THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

*Not in the square though! In the course of my nearly 40 years as a music fan i've given most genres a listen, and i often consider myself to have fairly eclectic tastes. I've never dismissed a style of music outright, not without giving it a go, however brief! But a few have never really grabbed me: i'm still struggling with Jazz, Prog Rock baffles me, and Folk has just, well, bored me. I have to confess that i have often fallen prey to the notion that Folk music was the preserve of boring bearded men and warbling women in sensible jumpers and dresses, singing "fiddle-de-dee" with a finger in one ear. Some of the music i've been into has had folk or traditional music influences: XTC certainly had a few elements of traditional english music in their sound at one point, The Futureheads delved into it for their inspired Acapella album RANT!; and The Pogues bought their punked-up version of Celtic Folk to the masses. But the appeal of the source material has el...

After a few months where spare time for vinyl hunting (second hand or otherwise) has been scarce, i've finally had a day to myself - the missus is away for the weekend, i've got a long weekend off, and a few quid to spare. So i took myself off into town (Nottingham), and had a good look around. Autumn and Winter are my favourite seasons, especially the Yuletide season, and it was relaxing to stroll around the Christmas market and sample a few culinary delights in between visiting record shops. First off was Rough Trade in the Hockley area. This is the place i usually go to for new releases and re-pressings, and although it's not cheap (most new vinyl isn't) and has a slight whiff of the hipster about it, i still like the place. After a long browse through the racks, i picked up The National's Sleep Well Beast and the Courtney Barnett/Kurt Vile collaboration Lotta Sea Lice, and a second hand copy of the 1971 compilation by The Who, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, as a Ch...

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...