THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

Like a lot of people my age (born in '76), i've grown up through a lot of technological changes, especially in the medium that music is heard through. As a kid vinyl was the dominant format, with the pre-recorded cassette tape in second place but gaining popularity as advances in sound playback improved (they never found a way to stop your tape deck chewing them up though), and both remained unchallenged until the new kid on the block arrived in the mid-80's: the Compact Disc. Touted as far superior in sound quality, and able to fit over 70 minutes of music onto one disc, this herald of the digital age was "the future" of music. It was also claimed to be virtually indestructible - no scratches, needle jumping, or any of the wear and tear associated with your vinyl records, prompting a host of tv shows (most famously Tomorrows World) to smear jam on them, proving said claims to be outright lies, although i'm sure the creators of the CD didn't forsee such te

January 1989. 12 years old. My first pocket money. Only a couple of quid a week, but enough to go to the local record shop and buy a 7" single. At this point, i'd had records for birthdays and Christmas, and my collection consisted of three Various Artists compilations (HITS Album 7, NOW 12 & 13), and the breakthrough album by electro-poppers Erasure, The Innocents, which was constantly on my brand new stereo that i'd been given for Christmas '88 - i can't remember the make, a Matsui i think -, and a couple of singles. So to finally go out and buy a record myself was a big deal for me. I remember walking into the local record shop, Frank Sissons. Sissons was a local independent store that primarily sold electronic goods - tvs', stereos, radios - but like many similar shops had realised there was money to be made in selling records. They had a flip-through display of cassette albums, a few racks of vinyl, and on the wall, that weeks Top 75 singles and album

I'm aware that this song, a part of my old singles collection, is a song about the fall of Communism, The Berlin Wall, and the end of the cold War. But considering todays events.....

The late, great Tony Wilson had a theory that, once every decade or so, a revolution in music comes along - something that starts at a grass roots level before infiltrating the mainstream. The mid-fifties bought Rock'n'Roll, the sixties Psychedelia, the seventies Punk.. And in the mid-eighties, Dance music. Starting out in the abandoned warehouses of Chicago, House music took the influences of Soul and Disco, using samplers, sequencers, drum machines and synthezisers to create repetitive, hypnotic, mostly instrumental tracks that quickly caught on in the clubs of other US cities, before crossing the Atlantic. And it wasn't long before the songs started entering the charts. The first house music hit was Farley "Jackmaster" Funk - "Love Can't Turn Around", a top ten hit in September 1986. But the first i remember hearing was Steve "Silk" Hurleys' "Jack Your Body", which despite little airplay and no promotion whatsoever

I am not nor have i ever been what you might describe as "cool". I've never followed, or claimed to like, something because it happened to be the current trend or "in" thing. It's the same with music: if i like it, it's based purely on the music and nothing else. There are people who claim to be "real" music fans, who sneer at the idea of chart pop, who wear t-shirts featuring cult bands, and only listen to "real" music by artists considered to be "authentic".  I'm not one of those people. I contend that, to truly be a lover of music, you must be able to see past genres, eras, scenes, and ignore any notions of what you must be seen to like. Those lists of "100 best albums of all time" or "100 most important records of all time" are fine if you take them as lists of music that might be worth checking out: less so if you read them as a list of albums you must not only own, but also loudly proclaim to lo

On 17 June 2016, Atrell Cordes aka Prince Be, vocalist of US hip hop act P.M. Dawn, passed away aged 46 of renal disease. P.M. Dawn were quite successful in the early '90s with their brand of soulful hip hop, mixed with a New Age hippy bent lyrically, but it's fair to say that they are best remembered for their 1991 hit, "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss", which sampled Spandau Ballets' "True" to great effect, taking it to No. 3 in the UK and giving them a chart topper back home. I'm not posting this claiming to be a great fan of the band as some folk do in the wake of a famous death. In fact i never bought or heard any of their other music after this - aside from a few songs here and there, Hip Hop and Rap have never really been my thing - , but this was part of my 7" collection, and it brings back memories, which is a large part of what this blog is about. Rest in peace, Prince Be.

It's a generally held view that the years 1978 - 1986 were a golden age for popular music. The initial rush of Punk having faded, young musicians everywhere took the "anyone can do it" ethos and applied it liberally. Post-Punk was born. Bands experimented, drawing influence from across genres, raiding the past and making it the future. Reggae, Soul, Jazz, Dub, Rock'n'Roll, Psychedelia, Funk, World Music - you name it. No mere copyists, these influences were taken to new places. Some bands followed the example of Electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk and took the resulting Synthpop into the charts. Bands like Gang Of Four and Public Image Limited took the bass-heavy influence of Dub and Funk, and mixed it with sheets of guitar noise. The 2-Tone scene took the influence of Ska and played it with the attack of Punk. The most important thing though was that most of these bands were trying to sound and look different from everyone else. And as the 80's dawned the age

1987. The year i turned 11 and started secondary school. Still a bit of a loner. And still obsessed with music. I hadn't graduated to buying my own records yet (that would have to wait another year or so), so until then my collection consisted a few singles and albums i was given for birthdays and Christmas, or that i could pester my parents into buying for me, and a ton of blank cassettes containing my weekly recordings of the Top 40. Back then, as now, there was a choice on Sunday of the full Official Top 40 on Radio 1, or the Network Chart on local commercial radio, which for me was Trent Fm. The Network Chart started in 1984, and was broadcast every sunday between 5 and 7pm across local Independent Radio stations, and was for many years presented by David "Kid" Jensen. More aimed a teen audience, it broadcast only the Top 30 until 1990, and differed from the Official Chart by combining airplay figures with sales figures. This meant differing chart positions, and somet

February 1992. I was 15 years old, and had just returned from a school trip to Eastern Europe (Prague, Budapest, Vienna), which had opened up to western tourism after the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall. As fascinating and beautiful as these places were, i only had two things on my mind: music and girls. Being a shy, awkward sort, women would prove elusive to me for a few more years. But that didn't stop me having the usual adolescent crushes, the latest being a 6th former who had been on the school trip. And my musical tastes shifted toward the romantic songs. Two singles purchased on returning from the jaunt to the Eastern Bloc were Simply Red - "For Your Babies" (hormones do odd things to your mind), and a re-release of "It Must Be Love" by 80's pop band Madness, who had split up in 1986. Released in advance of a forthcoming Greatest Hits compilation, it parked itself at number 6 in the singles chart, and sparked a wave of nostalgia and a long o

So as i'd said in previous entries, my introduction to music was my parents' record collection, which became mine, and my Dads record player, which was passed on to me when i was about 8 (1984), when he purchased a brand new stack system,which took pride of place in the living room. This now allowed me to indulge my musical passion more or less whenever i wanted. A couple of years later i was given a small radio/cassette recorder for Christmas, and i eagerly took the opportunity to start recording the Top 40 chart rundown on a Sunday evening. Sitting there with finger hovering over the pause button in a futile attempt to stop the tape in that split second before the DJ started talking (always over the end of the song to much annoyance!) is an oft-repeated memory of anyone who was a kid in the 1980s', although some of the people they get on those nostalgia shows on tv are too young to have been more than a glint in the milkman's eye back then. Anyway, i now had my

I was a bit of a loner as a kid. Awkward and shy, i was definitely not the athletic type. I had no interest in sport (i still don't), and i was marked out for a fair bit of bullying. I did have a couple of on/off friends, but most of the time i retreated into my bedroom, and into the family record collection - i had commandeered my Dads chunky headphones as well, so i was in my own little world - and lost myself in the music. I've always been able to appreciate music from bygone eras, something that - before the music industry realised the potential of nostalgia and started raiding the back catalogues of anyone who had ever recorded a note - was unheard of in the early 80's. And certainly unusual for someone in primary school.Of course, i listened to the Top 40 and watched Top of The Pops like any kid would, and liked what i heard. But then, as now, the notion that any music that wasn't current was somehow rubbish or irrelevant was alien to me. I loved the big, colour

My favourite song by my favourite band.

I've always been in love with music. Right from an early age, not much else mattered. Of course there were the distractions of toys (i grew up in the golden age of Transformers and He-Man) cartoons and the like, but i always came back to the music. Born in the red hot summer of 1976, i grew up listening to my Dads record collection - with additions from my Mum -, which consisted of, mainly, 7" singles from the 70's - glam rock titans like Bowie, Slade, T.Rex, Suzi Quatro, Mud, (and a now unmentionable singer who was huge at the time, but whose crimes have rendered his contribution to music obsolete), amongst pop bands, Status Quo, a couple of Motown singles, and later stuff such as The Police and Squeeze. Also, there were several of those cheap K-Tel compilations, which i suppose were the NOW! albums of their day, containing the hits of the time, interspersed with some real oddities. And as my Mum had left work to bring up me and my 2 younger brothers, this music was often