‘Music was my
first love and it will be my last ‘, so sang John Miles and really he could
have been singing about me or any other serious muso on this planet. Some
people might give you this as a definition :-
A muso is a person who is obsessed with music.
Their record collection will contain music and artists nobody else has heard
of.
This would not be
entirely accurate but it bears more than a great deal of the real truth in my
case and I have been obsessed by music since about the age of 10 or 11 years
old. I remember listening to my family’s Top Of The Pops compilations,
records by Alf Garnett aka Warren Mitchell singing first and second world war
songs and music hall classics, listening to the charts on Sunday evenings
replayed on a reel to reel tape recorder mostly compared by Jimmy Savile (oh
dear !!!) and also hearing my dear old Granddad singing off-key ditties and
his unique versions from the music hall in his armchair while he rolled his
own cigarettes and we all watched Hawaii 5-O on the television. I remember
buying my first single from Woolworths, it was Mungo Jerry’s ‘Baby Jump’ and
my first proper LP was T.Rex’s ‘Bolan Boogie’. I can recall the thrill of
buying Dr Feelgood’s ‘Down By The Jetty’ and realising it was recorded in
mono not stereo. I even lusted over the sexy female model covers of the early
Roxy Music albums, I can remember watching Johnny Winter somewhere on
whatever channel it was on at the time and then rushing out to buy his first
drugs free comeback effort ‘Still Alive & Well’ and then playing it non-
stop for weeks on end, I can recall dancing on my bed to Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’
and having my first real kiss to Mott’s ‘All The Young Dudes’.
I remember being fascinated by a fold-out
Vertigo records LP from Juicy Lucy and wondering why did Status Quo have their
previous album covers embossed on the back of each new album release. Why did
I have an album by Tony Williams Lifetime and one by the Carry On Team
singing novelty songs and why was Ernie the Fastest Milkman In The West by
Benny Hill not regarded as one of the truly great modern English Folk Songs ?
So as I have said
before I have been obsessed for years and at various periods collected over
2000 LP’s, 500 cassettes, 1000 CD’s, various minidiscs, occasional eight
tracks and boxes of 45’s. Now after years of buying, selling and culling I
have about 1000 LP’s left, no cassettes anymore, about 100 CD’s and around
60,000 mp3’s – yes I went digital a few years back for storage purposes
mainly and yes because I do love ‘ the shuffle’ on all my media devices. So I
really cannot capture in four tracks my career as a musicologist (sounds like I was
somehow aiming to be the new Alan Lomax) but seriously folks below
is some music that I have always regarded very highly and will go back to
even while I’m trying to capture, listen to and file whatever else hits my
musical radar on a daily basis.
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