Just for the Record
I just finished reading Mark Radcliffe’s Thank You For The Days. Less an autobiography, more a random collection of anecdotes woven together by the common bonds of music, family and beer, it charts the course of Radcliffe’s life over his fifty years, discussing an early obsession with Motley Crue, the occasion when he did the coastal walk, the question of whether Keith Richards is more rock ‘n’ roll than Mick Jagger, and the time his mother inadvertently hit him with a golf club. It makes for compelling and occasionally hysterical reading, and Radcliffe’s exemplary command of the English language lends his narrative wit, warmth and humour. In the introduction he says that he hopes that the episodes chosen would enable people to get to know him a little better. He certainly achieves that – but that he does so while coming across as good-humoured, likeable and refreshingly modest is a definite bonus.
As good as the book is, there was one passage that unnerved me. It’s the same passage that unnerves me in every music biography I read, at least where the topic comes up. I’ve also encountered various magazine articles, web pages and radio and TV programmes dedicated to it. The subject in question is not about sexual prowess and how many girls you’d slept with by the time you were eighteen (none, in my case), or those little things you did as children that you got away with, only to feel the need to violently confess years later (I have plenty of those, but they’re not going in here). No, what brings me out in a cold sweat and gets my heart racing is the matter of The First Record I Ever Bought. Because – and here’s the truth – I simply don’t know how to answer it.
You could argue with some justification that this isn’t really a big deal. It’s not likely to come up in a job interview (unless I’m applying for a position with the music press, perhaps), I don’t anticipate being cross-examined on the subject in a magistrate’s court at any point in the foreseeable future, and I somehow doubt that, should I reach the pearly gates in order to watch my life being judged, I’ll be confronted with a glorified Saint Peter probing my thoughts for information about this particular rite of passage. By rights, it should be lower down my list of priorities, and perhaps it would be if the matter were easily resolved. Like most men, I like talking about myself, but I also know (to some extent) when to go off on a rambling tangent and when to just stop talking, and if I were able to give a concrete response I’d probably just answer the question, add a brief context if I felt it relevant and then let the subject go on to something else. As it stands, however, I appear to be stuck perpetually in limbo, forced to give the question far more attention than it actually deserves.
Perhaps what’s also at stake here is the fact that I spend a lot of my time comparing myself to other people, particularly musicians or musicologists. As someone who claims to eat, sleep and breathe all things aural (it’s not just quiet background noise, it’s a lifestyle) you would think that I’d have this down pat. Mark Radcliffe knows the identity of his first record (it was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality). Bill Drummond knows his. Even my father could give you an answer. So, too, could Robert Smith, Morissey, Katie Melua, Elvis Costello, Stuart Maconie, and Alex Turner. I’m all for the concept of individuality and personal choice but how can I claim to take music so seriously if I can’t answer tell you where the journey started?
Part of the problem is the very phrasing of the question. To understand me here you have to factor in two things: the way I was brought up, and the fact that this bringing up was done in a transitional time when the word ‘record’ could mean any one of a number of things. It’s worth bearing in mind that most of the time, the question is asked of people whose formative teenage years were accompanied by music that existed exclusively on vinyl, or else on the radio. More to the point, most of them would have been too hard up to afford albums. The issue of the ‘first record’, therefore, was fairly unambiguous: it would, in most cases, have dealt with the first single you bought, or perhaps the first long player if your family was posh and had more than one car.
Being born in 1978, and developing an interest in music as I did in the late 1980s, things were a little different. For a start, vinyl – whilst still widely available – was gradually being usurped by cassettes. Cassette albums had been available for a good while, and at the time that I started to buy music you’d usually find a space for cassette singles, snugly nestled next to the seven-inches on the racks in our local Woolworths. Cassette singles tended to be two-track affairs that were repeated both sides, therefore negating the need to constantly wind the tape back in order to hear the song again. The inevitable drawback was that you would also have to listen to the B-side before you could once more hear the main event, unless of course you chose to wind it on, thereby rendering the concept of duplicated sides fairly pointless.
I never bought vinyl. Some of my friends did, but it just seemed like an unnecessary faff. As years went by I learned about the superior quality of vinyl over cassette, and came to realise that in terms of high fidelity I’d been batting for the wrong team. It wasn’t something you’d have noticed on the Goodmans record player / double tape deck / FM tuner that constituted my first bedroom kit, but on something with a decent set of speakers, there was noticeably less hiss. On the other hand, vinyl was easy to damage, cumbersome to store and not terribly portable. You couldn’t easily take a record to school to lend to a mate, unless you were prepared to buy one of those sleek and reasonably stylish record bags that were beyond my budget.
More or less from the beginning, then, I relied on cassettes. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have records at home. We did, in abundance. My parents owned one of those button-controlled turntables that position the needle automatically, and even moved along the underside of the disc, thus removing the need to flip it over manually. This took some of the fun out of the experience but it also meant that our record collection survived comparatively unscratched for a great many years. We had albums by the Beatles, a Disney collection and a lavishly packaged box set of Your Hundred Best Tunes, complete with loving, sensible looking couple on the cover, relaxing in front of a roaring fire on an extravagant bearskin rug. Singles were also a staple diet, although most of them were many years old, and my parents tended to put the ones they played the most onto recorded C90s for the car. New ones were a novelty but I can well remember the day my father brought home the seven-inch version of ‘You Win Again’, a song we all loved. Who knew that it was all downhill for the Bee Gees after that?
For the most part, I’d borrow records from friends or from the library, and tape them. My sum total of owned vinyl amounted to a whopping one single, and that had been donated by a friend who now resides in Bristol. It was a recording of Mankind’s disco remix of the Doctor Who theme, all wah-wah guitars and false endings – oh, and a vocal by the Cybermen. The first time we heard it, we pissed ourselves laughing. Ewan tired of the record long before I did, but rather than simply tape it onto cassette for me before flogging it a car boot sale he very kindly insisted on passing on the original, presumably in some well-meant but ultimately misguided attempt to get me into vinyl (and not in a kinky sense; that came later). In thinking about this now, I’m reminded of the Father Ted scene where Dougal comes into the lounge of the parochial house, looking for his record collection. Ted produces a battered, paper-sleeved single and hands it over with the words “Dougal, you have to have more than one record for it to be a collection. What you have is a record.”
CDs were around when I started buying music, but they were only just becoming mainstream. Certainly we couldn’t afford them, although certain friends owned a few. I can still remember the fascination of what appeared to be a blank silver surface that apparently contained high quality music. At least you could see the groove on a record. It was years before I worked out how to tell apart the recorded portion of a CD from the non-recorded, with its subtle distinctions. This shows inclinations towards technophobia, but I was far less a luddite than my old music teacher, who – on the first occasion he played a Compact Disc – spent ten minutes trying to work out where the needle should be positioned.
So much for the format. What am I to make of the fact that my parents did most of the buying for me? If they were to bring home a record they thought I’d like, for example, and give it to me as a gift, that would hardly constitute a record that I myself had bought, and such a recollection is not really in the same league as the romanticised accounts of visits to the local Our Price to ask for the Sex Pistols or the Undertones. And yet it was in this fashion that I received my first exposure to pop music, courtesy of a double-tape compilation that my parents had bought entitled Pop Hits For Kids, which contained such delights as ‘Stand and Deliver’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Hang On Sloopy’. And these weren’t poorly rendered re-recordings knocked up by a sessions band and sold at £2.99 a cassette (or whatever the 1986 equivalent might have been). These were original versions by original artists, which is something I didn’t really appreciate at the time.
A few years later, I requested that my father buy me the soundtrack to the hottest film of the summer. It was twenty years ago, and the film in question was Batman. I’d become quietly obsessed with Tim Burton’s reimagining of the Caped Crusader; I saw Keaton’s Batman take on Nicholson’s Joker only once in the cinema but watched the rented VHS tape four times before reluctantly returning it to the local video emporium. I had the Making Of book and the novelisation, and the video game would be sitting under the Christmas tree that December, so it only made sense to complete the set. As I’m writing this a popular fashion seems to be 1989 Batman T-shirts that have been sold pre-cracked; i.e. made to look old, as if you’ve had them for years. Part of me thinks this is utterly naff, while another part of me thinks it’s brilliant marketing.
The interesting thing about the Batman soundtrack is that about a third of it doesn’t feature in the film at all. Prince’s duet with Sheena Easton, the sorely underrated ‘Arms of Orion’, doesn’t make an appearance. Nor does ‘Lemon Crush’ or the film’s big hit, ‘Batdance’, which is basically six minutes of sampling and a disjointed, mildly schizophrenic structure. The other interesting thing about the soundtrack is that each of the songs is meant to showcase the mindsets of the lead characters. You thus have Bruce Wayne lamenting the dilemma that is his double life in ‘Vicki Waiting’, Batman discussing his mission statement on ‘The Future’, and the Joker outwardly embracing his hedonistic lifestyle on ‘Partyman’. This didn’t seem like a big deal to me at the time, but it’s only twenty years later that I can realise the sense of innovation: in many respects it’s a concept album, rather than a mere soundtrack. Batman was reportedly where a lot of people started to go off Prince, which is a shame as I maintain that he released a lot of his strongest material in the early 1990s, before all the legal wrangles and contractual obligations forced him to turn out third-rate excrement for the sake of paying lip service.
But however flawed and mechanical the album may be, it was the first one that I’d actively requested, and I’d like to hope that the fact that I did not go into a shop and pick it up myself does not necessarily bar it from inclusion. It was just the way we did things in our family. Shopping excursions were comparatively rare and it was far easier to just ask my father to pop into W H Smith on his lunch break. I also hope it counts because the alternative – i.e. the first proper album that I bought with my own money, in person – was Now 18, just after Christmas 1990. It was a decent compilation, and one indeed that I saw fit to buy again on CD some years later, but it’s hardly the most original or inspiring choice. I went through a period of buying Now albums in the 1990s, from 18 through 24, but then became bored with the material and indeed with the charts in general. They’re a clever stunt – an eclectic, well-chosen selection of chart hits at a fraction of the price that it would have cost to buy forty singles – but my goodness they’re tedious to write about.
So we’ll go with Prince, then, and I would very much like to leave it there, Because if we’re going to talk about singles, then the first CD single I purchased was Dr Spin’s ‘Tetris’ in 1992. This is embarrassing enough without me also having to tell you (and I don’t really have any choice, now that I’m in this sort of mood) that in 1990, the very first cassette single that I bought was ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’. I’m not proud of this fact, but it needed to be said. I have done my best to atone for it through copious buying of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Paul Simon, the Boss and anything else that possessed what is generally considered to be artistic merit, but there is always going to be a part of me that feels I will never fully atone for this earlier sin, which may account at least partially for the guilt complex that forms a big part of my current psychological makeup. And here was me thinking that all those dark secrets were going to stay hidden.
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