RING RING, SEVEN A.M.....

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 soul-pop and theatrical rock, unimaginative dance, boybands. And the inexplicably popular Spin Doctors. I'm not saying it was ALL crap, but there was very little to capture my interest in a that year. Even the Albums chart was dull. So i delved back into the musical past, taking advantage of the fact that everything was now being re-released on cd. And it was a real goldmine. Among the first couple of  albums i picked up were Bowie: The Singles Collection, and The Jam: Greatest Hits, introductions to artists who i would become a big fan of. The diversity of the Bowie compilation fascinated me: the psychedelic folk of Space Oddity, the glam rock of the Ziggy Stardust years, the soul and funk influenced Young Americans and Golden Years. Sometimes when i listen to a song i've never heard before, i can anticipate how it's going to progress, but that didn't happen with Bowie. The Jam cd was another revelation: short, snappy anthems with intelligent lyrics full of political and social commentary and personal reflections of what it was like growing up in Britain at that time, welded to r'n'b-infused punk and later, soul and motown inspired pop, all played with, to quote frontman/singer/songwriter/guitarist Paul Weller, "fire and skill". I've often criticised people who only buy Greatest Hits, Best ofs', and compilations, but they do play an important part as a window into previously unknown worlds. What you do with that insight afterwards draws a line between casual music fans and music lovers for whom life without it would be unbearable. I definitely fall into the latter category!

I remember buying a Ultravox/Midge Ure best of en route to a family holiday in Scotland later that year, and whilst i wasn't too bothered with the solo Midge tracks, the Ultravox songs stuck in my head, which fed an interest in synthpop and electronic music, just as The Jam cd would spark an interest which would lead to my discovery of punk. As i read more music magazines, and NME and Melody Maker would become weekly essentials, i would learn more about different genres and connect the dots between older and more current music. And having spent a lot of time in the past, i would soon be shaken back into the present by the music that was about to erupt....