THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

This blog is about my love of music, how it's grown and changed over the years, my thoughts, feelings, memories and opinions on my lifelong passion. But it's also about much more: an undeniable feeling that i simply cannot imagine life without music. I never had an interest in sport, cars, computer games, or any of the other things that men generally get quite obsessive about. I never had many friends or girlfriends for most of my life, and so music became my friend, my companion, my way of connecting and making sense of life. I'm not sure what i would have done without it, and when i meet people who aren't bothered about or - in very rare cases - interested in music, i find it very hard to comprehend! So as part of this blog, i'm going to try and do an occasional and non-chronological series of posts about the songs and albums that really changed my life and musical tastes. I've already written about my love for Madness, what their music has meant and still mea

June 1993. After spending the best part of a largely boring year in 6th form at school - the only highlight was meeting a fellow Madness fan at the local college - i left the world of education and began my first job at a local plastics factory. Mundane and repetitive work though it was, it provided me with some money to indulge my music obsession. Another benefit was that, siting at the side of a machine all day meant that i could listen to my walkman, something which my supervisor didn't take kindly to! By this point, i'd started building a nice little cd collection. Most of these albums were Greatest Hits and Best ofs, as i'd more or less stopped listening to new music: looking back at the singles charts for that year (i consider myself to have a pretty good memory, but the archive on the Official UK Charts website has helped give it the occasional nudge!), i can see why. Mariah Carey, M People, Meat Loaf, Dina Carroll, Take That, 2 Unlimited, Eternal. Bland, overblown s

As i've gotten older, three things have allowed me to expand my musical tastes: more income, the internet, and the advent of digital radio. Back in 1993, my 17th year, the latter two didn't exist, and the first was limited! But the lack of easily available information about music and artists made me more determined to hear it. And so my first musical epiphany happened. I'd fallen in love with the music of Madness the year before, and i wanted to know more about the 2-Tone/Ska scene that they'd been associated with in the early days of their career. Also, there had been a revival in the popularity of Reggae itself, spurred on by the arrival of another development in the music: Ragga, which combined the electronic rhythms of Dancehall with Hip Hop and Rap, was a big presence in the charts from late '92, with Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, and Apache Indian, the latter of whom represented the Ragga scene in the Asian communities. Dancehall itself became popular again, with Chak

I began 1993 with a new medium to hear music through: the Compact Disc. I still played my vinyl 7"s, and still used my walkman, but i was definitely excited by this new format, where the sounds seemed bolder, brighter, crisper. (There will always be an argument about whether vinyl sounds better, but i would say that all formats have their own unique qualities).The ability to skip tracks, program your own track sequence, put an album on shuffle,: all opportunities. I even made intros for tapes, featuring advert-like snatches of the hits! I only had a few albums at this point: 3 Madness titles - Divine, Mad Not Mad, and Madstock!, and The Police Greatest Hits, all of which i'd had for Christmas. As you can probably guess, they were played constantly, broadcasting my music collection to the street from my bedroom window, much to the annoyance of my Mum, promptimg her demands to "turn it down a shade". It would be a few months before i made any additions to my small coll

(Ignore the Post Title, it's nothing depressing lol) 1992, the year i turned 16. My weekly single buying slowed down quite a lot a few months into the year because, as far as the charts were concerned, it all seemed a bit boring! Everyone was listening to Guns 'N' Roses, who i thought were bloody awful, and the Grunge sound of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam sounded depressing to my teenage pop sensibilities. A few indie and "baggy" bands were still popular, but they went over my head, with the exception of James and Carter USM, who provided one of the comedy highlights of my year when Fruitbat rugby tackled Philip Schofield at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party! The dance music which had seemed so exciting and inventive a year or two before was starting to become a parody of itself: barely a month went by without yet another song sampling a kids tv show appearing: Sesame Street, Trumpton, Rainbow, Roobarb and Custard. And whilst the more "progressive&q

25 November, 1991. Half asleep and cycling along on my morning paper round in the dawn light, i pulled the next customers' paper from my bag, and as i was about to post it, the headline caught my eye and shook me awake: Freddie Mercury, flamboyant frontman of rock legends Queen was dead from AIDS, aged 45, barely 24 hours after announcing his illness to the press. Now, i wasn't a huge fan of the band or anything, though i had listened to the Greatest Hits album and watched the VHS of their recently released Greatest Hits 2, both belonging to my parents. So i was well acquainted with their hits. But this was a big deal - someone whose music i knew and liked was gone. It was all people talked about at school for weeks afterwards, and some of the lads who could play instruments performed a tribute to him in the Christmas show. Within a couple of months, Greatest Hits 2 joined EMF, Cathy Dennis, and the debut album by the King of surreal light entertainment, Vic Reeves, on my ste

Throughout 1989 and 1990, my collection of 7"s expanded, with my trips to the local record shop having become an almost weekly ritual. I watched and listened to the charts on Top Of The Pops and Radio 1 as my current favourites rose and fell week after week, and read Smash Hits cover to cover, taking in every word, putting up the posters, reading the lyrics, and fantasising about either meeting my musical idols or becoming one myself - i think nearly every teenager has mimed to their favourite songs in front of the mirror with either a hairbrush microphone for girls or a cricket bat in lieu of a guitar for boys. My obsession with music, although occasionally discussed with schoolmates, was largely a solitary thing, confined to the four walls of my bedroom, where i would also make my own "radio show" tapes, compiling my own charts and reading out articles from Smash Hits. My own little world. The Top 40 was a real pic 'n' mix of musical styles in those years, wi

The spoils of today's record hunt. I had the two Erasure records in my old vinyl collection, so it was nice to find them! Shame the 2-Tone 7"s aren't in the labels' iconic sleeves, but you can't have everything.

At the time of writing, i'm a mere month away from turning 40. Now, i'm not about to start having a midlife crisis, or start having botox in a futile attempt to turn back the clock, but as i've gotten older, i've noticed a disturbing development, aside from the odd grey hair and a nasal/ear hair trimmer having become a necessary purchase. I've always told myself (and anyone else who would listen) that i would never become one of these boring old farts who only listens to music from their past, and who denounces all new music to be crap. But i find it happening, nonetheless. Conversations with friends only seem to confirm a similar attitude and outlook: that there is nothing recent worth listening to. New artists and more recent albums seem to be a dying breed in my collection, and whilst i still listen out for new talent - the advent of digital radio and 6Music was a godsend for people who, like myself, have stopped tuning into Radio 1 - i hear less and less of  mus