THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

As an 18 year old discovering Punk and all its various offshoots, the band who were the catalyst for the initial movement were the band who it took me the longest to get into. I'm talking of course about the Sex Pistols. Depending on whose account you believe, the band were brought together and masterminded by Malcolm Mclaren, a entrepreneur and clothes designer with a anarchic and provocative streak who owned a boutique on the Kings Road in Chelsea which sold clothes featuring taboo designs often based on fetishwear. For a while they were more famous for their reputation and getting kicked off record labels than their music, and the music often took a back seat - they were beaten to the punch by The Damned, who released the first UK Punk single ("New Rose")  a good month or so before the Pistols debut, "Anarchy In The Uk". It was nearly a year later on 28th October 1977 that their debut - and only - album was unleashed upon a by now suspecting publ...

Bands are like friends. The really great ones stick with you, and although you may go long periods without contact, and have other friends, you always come back to one another and pick up where you left off. It's like that for me with Madness. Throughout my life i have become acquainted with, loved and fallen out of love with, liked and disliked many bands and artists, but i've always gone back to Madness. But you get older and your life, your circumstances, your relationships all change, and you find new friends that reflect those changes. As i've gotten older and found myself in a proper relationship for the first time, i've experienced new feelings, new situations, that i didn't have the emotional language to understand or explain, and i needed a new best friend to help me make sense of it all. Enter The National. An indie rock band from Ohio, they first entered my consciousness in 2005 when their third album, Alligator, became a critical - if not commercial - su...

Time to listen to music (old or new) has been scarce lately, as has the time on my own to do so - listening to music has rarely been a communal thing for me - so although i've made a few more additions to the collection i've rarely had the chance to play them. There have been a few purchases from the iTunes store, downloaded directly onto my new iPod Touch, which i've been listening to at work - a few old Rock 'n' Roll compilations and a Billy Fury 2 for 1 featuring his first two albums, which i bought after seeing a Billy Fury documentary on the iPlayer. I've always had the ability to enjoy music that was made long before i was born, and the music of American diner jukeboxes has always stirred a curious nostalgia in me, a fascination for a time that i've never known. Early R'n'R, doo wop, r'n'b, all from a time that seemed more simple. I've also downloaded a huge New Romantic compilation packed full of Synthpop, Electronica, and Pop from...

It's been a while since i wrote about any actual music on this blog, as recent events have conspired to take up much of my spare time. Between holidays, an injured missus, funerals and work, i've barely had time to listen to much music. But as the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and my passion for music has only increased. It might seem a bit trivial to some, but everybody needs an escape, even more so in times of darkness, and this is mine. I have made several additions to my music library recently, mostly before current events began, some new and some old. A few weeks ago before my birthday i came into some extra funds, and the urge to splurge was hard to resist. So a trip to the few excellent record shops of Nottingham was in order, and my first visit was a tiny shop in a courtyard. Forever Records - set up by a former employee of the much missed and legendary Selectadisc who went on to manage the homeless charity-supporting Music Exchange - is a small in...

Before i begin, i've nicked the title from journalist and editor of GQ Dylan Jones' fine book about the iPod and his own lifes' journey of musical discovery. Worth a read. Since the beginning of the '00s, music had increasingly become available as a digital file (or MP3) to be shared, downloaded and played through the internet, and not always legally! This gave unsigned bands another route to an audience that bypassed record companies, and became another way to discover music from throughout the decades without shelling out a fortune on CDs. All of this was fine, but it meant that you either had to burn the files to blank CD's or sit at your PC if you wanted to hear the songs, as there was no way to make them portable. So when i first started downloading songs - almost always singles - from iTunes, it meant that i had to copy them to a CD, then copy the CD to MiniDisc, a time consuming task. When the first iPods came out in 2001 they were way out of my price range...

My unadulterated love of music in (nearly) all of its many diverse forms has guided me through some dark and lonely times, whether indulging or lifting me out of them, and no bands music has quite done it like that of Echo & The Bunnymen. That slightly mystical touch of "otherness" that their best songs have, expressing itself through the holler and croon of Ian McCulloch and his unusual, often opaque lyrics that simultaneously manage to be bleak, self-doubting, and dark yet all the time reaching for the heavens: the angular, scything, resolutely anti-rock guitar playing of Will Sergeant, eschewing traditional chords and guitar solos in a endless quest to see what sounds he could tease from his instrument: and, in their first incarnation, the elastic, inventive and fucking GROOVY bass and drums of, respectively, Les Pattinson and the late Pete de Freitas. Nothing they've done since, together or apart, has ever topped that. My first introduction to the Bunnymen was...

As 2004 dawned, my love of music became not just a passion, but a way to fill the hole in my life left by the unexpected loss of my Mum. There were some dark nights of the soul that year, and i increasingly tried to shut myself off from the world and bury myself in the sounds of whatever i was listening to at the time. Thankfully i had my new group of friends at work to stop me from sinking, and a whole new exciting explosion of bands to pick up my mood. Since the Garage Rock revival of 2002/03, a new crop of bands had emerged to take things in different directions, influenced by similar developments following the explosion of Punk in '76/77.  Post-Punk was the catch-all label for bands who took the energy of Punk and the Year Zero attitude in more individual and experimental directions, incorporating all kinds of genres into their varying sounds - Jazz, Reggae, Dub,  early Electronica, Metal, Psychedelia, Disco, World Music, Krautrock, even deeply unfashionable Prog - allied ...