Just a quickie today. I remember there was a big deal about Metallica's new album, Load, and the local Virgin Megastore (remember those?) was doing a midnight launch for it - this must have been summer 1996. Being a big Metallica fan, I dragged Debs to the launch night (there were no freebies) and we queued up to get Metallica's newest release.
While queuing, Debs picked up Bush's first album, Sixteen Stone. We were still watching a lot of MTV2, and despite the album being out for a couple of years we'd not really heard of them until they started showing the video for Machinehead that summer. I quite liked the single, and I remember the video for Glycerine being shown late one night too. So we bought the album, thought we'd give it a go.
Over the next couple of days we gave both albums a listen, and despite us going to the midnight launch for Metallica, the Bush album got more play. Just a really cool album, and just as we were getting into it (as we were late to the party) we were only a couple of months away from their follow-up, Razorblade Suitcase. While Swallowed was the big hit from that album, Debs absolutely loved the falling angels video for Greedy Fly.
Those first two albums are fantastic, and still get a lot of play here.
I'd left Uni, and there was little on the horizon - I mean, my art wasn't brilliant, and I really didn't want to be an animator, despite getting a degree in it. Debs was working in graphic design, and I really wanted to get into publishing my own comic. I remember listening to MTV2 (as it was, before it became MTVRocks) where they played all the rock and indie music, and being fascinated by Radiohead. Creep was always on, the anthem of every weirdo like myself, and the cool new singles from their second album were getting a lot of air-play. My Iron Lung and Fake Plastic Trees were amazing, and I marvelled at Thom Yorke's vocals, but the video for Just was absolutely mesmerising.
I remember we bought The Bends on CD and played it in our little rented house for the first time and loved it. It played constantly, and I went out and bought their first album (Pablo Honey) soon afterwards.
One song on The Bends really resonated with me - Street Spirit (Fade Out). I don't know why, but it really stuck with me. When I put together the first issue of my comic, Missing, that I self published back in '98, the opening scene was set to that song.
When OK Computer came out in 1997, Radiohead did a tour with big festivals and arenas - but to warm up, they toured some of the smallest venues they could find. One was a little seaside town just up the coast from my hometown, and the moment I saw the announcement I was on the phone to book tickets.
September 4th 1997, at Bridlington Spa, Radiohead played a blisteringly amazing set. We were sat in the balcony, right in the middle, second row, and we were incredibly close to the band in such a small venue. The strobe lighting was intense. I think it was during Climbing Up The Walls or Planet Telex that I honestly thought something had flicked a switch in my brain and I was just going to go into seizures.
One of the best gigs ever. Second only to Nine Inch Nails. Phenomenal.
I still listen to a lot of Radiohead, and have always said that, come that fateful day, at my funeral I'd like How to Disappear Completely to be played. I hope that's a while off yet.
Again, a little late to the party, I was first introduced to Nine Inch Nails just after I'd left my hometown and gone off to University to study graphic design/animation/illustration. The end of my art college time "up north" was turbulent to say the least, and moving away, being away from home, and the whole "trying to fit in" thing isn't something I do naturally. I hid in my tiny box room of the house I'd found for student accommodation and evenings were mostly spent listening to the radio.
This must have been around 1992ish as I have this memory of hanging around in Gaz' accommodation listening to the noise that was Ministry (Psalm 69 had just come out and the radio was playing Jesus Built My Hotrod a lot) and thinking "this is really cool". This lead to him saying that I should listen to Nine Inch Nails.
Pretty Hate Machine quickly became my favourite music choice for literally months and months, with the haunting Something I Can Never Have becoming my personal anthem in my angsty days.
I went out and bought Fixed, before I'd even heard Broken (yeah, that can be confusing, but they didn't have Broken in stock at the store), and was right there on release day when The Downward Spiral was released in 94.
My love of Nine Inch Nails has grown as their music has evolved. I love all of it, and would happily listen to nothing but NIN and Trent Reznor's creations. Trent Reznor is a god in my books, and along with David Lynch, is a constant inspiration to do and create whatever you want - and not worry about it being liked or successful. There will always be people for whom it resonates, and has a deep emotional meaning.
Pretty Hate Machine is not my favourite NIN album, but it is the one that opened the door for me becoming an obsessive fanboy, and I still love it. I managed to see Nine Inch Nails at Nottingham Arena in 2014, something I'd never imagined possible, and they still play tracks from Pretty Hate Machine (Terrible Lie, and they finished off with Head Like A Hole before their encores).
Amazing gig, and not the last time Nine Inch Nails will appear in my 20 Albums that shaped me...
Next on my little list of albums that shaped me, is another recommendation while I was at art college. Martin introduced me to some really cool and weird stuff. He got me listening to Sonic Youth, Ice-T, Bodycount, and more... But the album that left the biggest impression from this time is Doolittle. I'd not really heard any Pixies music before, but they were a real revelation. Martin got me into them just before they released their album Trompe le Monde so I had a whole wealth of back-catalogue to catch up on.
Doolittle is brilliant and bonkers. With amazing graphic design by the late, great Vaughan Oliver (who everyone at art college wanted to be), each track was something very different. It's hard to describe the combination of biblical epic stories, surreal Dali movies, and odd love songs that make up the album, with each track a surprise.
I mentioned in the last post that my art college friends in Hull were very supportive and introduced me to some great music. Besides keeping me sane by introducing me to the wonders of Curve, there were a couple of other albums that had a big impact at art college.
The first was Faith No More's second album, The Real Thing. I had their first, Introduce Yourself, as I really liked We Care A Lot, but it wasn't until Mike Patton took over vocals that Faith No More really became EPIC.
Gareth introduced me to The Real Thing, and it was our "album of the year" the first year we were at art college. We played it to death.
Crazy bonkers fusion of rap, metal, funk, and everything else they could throw at it. And still a great album.
Dumped. Yeah, just after Valentine's Day as well. I remember it well.
Anyway, wasn't happy. My first real girlfriend had broken up with me, but my friends at art college rallied around me and tried to keep me distracted so I wasn't wallowing in self pity. One of my college friends had recommended this band called Curve earlier, and I'd heard a lot of their EPs (Ten Little Girls, The Coast is Clear, etc.). In an act of complete synchronicity, just after the breakup at the end of Feb saw the release of Curve's first proper album - Doppelgänger.
Curve were described as shoegazing filth-pop, and remain number 2 in my all time favourite bands (sorry, but Nine Inch Nails are going to be hard to top). Curve were a mass of electronically constructed beats and synths, with grinding noisy guitars, and the amazing vocals of Toni Halliday echoing over the top. They were the goth music that had defined me so long before, only angrier and noisier. They were dark, doom-laiden, and hated the world (one of their later albums is called Open Day At The Hate-Fest).
I still love Curve. There was a long period when I thought that it was just three albums (Doppelgänger, Cuckoo, and Come Clean). Then came that Spider-man movie trailer using Hell Above The Water, and I discovered they were back - new albums, and even a load of unreleased stuff you could get from their website. I was so happy.
Unfortunately, it didn't last, and 2005 they called it a day. The talk of a reunion is always looming on the horizon and I live in hope.
Following on from the previous entry of The Sisters of Mercy's Floodland, I was really going goth. So very goth. Never dyed my hair black or did the eyeliner (guy-liner) but I listened to the music and wore black, and was pretty miserable most of the time.
One of my loves was All About Eve. I loved that album. I bought the vinyl, bought the cool 12" remixes of the singles that came in boxed sets with posters of the band, and it was the first CD I bought when that new-fangled technology made its way into our home.
It was a beautiful marriage of ethereal vocals, haunting melancholy and rock guitars.
I remember my mother commenting - "She's really pretty and has a lovely voice, why does she always sound so sad?"
Like The Reptile House, All About Eve had their fan club - Eden - and I subscribed straight away. I found a pen-friend through it (that I have long since lost contact with - sorry Jill), and won a competition to get tickets and a backstage pass to an All About Eve concert. I had the choice of any from their next tour, and I picked York...
November 12th 1991. York Barbican. I went with my (then) girlfriend, drove to York and parked in a multi-storey car park near the Barbican and picked up my backstage passes. The concert was awesome, part of the tour for the Eve's album Touched By Jesus. The lights failed for about five minutes in the middle of it, and the band didn't even stop - just kept playing in the pitch darkness until the lights were restored. Absolutely loved it.
After the gig, we headed to the backstage bit, and being the social dork that I was, I just seemed to be star-struck and confused by it all. In the backstage area there were about twenty of us hanging around with the band. We just kinda stood there and looked confused. I wasn't really brave enough to talk to anyone, but I think that was a bit obvious because I remember some of the band (definitely Mark Price and Andy Cousin) striking up a conversation with us. I was at art college in Hull (as was my then girlfriend) and I remember Mark Price saying about being at art college and doing graphic design. They were cool, took my cd booklet for Touched By Jesus and made sure that all of the band (including Julianne Regan who I was too nervous to talk to) signed it. Still one of my prized possessions.
We could have hung around with them longer, and they seemed disappointed when I said we had to leave (mostly as if I didn't get my car out of the car park by midnight it would be locked in until six in the morning). They were genuinely welcoming and great, and I had to go home. Dufus.
Anyway, we went home. Fantastic concert, and I still love their albums. I got dumped about three months later, which lead me to the next album on my list...
Confession time. In my late teens, my music taste was pretty crap. I listened to pop. Shiny, happy, bubblegum pop. I got a bit adventurous when my hormones took control and I realised that someone I like-liked at school listened to something - the main reason why I started listening to stuff like Meat Loaf, Phil Collins, or Black. Otherwise, I listened to pop. Johnny Hates Jazz, Tiffany, The Christians. I hadn't really found myself musically. Even though I'd left school by now, I hadn't really progressed with my music tastes. Sure I still listened to Talking Heads, or Mike Oldfield, but it wasn't until one fateful evening watching Top of the Pops that my life was changed.
You have to imagine boring old me, sitting at home watching Top of the Pops when on come The Sisters of Mercy. I'd never heard anything like it. I remember talking to my friends the day after and we were all in the same state of awe. I think three of us went out and bought Floodland that week, and it was just a matter of time before the previous album, First and Last and Always, and all of the original EPs, became household items in everyone's life in our group.
Black leather jackets were the norm (though I never had one, strangely), and by the time I went to art college in Hull I'd gained goth biker boots from the coolest place in Hull (Function 1 - back when it was hidden on the other side of the city above a warehouse, behind a secret door marked "Beware of the Leopard"... okay, I may exaggerate the last bit, but it was a strangely secret place). A great place for some really cool black shirts with single colour prints of Sisters EP covers on the back...
The Sisters of Mercy was just the start. It was a gateway to The Sisterhood, The Mission, Bauhaus, Fields of the Nephilim and All About Eve (more on the Eves later).
Floodland really spoke to me - it was dark, bleak, epic, doom-laiden and kinda summed up my late teens perfectly. Still a great album.
I signed up to The Reptile House, the Sisters fan club, and got the long sleeved t-shirt, and even the rude t-shirt with the lyrics from Driven Like the Snow ("F*** Me and Marry Me Young") that I had to cover up when I was at art college. The Reptile House longsleeve still fits and I wore it to the advance screening of the first half of Edgar Wright's "The Worlds End", as I knew Simon Pegg's character (Gary King) wore one in the movie. It prompted Edgar Wright to come over and have a chat with me about The Sisters, and asking Andrew Eldritch if he was okay with them using the t-shirt and one of the songs in the movie.
I managed to see The Sisters of Mercy play on one of their more recent tours. Andrew Eldritch and Doktor Avalanche with a host of other musicians you couldn't really see for the smoke machine. Eldritch hopping about the stage in an ice hockey jersey still had the energy and bite after all this time. I just wish he'd record something new.
There was a real spate in the 80's of TV showing cool stuff and completely changing our music listening habits. I remember there was a special night on BBC2 (I think) that looked at music videos, and they did almost an hour looking at the music videos of The Cure, and my awesome friend Coop went out the following day and bought their best of album (Staring at the Sea), and it was a slippery slope to him becoming a completist, buying all of The Cure's albums in a relatively short period of time.
For me, it was Channel 4 showing the Talking Heads movie, Stop Making Sense. I'd seen their music videos before for tracks like Once in a Lifetime, but I remember seeing a trailer for the movie's C4 screening and David Byrne's amazing oversized suit and I knew I had to watch it.
C'mon, just watch that opening sequence with David Byrne walking out onto the stage alone with a cassette recorder and an acoustic guitar to perform Psycho Killer, and you know you're watching something special.
The rest of the band gradually assemble over the following songs, and the whole thing was genius. The following week I went out and purchased the album, and like Coop before me, it was a slippery slope to buying their entire back catalogue, and I'm still a fan today.
I do have a fond memory of trying to convert a girl I was at school with to listening to Talking Heads. I had Speaking in Tongues on a cassette in my cheap not-a-Walkman, and she agreed to give it a go. She really enjoyed Burning Down The House, but when it got to the second track, Making Flippy Floppy, I think she thought I was suggesting something dirty and she stopped listening!
I've noticed that a lot of the music I'm picking are not your traditional "love" style songs... Let's face it, their second album is called More Songs About Buildings and Food - and that features my favourite Heads song (also in the movie Stop Making Sense) - Found a Job - a song about a couple (Bob and Judy) who are so bored with TV they start writing their own shows. Brilliant.
Welcome to the Pleasure Dome - Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984)
"Oh, Frankie."
Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a weird one for me. Some of their music was jaw droppingly brilliant - made all the more epic by a lot of post production by legendary producer Trevor Horn. And yet, some of their music was just snippets of cover versions, or whole tracks of them sitting around talking trying to be cool "lads".
My first exposure to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, again, was a trip to see relatives in London. Staying with my grandparents, my uncle who had introduced me to The Boomtown Rats was watching British Channel 4 music programme "The Tube" especially as FGTH was going to be on. He said, "You have to watch this."
It was probably because he was trying to be all controversial as Relax had been banned by the BBC and The Tube was going to reshow the music video for Relax that they'd filmed. It was good, but I wasn't totally convinced.
And then along came Two Tribes. With its controversial video, epic sound, and legendary number of remixes, Two Tribes would become a bit of an obsession of mine. I bought as many remixes as I could find, and when the album came out I was one of the first in line.
Listening to it now, it's not a brilliant double album - but it is a brilliant single album. Take out all the mucking about and weird tracks and you have a solid and amazing work of epic production and mammoth sounds.
I bought the 12" for The Power of Love, but my interest was already starting to wane - though my obsession with Frankie Goes to Hollywood (along with Holly Johnson's cartoon haircut on the cover of the album that looked like mine - back when I had hair - as well as the weird link with my middle name) lead to the creation of my nickname that was given to me in the 6th form at school and has stuck ever since - Frankie.
I have a distinct memory of buying Rage Hard, the first track from their follow up album on 12" from Sydney Scarborough's in Hull, and discovering I had two copies of it in the sleeve. Being the sadly honest person I am, I went back and returned one of them (much to the disgust of some of my mates). That 12" (the Tour of the 12") is a brilliant novelty version of the record, teaching you how a 12" remix works with a voice over.
Strangely, that was the end of my FGTH purchases. I liked Warriors of the Wasteland, but never bought it, or the album Liverpool... and by that time, the band itself imploded and I moved on to other things. Sorry Lads!
Ah, The Police. I'm a big fan of The Police, but got into their music relatively late. I'd heard their singles, liked them, but never really bought any of their albums. I have a distinct memory of one of my sisters buying one (I think it was Regatta de Blanc) and saying that she'd taken it back to the store the following day as it had lots of swearing in it.
Again, it was visit involving relatives that exposed me to some new music. I was staying in London with my uncle and aunt, and staying in their front sitting room on a portable bed arrangement. In the room was the family's stereo and their record collection, and I remember buying some blank cassettes while I was there so I could copy some albums while I was there to listen to properly when I got home. One of those albums was Ghost in the Machine (another one with some swearing in it, sorry sis) and I was mesmerised by some of the weirder, etherial tracks at the end (Secret Journey, Omegaman, Darkness).
Then came their next album, and Synchronicity II was released as a single. Here was a track that was about mundanity (you know I like that, after my entry on The Boomtown Rats last time), interspersed with the weirdness of a strange Cthulhoid creature surfacing from a loch and lurking towards an unsuspecting home. How freakin' cool is that? Synchronicity II was my favourite track of everything for a very long time.
Other great tracks on Synchronicity include the weird Mother, and the melancholy King of Pain. Great album where the big hit single, Every Breath You Take, is possibly my least favourite (mostly as it's really creepy and stalky).
I started with the Greatest Hits album (Every Breath You Take - The Singles) and quickly progressed on to the Message in a Box complete recordings set. Still fab now.
The Boomtown Rats - The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979)
Continuing my look at twenty albums that had a major impact on my life, we come to 1979's "The Fine Art of Surfacing" by The Boomtown Rats. Everybody and their dog had heard of the Rats by this time, being famous for dethroning John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's Grease song from the top of the charts with Rat Trap years before. By the time I Don't Like Mondays hit the charts, the schoolyards were filled with kids talking about what the song was really about. It's a sad state of affairs that these incidents have become more and more commonplace... but let's not get into that.
I was introduced to the album by my uncle (I think that's right) Ian. He was a couple of years older than me and we only really saw each other once or twice a year. He lived with my maternal grandfather, and "aunt" (who was actually my step-grandmother?) in east London. Ian introduced me to some great music that influenced me as a kid - one being Frankie Goes to Hollywood (we'll come to that later) and the other was this album. He bought it on cassette while visiting my parents "up north" and we listened to it when he first got it. On first listen it was cool, but I distinctly remember the weirdness of some of the tracks - Having My Picture Taken is really quirky, and not the usual topic of music at the time, and both Nothing Happened Today and When The Night Comes are about mundane life, being bored with work, and not the standard love songs that really dominated.
"Frankie, you're no different from any of the rest, They've nailed you to your table and they've chained you to your desk."
And then the album had weird secret tracks at the end of each side that I'd not experienced before. The end of side one finishes with a repeating laugh track with "Stop laughing, that's not funny" repeated over it (very creepy)... and side two ends with a sign off for the Rats leaving the Ensign Record label - "That concludes episode 3..."
Months went by and a friend at school in my class was obsessed with Adam and the Ants and asked if ever I saw any magazine articles about the Ants I should save them for her, which I did. She asked what music I was into, and I knew the sort of magazines she read wouldn't cover the weird synth-instrumental stuff I was listening to (Oldfield, Jarre, etc.) so I thought back to that album and said The Boomtown Rats are alright... She surprised me with a mass of clippings from music press about them.
When my birthday was approaching, I was asked what I wanted and I asked for the newest Rats album - Mondo Bongo - which one of my sisters kindly bought for me and proceeded to make me play in front of my parents. Luckily they weren't listening too hard (first record I owned that had "shit" as a lyric), and I quickly progressed on to buying The Fine Art of Surfacing on vinyl.
I bought Surfacing, Mondo Bongo, and V Deep again a few years ago on CD and they still hold up really well. Great albums, all of them.
Continuing my Roll Your Own Life bit of nostalgia, looking at twenty albums that had the biggest impact on my life, we come to the second one - Mike Oldfield's Crises.
It was about this time that I started tabletop gaming, and the friends I played D&D with all had a great influence on me with my music choices. It was my first exposure to cool instrumental artists such as Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Even weird and high-concept albums like The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony (what a title)...
It was also my first exposure to Mike Oldfield. I'd heard bits of Tubular Bells when it was on the news and documentaries, and I was fascinated that someone could record a whole album alone playing all the instruments. However, I think it was Coop who introduced me to Crises. Hell, what an album. Everyone remembers Moonlight Shadow as the big single, while Oldfield was trying to get some bigger commercial success - but it was the A Side, the twenty-minute long title track that I was most drawn to. There were loads of cool elements to it - the whole opening in epic, and echoes Tubular Bells a little before you get the vocals bit about six minutes in. Then it changes to the "Watcher in the Tower" bit (about eight minutes in) that always went down a storm with the D&D group, and then builds to this massive musical extravaganza towards the end of the track.
Still cool today.
Side B was filled with individual tracks to be more commercial, leading with Moonlight Shadow (though bear in mind, in the US sides A & B were flipped and an extra track, Mistake, was added), and a handful of other tracks that were pretty cool. I know Shadow on the Wall, Oldfield's branch out into slightly heavier music, was a bit of a fave.
I still have very fond memories of listening to this, and Five Miles Out.
First of all, thank you to everyone for your kind words over the loss of our beloved cat, Marla.
It's been tough these last nearly seven weeks, and it's been hard to concentrate on anything without memories coming flooding in. I've been away from social media, and away from most things except the day-job and staring into space. However, things have slowly been progressing with WILD, and there's some really exciting news on the horizon...
But, I need to get back to writing.
A few days ago, I was tagged in one of those Facebook things where you post something each day and tag a friend to get them involved. (Thanks Milo!). This one was twenty albums that defined you, shaped you as a person, and had a major impact on your life.
I started to do it on Facebook, but I didn't feel like torturing other people by tagging them, but then I thought about it - Why am I just posting a picture of an album on Facebook? There's no backstory - no reason for why that album had an impact. I started working out my list (not an easy task) and I'm finding it a great distraction from grief - and also, if I write a little about the posts and I can see it as a warm up exercise for actually doing some proper writing on what I should be working on.
Someone I worked with in a different dayjob used to get up at 6am to write a short story - some flash fiction - each morning. I'm not getting up that early (though I'm usual up for 7am) but this may get me back into the habit of throwing words down on the computer.
So here we go. A new part of my autobiographical series of posts I call "Roll Your Own Life" - it may not be daily, but I'll try to do 20...
The Music That Shaped Me (part 1) - From the Tea-rooms of Mars (1981)
I'm really not doing these in any sort of chronological order, just as they come to me, so please bear with me.
Up to this point, I guess my music tastes were really whatever my parents listened to, or the Star Wars soundtracks, but electronic music was starting to fascinate me and I remember seeing Landscape on Top of the Pops playing Einstein-A-Go-Go and thinking it was different, nerdy, and really cool. I also remember the lead guy from Landscape, Richard James Burgess, being interviewed on Tomorrow's World about drum synthesisers.
I hadn't really bought a lot of music before this. I had some soundtracks, some ELO, the odd single here and there, but I remember getting this album and loving it. The opening track European Man had the most epic opening for an album I'd ever heard before, and could imagine it being the opening titles to a movie.
And then there was the second single from the album, Norman Bates. At the time, I'd never even heard of Psycho, but my mother was a big fan of Hitchcock movies and related the story of Psycho to me so I understood the record. And next time it was on TV, I was sure to watch.
The other stand out track for the album was a really odd one called The Doll's House. I have no idea what it's about - a weird instrumental thing with echoing voices, creepy noises and a drum beat over the top. I listened to it repeatedly trying to fathom out what was going on, but still have no idea.
Certainly worth checking out if you like early 80's electronica.
