I’m enjoying some rare grooves from the Dawn of Music.
That is to say, 1980.
That was when music happened to me. When I stopped hearing music and really started listening.
Necessarily I listened to whatever was lying around in my dad’s record collection. I was 11, and not flush with cash. I couldn’t pop out to Andy’s Records and buy the latest seven inch singles or LPs.
So I immersed myself in the prog rock and electronica that was in the cupboard below the JVC separates system. To wit:
- Tubeway Army – Replicas
- Pink Floyd – The Wall
- Supertramp – Breakfast in America
- David Bowie – Scary Monsters and Super Creeps
- Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe
- Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
Those of you just a little older than me will groan and sigh. Yeah, you were old enough to have some cash. You brought into the punk revolution. So what? It was a musical dead end anyway; a couple of years later New Romantic dandies such as Adam Ant and Simon Le Bon were strutting on the stage as if superglue hair and safety pin noses had never happened.
I was happy with my prog rock. I was happy with my electronica.
Until I first heard The Smiths’ How Soon Is Now? on the John Peel Show.
Then all bets were off as far as music was concerned. How Soon Is Now? was a six and a half minute epiphany that made me realise that there are no real hard and fast rules in music. Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law.
Ever since then I’ve listened to whatever the hell I like, when I like, as often as I like. I’ve refused to be lead by consensus popularity. More than once I’ve been ahead of the curve in terms of musical taste. Often I’ve been off the beaten track altogether.
But I do like to come back and pay my first loves a visit now and then.
What’s on the player right now? Child of Vision, the last track on Supertramp’s Breakfast in America.
