And long, long ago – how on earth did we even find out what music we were supposed to like?
As usual, you can read this and dig out the tunes mentioned yourself (they’re on a Spotify Playlist you can find at the end, with the exception of Pete Atkin’s National Steel – it’s on YouTube) or listen to me reading the whole thing on Mixcloud here:
interspersed with the actual records. Takes about an hour.
Matt Deighton — A Song That’s On My Mind
It’s a transaction. The Postie has to physically hand over the big, square, rigid packet. Properly wrapped, too, in corrugated cardboard, not the cheap flexible packaging some unscrupulous dealers use.
I swore I wouldn’t. I swore it was over. In fact, didn’t I describe vinyl last week on these very pages as “a zombie format”? I did. And I still believe that.
It’s just that I’ve always had a weakness for zombies. Let’s face it, I have something like five cassette decks lurking around here, including one I should really have given back to the BBC eight years ago…ah, cassettes! Another time…
Having listened with something akin to awe to the new Matt Deighton album Today Become Forever (a Veedon Fleece for today, Van Morrison fans) I decided to…buy it on CD. And then I wanted an early Deighton LP called You Are the Healer, only available at anything approaching reasonable cost from his website. And to support him, why not a signed copy of the Bu-Ray documentary Overshadowed? Oh, go on then.
Van Morrison — Bulbs
Matt Deighton — Lay down your Weary Light
After my last, extremely lengthy musing about the record industry, the mad current obsession with vinyl and how ranting about how little Spotify pays artists really helps nobody, I’ve found myself not just buying the above-mentioned Deighton masterworks, but the newly-released vinyl copy (with CD in a package) of the Trashcan Sinatras’ I’ve Seen Everything. And a Brinsley Schwartz CD box-set which has been whisked away by Santa. It was a Pete Paphides blog about the Trashies that made me order their belatedly successful wonder ( I had a copy on CD but it has vanished into the Loft of Doom). A social media link to an old Guardian piece about Deighton and some Spotify digging sent me scurrying after product, tracking him back through his difficult and tortuous career as a muso’s favourite – Mother Earth, Paul Weller, Oasis, remembering mentions by an author, Tom Cox, whose book Villager owes a great deal to Matt’s record of the same name… Just as I buy Tom’s books to support him, I bought Matt’s records to send some cash his way.
Trashcan Sinatras — I’ve Seen Everything
Brinsley Schwartz — Hooked on Love
And so I began asking myself: how did we find out about music back in the 70s before streaming, the internet, social media, mobile phones and even CDs? What made us buy records? What led us to this life-changing, account-emptying devotion?
Remembering that at first we had no money. Or hardly any.
My first bought-and-paid-for record was a single. Distant Drums by Jim Reeves, though I preferred the cataclysmic emotional heft of the B-side, Old Tige, a spoken word epic that can still leave me weeping like that guy in the too-small suits on the Pottery Throwdown. Birthday money. Really, at 10 I just wanted to buy a record, any record that wouldn’t get ceremonially burned on the lawn for religious reason by my parents. That obsessive interest in artifacts has never left me. I love records and hifi probably more than music. I delight in cameras more than pictures, guitars more than being able to play them. Motorcycles more than riding them. Typewriters more than typing. Don’t start me on watercolour and pastel sets, pens, pencils bicycles, golf club sets and as for books…
Oh. And don’t cry when you get to the end of this. I defy you not to.
Jim Reeves — Old Tige
*** *** ***
When I was a schoolboy, student and just afterwards (basically the whole of the 1970s) I had hardly any money and although I was absolutely besotted with rock music (we didn’t countenance ‘pop’ in those days) a full-price album was a really major investment. I still have the first one I bought, in 1970, at Gloria’s Record Bar in Battlefield: Another Side of Bob Dylan, for 43 shillings and nine pence (right at the upper end of record costings), or £2.20. The equivalent today of around £40. Previously, my cool uncle had started me on the road to rock’n’roll ruin through Christmas presents: first the Monkees’ Pisces Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Ltd in 1967, and two years later, adolescent tastes having kicked in, the eponymous album by Taste, Rory Gallagher’s band. Of neither did mum and dad approve, but by then it was too late.
Bob Dylan — It Ain’t Me Babe
The Monkees — Pleasant Valley Sunday
Taste — Same Old Story
That orange CBS label, so basic and so redolent of an exotic, limitless world way out there. And the inner sleevs, with its thumbnails of albums by names I’d never heard of, like
Steamhammer and Argent (who later, amazingly, played at Troon Town Hall) and Moondog. If only you owned all those, you would have have a good chunk of everything worthwhile in the world of rock. But of course you never even saw most of these sleeves in real life. Not in Fairbairns Electrical.
Argent — God Gave Rock’n’Roll To You
There was a gap between the Monkees and Rory – who, in my sixth year at school, played the basement function suite of the Caledonian Hotel in Ayr. Not going still grieves me. I had managed to acquire, because it was only 14 shillings and 11 pence (or 75p, equivalent today £16) a record Uncle John had also possessed, a compilation album released by CBS called The Rock Machine Turns You On, which I played until the grooves had been Dansetted to death. Truly, there was rubbish thereon: The United States of America’s I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar springs to mind, and Flames by Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera. But Dylan’s I’ll be Your Baby Tonight was a peculiar illustration of how his vocals had gone warbly on John Wesley Harding, and there was Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy (“must be about an order of nuns”), Roy Harper, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds. This was the first bargain priced compilation, and the start of a habit that went on for decades. Always short of cash, the cheap compilation became a foundation of my record collection. Age of Atlantic and the much sought after Age of Atlantic Two (rare Led Zeppelin track) will feature, I have no doubt, in future newsletters.
Leonard Cohen — Sisters of Mercy
I learned about rock… from my uncle, who played in a band; from pals like Stewart Howard and his older neighbours, who had a kind of den above a disused laundry and where I first heard Hendrix, Cream, and Taj Mahal. Except there was early Saturday night telly, and I can still recall the shock, the utterly disturbing thrill of Hendrix on the Lulu Show, live, being shut down, playing whatever he liked, wild, distorted, ragged, glorious. Unearthly.
Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Chile
Taj Mahal — Statesboro Blues
We hung out at Fairbairns in Troon and later at the hair-and-patchouli outpost called Speed Records, next to the disused George cinema, penniless but listening. There were radio programmes but not many apart from Peel and that was on so late… We bought the music papers with increasingly religious zeal, NME and Melody Maker. Pored over the names appearing in faraway exotic spots like The Marquee in London. Leicester De Montfort Hall, Nottingham Rock City. We bought second hand and bargain bin albums by unknown artists because we just loved owning records. That was how I first heard a band called Legend, fronted by the great Mickey Jupp. His songs were later recorded by the likes of Dr Feelgood, but he remains the greatest British songwriter of whom very few have heard.
Legend — Cheque Book
We were soaking up information, listening hard, picking up snatches of tunes in shops, dreaming of going to gigs. You’d save and save or make desperate birthday requests, finally be old enough to work a milk round, a summer labouring in a quarry. Anything to own a record.
And then…a guitar.
Wow, a guitar. The possibilities!
There it is. Low-level music industry, same as it ever was. You heard something, talked to someone, read something somewhere, listened to someone else’s copy. Glimpsed hair and circus outfits on TV. And then you scrimped and saved and bought… the thing, the record, the piece of the artist, a holy trophy of your affection.
Then you thought, wait a minute. Maybe I could do that. How hard can six strings be to strum?
You began hanging about in instrument shops. There was this red Watkins Rapier in a Kilmarnock window. It infested, became your dreams. That’s when the trouble really started.
The Pirates — Gibson, Martin, Fender
Pete Atkin — National Steel
Playlist, available on Spotify (without Pete Atkin) here:
The sonic newsletter (me reading with the records playing inbetween) is on Mixcloud here:
Matt Deighton — A Song That’s On My Mind
Van Morrison — Bulbs
Matt Deighton — Lay down your Weary Light
Trashcan Sinatras — I’ve Seen Everything
Brinsley Schwartz — Hooked on Love
Jim Reeves — Old Tige
Bob Dylan — It Ain’t Me Babe
The Monkees — Pleasant Valley Sunday
Taste — Same Old Story
Argent — God Gave Rock’n’Roll To You
Leonard Cohen — Sisters of Mercy
Byrds — Dolphins Smile
Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Chile
Taj Mahal — Statesboro Blues
Legend — Cheque Book
The Pirates — Gibson, Martin Fender
Pete Atkin — National Steel
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