perth Library will make more sense when you read later entries.

Elvis Costello continues to weave in and out of my soundscape; I have occasionally caught some of his marvellous TV show, and I still love to thrash out early Costello material on my guitar.  I do believe that he was one of the most important musical voices of the last century, and I think he’s capable still of startling innovation and taking listeners down entirely unexpected roads.

Since then:

A few iTunes purchases over the years have restored my vinyl collection and added some later stuff.  I’m still most likely to listen to ‘Juliet Letters’ – I even wrote a short story based on one of those tracks.

And earlier this year, I stumbled upon this. One of his great songs and a truly stunning interpretation.  See what I mean?

What I said back then [NOTE: I am not responsible for the consequences of some of these links being opened where others can hear]:

A true original, a one-off, and if this were a list of my musical heroes, then a much longer entry. But memories…

I’ve been trying to avoid dating things too much, principally for reasons of not having the hours required to research them – it should generally be reasonably clear when things happened. But this – this was 1978. So I was 16, and just at that perfect age for clever, witty songs which weren’t afraid to swear. Quite a lot. At that time, music TV in the UK was pretty much restricted to Top of the Pops, that venerable institution, filled only with singles which had gone up the charts that week, and were tasteful enough to be put before the nation in the early evening; and The Old Grey Whistle Test (which deserves a memory of its own, really) late at night. And then, slowly but surely, some other things began to appear. ‘So it Goes’, ‘The Oxford Road Show’, one or two others, including a BBC series whose name escapes me for present, but which delivered a live performance into our living rooms at teatime on a Saturday. One weekend, I flick over to see who’s on, and it’s Ian. My mother comes into the room, intent on whatever it is mothers do when they’re really checking up on their teenage children, and is met with ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and ‘There ain’t half been some clever bastards’. “Charming,” I hear from behind, as the door is closed. With impeccable timing, the Blockheads launch into ‘Plaistow Patricia’. I’m certain I really did hear this on the BBC at teatime on a Saturday – of course, it might have been bowdlerised, but this is Ian Dury we’re talking about. The shame is, that he was the kind of bloke to have utterly charmed people like my parents. I resolve not to automatically dislike whatever my children find entertaining when they’re sixteen.

Oh, and if anyone knows where I can get hold of the South Bank Show edition, with the coruscating ‘Fuck off Noddy’ in it, please let me know…

What I think now:

Well, ‘Fuck Off Noddy’ is on YouTube, of course (WARNING – very much not safe for work link right there.  Probably not really safe for home viewing, either.  But bloody funny.) – no sign of the South Bank Show, though. And that first clip suggests that my memory is faulty, if it was indeed ‘Sight and Sound in Vision’ from 1977.  But I know ‘Bastards’ was played, and it was 1978.  Blockhead music still gets a regular airing; I generally assume that I’m the only person in Prince George listening to Ian Dury, possibly the only one in BC at times, but I like to try to educate wherever I go…

The boys know some Dury, and – of course – love the gleeful silliness and musical exuberance of it all.  They even understand the accent, most of the time.  I’m perilously close, of course, to being made to live up to my resolution there – only another year to go before Cam is 16.  Right now, he mostly listens to the same kind of stuff I listen to, and there’s definitely an essay in that.  I don’t hear him endlessly repeating stuff I can’t bear to listen to, but if I do, I hope I can make good on my promise…

Since then:

There’s a terrific Ian Dury compilation on my iTunes; I saw a documentary some years back, which featured Upminster quite heavily, and made me nostalgic for a different part of my childhood, and there’s a movie.  Which I can’t decide if I want to see or not.  Not that it’s easy to get hold of out here.

What I said back then:

There has to be a punk moment, and this is it. I could have picked almost anything from this time, but there’s a story attached to this. We didn’t really do punk properly in Aberdeen. We were a bit too far out of the loop. I mean, we had the expected furore when the Sex Pistols were banned from playing in Aberdeen, but I’m not even sure there was a serious suggestion that they were coming. There were Clash and Damned albums in the Year Area, and the odd safety pin – in lapels, mind, not in faces. We did enjoy the supposed anarchy and rebellion, but I think we were a bit half-hearted about it really. And we got it all several weeks after the fact, too – the latest new band were established chart artists by the time we actually got to hear any of the music – everything moved so fast in 1977 – and I think that a little of the thrill was absorbed by that. And I can make no real claims to being a punk in any meaningful way; I liked the music I heard, but I didn’t own any of it.

The only way I could hear it, other than the occasional radio play, was good old fashioned seven inch singles. In later years, there was a record player in the Year Area – I wonder whose it was? We queued up to put on our singles during lunchbreak particularly, and some of my fond memories are of almost entirely forgotten singles – Flying Lizards, Lemon Kittens, Spizz Energi, Regents (anyone remember “Seventeen“?) The other place where records might be played was in the dressing room of the Drama Theatre – there was a lot of free time between Highers and the end of term, and we were trying to put on a couple of plays to the accompaniment of various loud pieces of music, including, from somewhere, the Buzzcocks single ‘What Do I Get?’ Now, not particularly controversial (not compared to ‘Orgasm Addict‘, anyway), it wasn’t even particularly new – someone presumably had brought it in in a job lot of things to listen to. The other side, however, was charmingly, and challengingly entitled ‘Oh Shit‘. No-one dared put it on (hey, we weren’t that rebellious) until one day, yours truly, bored or forgetful, or something, flipped it over and the room emptied. There was a first year drama class going on in the theatre, and apparently they could hear it all perfectly… I think it was my only act of teenage rebellion, and I can’t even be certain that I meant it. Pass the pipe and slippers….

What I think now:

Well, I glossed over a couple of things, I’m not sure why.  ‘In Reverse Order’ for one; if my remaining braincells were all still in the right order, I could tell a tale or two of Aberdeen’s punk fanzine – I was a stalwart contributor to both issues, although I don’t now have a copy of either, and nor, I suspect, does anyone else.  I was delighted to briefly reacquaint myself with Michael Hance some years back on the strength of our shared experiences with ‘IRO’, but it otherwise has faded into obscurity, which I think is where it belongs.

(Note to self:  there’s probably a couple of thousand words in it, but I’d probably be the only one interested in reading it…)

The other Buzzcocks related thing is one of my favourite short stories by anyone in any genre.  It’s by Patrick Marber, better known for his plays, and does the whole Buzzcocks / being a teenager thing way better than I did.  It’s called ‘Peter Shelley’, and it’s in a collection called ‘Speaking with the Angel’, which I recommend purchasing, since the proceeds go to a very worthwhile cause, and it has a whole bunch of other great short stories in it.  In fact, I’m a little bit depressed that the first link is out there.  Let’s hope hundreds of you visit it from this link and get it taken down…

Since then:

Well, not a lot, really.  I’m aware that Buzzcocks are still going (or were the last time I looked), but I’m not particularly inspired to go and look them up.  Maybe I should…

What I said back then:

Several of these memories will turn out to be more than one memory stitched together, especially this one. Let’s see: I remember…

  Second year drama with Mr. Dunbar – “I’m going to play you some Joni Mitchell;   I don’t think you’re ready for her yet, but this is Big Yellow Taxi. We’re   going to do some movement to it…”

  Airyhall Library introduced a record borrowing service: ‘let’s see, I know   something about Joni Mitchell, maybe I’ll try this live album (Shadows and   Light). I fall hopelessly in love…

  Doing homework to Ladies of the Canyon

  Edinburgh – Wild Things Run Free.. – Chinese Café still haunts me, and I still have not heard a better version of Unchained Melody

  The first time I heard Court and Spark, in a flat in Edinburgh

  The first time I really listened to Hejira

  Yonge St in Toronto – at last, the full length version of Shadows and Light on CD – buying it there seemed so appropriate, like coming home…

  Graeme going to see her live in 1983 (or ’84) – it’s OK, I thought, I’ll see her next time. I’m still waiting.

In so many ways, Joni has been the soundtrack to times in my life which didn’t seem important at the time, but which turn out to be critical moments in retrospect – I was listening to Dog eat Dog in Inverness at the time when I was trying to decide about whether I should go for a job which required me to move to Perth, I was listening to Mingus on a weekend alone, as I started to properly get to grips with the depression. And there’s always the clarinet solo in For Free.

What I think now:

Sobering to realise that Joni is 68 now.  I covered a lot of the bases there, although I hadn’t yet had the experience of listening to Hejira on a proper North American road trip; the kind where you might pass a ‘farmhouse burning down, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night’ – it does change the way you think about the music.  I also omitted the fact that, even after I worked out the tunings, I never could quite get my guitar to sound like hers – even Big Yellow Taxi, which is quite straightforward once you know how to tune for it, doesn’t sound quite like it should…

Also, I love the fact that this, for all its Californian gloss, is Canadian music.  She’s a fellow BC resident these days, and listening to the most recent album, Shine, I can’t help trying to feel the BC influences…

Since then:

Joni Mitchell CDs occupy one section of the little rack I have by my desk – reserved for the things I’m likely to reach for when I need something comforting and familiar (of course, these days, I just fire up iTunes, but the symbolism is important, I think).  Allan Dunbar was wrong all those years ago; my boys have known and loved ‘Taxi’ for years, and if I’m passing music on to them, I’m happy that hers is a name they’ll recognise and not dismiss as the old man’s crazy obsession.

At least, I hope they will…