1969 - Uncle Meat, The Mothers of Invention

I had always thought that when we went to see the Mothers of Invention (that's Steve and I) in Manchester in 1969 it was at the Free Trade Hall. I've just discovered, through the delights of google, that they actually played at the Palace Theatre in 1969 and didn't play the Free Trade Hall until 1970. I know it was 1969 because of the lineup - Frank Zappa, Jimmy Carl Black, Don Preston, Roy Estrada, Euclid James Motorhead Sherwood, "Bunk" and "Buzz" Gardner, Ian Underwood and Art Tripp.

It was my first 'big' concert (I was 20, a slow starter) and Steve smuggled a tape recorder in and recorded the concert - it's okay, statute of limitations and all that; anyway the tape, sadly, is long lost. They were on tour to publicise Uncle Meat, which had come out earlier that year.

I had been a fan since buying their first album, Freak Out, in Morecambe in 1967. I'd never heard of them - who had in Morecambe in 1967 - but the title, the band name and the sleeve shouted New! Strange! Different! - all magnets to me at 18 when any music that was unlike any I had heard before was, by default, worth a listen (just as an aside I remember my sister Jackie, who had moved to London, telling me about a record she had by the Stan Kenton Orchestra that was 'really weird' and promising to bring it up to Heysham for me. She eventually did bring it and it was weird and I didn't like it).

But The Mothers were different; they had songs 'You Didn't Try to Call Me', social comment 'Who Are the Brain Police', and pieces which were unlike anything I had heard 'Help I'm a Rock'. They also had Suzy Creamcheese who, by the way, lives in Lancaster and is really nice.

By the time of the Palace Theatre concert we were also listening to Absolutely Free and We're Only in it for the Money, Zappa's satirical attack on the whole hippie subculture and, in particular, The Beatles' Sergeant Peppers, even down to the sleeve artwork, with the members of the group dressed in drag and the band name spelled out in vegetables - 'Call Any Vegetable' - rather than flowers. Sadly the record company made them put this image on the inside fold-out sleeve and front cover was, again, a parody of the Beatles' album's inner sleeve. Anyway, a great record.

So, by the time of the concert I had this image of the band as this bunch of very strange, probably stoned individuals who would come out on stage and deliver an anarchic set full of weird images and strange music. Well, the reality was very different. Okay the music was strange, a mix of orchestral (alto, baritone and tenor sax, trumpet) and rock instruments (electric guitar, drums, keyboards) but played by musicians who knew exactly what they were doing, and presided over by Frank Zappa who, with small gestures, stopped, started, slowed down, sped up and otherwise seemed to have a precise, almost military, control over the band.

So what do I remember? Well, there weren't many people there (a few hundred) so Zappa asked everyone to come down to the front. Then there was the dancing - or the lack of dancing. Every so often Zappa would start to dance - stop - then announce, as though he had only just remembered that, according to the local bylaws, you weren't allowed to dance on stage on a Sunday. I also remember 'Motorhead' doing an extended riff about cars and, after the concert, Steve and I going across the road to a cafe and bumping into Jimmy Carl Black and Don Preston, who were really nice, chatted to two overawed and shy teenagers, and autographed our programmes - these were actually album-sized booklets about Uncle Meat and I still have mine somewhere (I hope).

All in all a great concert, even if it wasn't at the Free Trade Hall. I'll probably find out I was wrong about the other group I saw at the Free Trade Hall around the same time, The Incredible String Band. That's the strange thing about reality, it's never what you think it is.

1968 - Hurdy Gurdy Man, Donovan

In the Nineteen Sixties Morecambe had two piers, West End Pier and Central Pier; now there are none. Central Pier was one of the two venues in Morecambe where young people went dancing - the other was the Floral Hall (The Beatles played here twice, in 1962 and 1963; sadly I didn't know about it and anyway I was only 13 so probably wouldn't have been able to go). The West End Pier was wrecked by storms in 1977 and Central Pier suffered several fires in the 1980s and was finally demolished in 1992 after a further fire destroyed the ballroom a year earlier.

The Undertakers

So, to the music. I have a vague memory of going the Central Pier ballroom when I was about 16 to see The Undertakers, a sixties Liverpool band. I can't remember much about it (this is a constant refrain, probably due to an excess of alcohol consumed over the years - but not for over 30 years and something I intend to blog about at some point), but I do know that I was very nervous being there, surrounded by older boys and men who were probably planning to beat me up. Just as an aside, I spend much of my adolescence and early adulthood afraid of violence; I had been bullied as a kid and tended to roll over and show my belly when threatened. There, mini-confession over and again, back to the music.

This is the West End Pier, obviously not in the best of health. At the end of the pier, the bit at the right of the picture, was an open-air skating rink where Steve and I, and a bunch of people we knew, used to go roller-skating several times a week in the Summer. We would walk or skate from Heysham Village to Morecambe along Sandylands Promenade, skate for the evening, then back to Heysham. One thing that made the skating a must-do was the music - over speakers whoever was selecting the records was playing all the latest hits and, particularly, Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan. The first place I heard it was on the pier and it floored me. There's something about particular records that  when I hear them for the first time they create a feeling of excitement and dizziness, almost as though they are giving me a glimpse of some other world, a world which is stranger and more magical than the one I inhabit. It happened with Bo Diddley (Pretty Thing), The Beatles (Strawberry Fields Forever), The Yardbirds (Shapes of Things), and it happened with Donovan.

One thing which hit me about this song, and is true of most of Donovan's records, is the quality of the production; he gets a great guitar sound, and particularly the sound of acoustic guitars. I've played guitar for most of my life - well, since I was fourteen, and I've been obsessed with getting that guitar sound for most of that time. The only guitar I've played that came close was a little Epiphone acoustic that I borrowed from a music shop in Morecambe in about 1967 that had a beautiful full, rich sound. I could have bought it for fifty quid, but it had a small crack in the body so I didn't..... regrets.

Another quality I love is the voice - strange, otherworldly. Again, Donovan's voice is always focused and well articulated. But on top of this is that weird tremelo effect giving it a pulsing, vibrating feel. And then the electric guitar, drums and tambura come in and lifts it to another level. I always thought that the electric guitarist was Jimmy Page and Donovan seems to believe it was him; in fact he credits the recording session for Hurdy Gurdy Man with possibly leading to the formation of Led Zepplin. But there are other claims - that it was Alan Parker who played lead.

I still love it and pick up my acoustic occasionally and play it (it's dead simple, a few repeated chords, nothing fancy).

Have a listen and see if you agree. Hurdy Gurdy Man

1969 - What We Did on Our Holidays, Fairport Convention

*DISCLAIMER - all of the following is based on my admittedly faulty memory. To repeat the saying, 'If you remember the sixties, you weren't there!'

In the late sixties Steve had gone from group manager (The Mind Machine, which I will write about at some point), to light show creator. He has always been a creative whirlwind and if this was a superhero comic he would be the mad professor and I would be the trusty sidekick. Light shows seem to have come into being independently both in Britain and the United States. Pink Floyd were, as far as I know, the first British band to use a light show and, in America, bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were employing lights at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms in San Francisco (somebody correct me if I'm wrong).

Anyway, Steve had started playing around with various lighting effects in The Cellar, using an old slide projector. He had added a motorised drive so that when a circular slide was placed in front of the light source the motored rotated it causing the effect to change.  The main ones I remember were:

Liquid Slide

• circular slides filled with coloured oils - as the slide rotated the blobs of oil moved around causing a constantly changing pattern of coloured blobs

Diffraction Grating

• Sheets of diffraction grating 

Polarising Filters

• two circular pieces of polarised glass with strips of sellotape between them

The lightshow was called 'Mushroom Lights' and consisted of two or three projectors, a collection of various types of slides, a number of spare bulbs for the projectors, Steve's car and a varying group of assistants (or, to go back to the superhero metaphor, 'sidekicks'). I remember one time Steve and I went down to London, I think to stay with our friend Jules, and going along to an electronics shop on, I think, Denmark Street, where Steve bought a whole pile of stuff; glass slides, sheets of diffraction grating, polarising filters etc. At that time it was very difficult to get hold of anything exotic or unusual so it was a case of make it yourself (in this case 'yourself' meant Steve, I was about as technically competent as the average iguana), or go to a big city to get it. So we came back with all this stuff which Steve then incorporated into the setup ready to take out to concerts.

Two shows I remember particularly; one was at Bolton Technical College where Family were playing.

Family

We didn't do the light show for Family, they were in the main hall, but Alexis Korner was playing in another hall and we did the lights in there, sneaking through to the main hall to see what the lights in there were like. They were good, very professional, but somehow this slickness meant that they weren't very interesting. Our show, on the other hand, had a handmade quirkiness, giving the show an atmosphere and an unpredictability which drew the audience in. I suppose it's a bit like a great deal of modern music; everything is perfect, notes are spot on and any imperfections in pitch are autotuned out, making the music sterile and uninteresting. This technical perfection means there is nowhere for me in it, nothing for me to latch on to. I suppose perfection is fine but it's not somewhere you would want to spend much time. Listen to some older music, from the sixties for instance (my era). Most of it is full of imperfection, full of life (or is this just me being an old man? 'Everything was much better when I were a lad.......' Ah well, ramble and moan over.

Fairport Convention

The other concert was Fairport Convention at Lancaster University. I think this was in 1969, but I'm not absolutely sure. Sandy Denny was still with the group and it took place in one of the refectories. One thing I distinctly remember is that Sandy Denny didn't like the lights. She seemed quite grumpy. I don't think it was our lights in particular, I think she would have had the same reaction to any light show. This is the bit where my memory fails me; did we carry on with the lights anyway? Or did we stop the projectors and just watch the band? I'm not sure, but I think we turned everything off and joined the rest of the crowd to watch them play. They were good, no doubt about that. They did a stunning version of Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.  It's strange, looking back now, thinking that a band of the quality of Fairport Convention would be playing in a relatively small college refectory. But the world was very different then. There wasn't the obsession with celebrity, with famous people being separated from us mere mortals by some sort of invisible wall. You could talk to rock stars, walk up to them at the bar, buy them a pint, have a chat. Steve and I once bumped into Jimmy Carl Black ("My name's Jimmy Carl Black and I'm the Indian of the group") and Don Preston from the Mothers' of Invention in a cafe in Manchester after a concert (I'll write about this at some point). They were fine, happy to talk, not acting out this big 'ROCK STAR' thing. Them were the days!

You know what? I think I'm getting old.

1952 - Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men

We moved onto Delamere Avenue in 1950, when I was about eighteen months old. The house we moved into, number twelve, was about a third of the way down a line of semi-detached, pebble-dashed council houses facing out over the roofs of the houses opposite towards Heysham Harbour and Half Moon Bay. It was part of a new estate, Trumacar which, when we moved in, was still being built. My mum used to tell the story of how I had somehow become friendly with one of the builders and how he had taken to letting me sit with him in the cab of his lorry while he was working. One day she heard a knock at the door and opened it to find him standing there clutching a tear-stained creature covered head-to-toe in a layer of dirt -  I had fallen out of the cab into a pile of gravel. Being very small and gravity being what it is, I hadn't fallen very hard and so, apart from a few bruises and scratches, I was relatively unhurt. That was the last time I rode in the lorry.

Bill and Ben were my first heroes. I was three when it started, but my first memory is of running home from school so as not to miss it on TV. As far as I remember it was on at about half past three and school was about half a mile away at the bottom of a hill, so it was quite a rush to get back in time - and of course there was no video recording or pause-and-rewind in 1954. The funny thing is that, in my memory, I am rushing back to number 11 Delamere, not number 12, even though we didn't move into number 11 until about five years later (that's another story which I'll come back to at some point). Bill and Ben was one of three children's programmes which were broadcast every weekday afternoon, the others being Andy Pandy and Rag, Tag and Bobtail. They all went out under the title Listen with Mother (no political correctness in 1954). But Bill and Ben was my favourite. They were string puppets whose arms and legs were made from flowerpots and they each lived in a large flowerpot watched over by a  flower called Little Weed. In each episode the man who looked after the garden where they lived went off to have his dinner and, while he was away, Bill and Ben would have various adventures, ending when the man had finished his dinner and was coming back to work. What I found exciting was that they talked in a sort of nonsense language which was almost understandable. For instance, when they were getting ready to pop back into their flowerpots they would each say 'Bop, bop diddle weed' (Bye, bye little weed), one in a low voice (Ben) and the other in a high voice (Bill), to which Little Weed replied 'Weeed'. This was the only thing she said, but she could express a range of things, from pleasure to anxiety, depending on how she said it (by the way, back in the eighties I worked as a volunteer at a drop-in centre in Lancaster. One day one of the other volunteers told me that his mother had been the voice of Little Weed! Now I've met one or two more or less famous people in my time, but to have met the voice of Little Weed would have been on a whole other level. Needless to  say I never did meet her).

One thing I loved about Bill and Ben was the music. It was simple, rhythmic (I think possibly marimbas and woodblocks) with a strange underlying background sound. One of my pet hates (and I have quite a few) is that a lot of modern music is too complicated and overproduced. The Bill and Ben theme has, to me, a beautiful simplicity. So too have the stories. Why all this particularly interests me is that Steve and I are trying to put together a children's TV show for which I am doing the music. When I was attempting to come up with a suitable theme tune it was the music from these early TV shows that I remembered.

Here it is. I'm not sure if it will stay as an instrumental or have lyrics added; I quite like it as it is but we'll see. What is it they say - you never actually finish creating something, you just at some point abandon it to make its own way in the world.

It's been great fun putting together the songs for the programme. I'll talk to Steve and see how he feels about putting some more of them on this blog. I can also possibly do a post about the process of putting together the songs - the writing, recording (the software I use is Cockos Reaper, it's fantastic) and arranging. I realise that this may be more interesting to recording geeks but, anyway, we'll see.

It's a strange thing, writing a blog. For one thing you have no idea who is reading it (if anyone!) There's quite a bit of ego involved in that you have to think that what you are doing is going to be of interest to someone who doesn't know you. I've resisted all of these things - blogs, facebook, twitter etc. - up to now but I realise that, apart from anything else, it's great fun! And, at the end of the day, if people aren't interested I can just stop writing it and go and do something else - like writing some songs, or doing the washing up.

1999 - River of Orchids, XTC

'With arms stretched wide'

George - hasn't a clue!

George doesn't know what he wants to do with his life; he doesn't even know what he wants to be doing tomorrow. I'm the same, I've never known what direction I was going in. The difference between George and me is that he's a dog and I'm not. You know how it goes, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'. That's easy when you're a kid, 'Astronaut', 'Engine Driver', 'Ninja Assassin'. When you ask George the same question he just looks at you as though he's giving the question serious thought, but that's as far as it goes - silence (add the word walk or dinner and you get a more positive response. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and I'm sixty three! Some people seem to know, they appear to have their lives all mapped out - school, unniversity, career. Me, I never had a clue. Oh I knew what I didn't want to be - boring, insane, accountant, insurance man - and I've done pretty well at avoiding three out of four (Guess!). But as to careers and long-term plans, no idea.

Just as an aside, about twenty years ago I wrote a song about insurance men; at least it's called 'Insurance Men'. I've no idea what it's really about and I know that some people find it a bit disturbing; even I find it a bit disturbing. Have a listen, see what you think. Maybe after you've listened to it (I've cut it down as the whole song is over nine minutes long), you'll have a better chance at guessing which of those four things I didn't manage to avoid! By the way, the song, along with most of the other stuff I've done, was recorded and mixed by my best friend Steve (of cellar fame) at his studio, 'The Mill' in Blackburn. So 'Insurance Men' is a 'Run of the Mill' production. I'll say more about 'The Mill' in a future post.

Anyway, on to the ostensible subject of this post. It's 1999 and there I am, fifty years old, bored, sitting in the back of a shop in the West End of Morecambe with a mug of coffee and a Mars bar, waiting for it to be time to open the door so that people who are not really interested can come in and sign up for courses they don't really want to do. Talk about fulfillment! It's the latest in a long line of jobs I've had since I left school - shop assistant (fired), trainee work-study engineer (failed), bonus clerk (bored), casualty porter (blood phobia didn't help), slot-machine-arcade manager (failed miserably, lasted one and a half days), security guard (how did I end up doing that?), office manager (for Steve, in his other role as designer and manufacturer of hand-carved pine furniture) and now, College Education Shop Manager. So how did it happen that someone who is reasonably intelligent and fairly creative ended up doing this?

One word - chance. One thing that distinguishes us from the animals (and me from my dog, George, who doesn't even realise there is such a thing as 'the future') is the ability to imagine possible tomorrows and then think of ways to turn our imaginings into reality - "Wouldn't it be nice to be lying on a beach in Spain. I know, I'll put some money in a savings account every week so that next year I'll be able to afford to do it". It's called planning, forward thinking. Well I'm no good at that, never have been. Many years ago I had a dream of owning a Gibson J200, that's a big, jumbo acoustic guitar much favoured by country musicians (and some rock musicians). So I found a big glass jar and stuck a photo of a J200 on it to motivate me to put money into it.

Jimmy Page playing J200

I don't remember how long it sat there on that shelf but I don't think it ever had more than a couple of pounds in it and that was no doubt taken out as soon as I needed some fags. The only time I ever played a J200 was in a music shop in Preston. They had one hanging from the ceiling and I asked if I could have a go. "Help yourself", I was told. I managed to bang it into another guitar taking it down (nobody noticed but I don't think I did any damage - fortunate as they cost a couple of thousand pounds, or they did then). It was nice to finally have a go but I wasn't over-impressed with the sound, though I was amazed by how light it was - it seemed as though it would blow away in a strong wind. So I never did get my own J200, but I do have a jumbo guitar, a Freshman FA400FBJ which I have had for about six years.

Freshman FA400FBJ

It's really nice but I've hardly touched it for the last few months (too busy reading my new Kindle!). Anyway, now I've learned how to put songs onto this blog I'll probably include some of the things I wrote on my Freshman. Don't worry, most of them are less weird than Insurance Men!

By the way, when I say that I'm not good at forward thinking, I am very good at forward worrying (I suppose that's the only sort of worrying that's of any use, backward worrying would probably be a bit of a waste of time). I'm good at worrying about all the worst things that might happen - nuclear war and cancer and global warming - but planning for it, forget it.

One of the things I did when I was sitting around in the college shop waiting for customers to come in was listen to music. I'd got into the habit of buying Uncut and listening to the cover CD at the shop before putting it on a shelf and forgetting it. How many cover CDs have you never listened to? Or listened to once then forgotten about? I had long forgotten what else was on this particular CD apart from one song, but one of the wonders of the Web is that you can go onto Google and find nearly anything, including the cover of the CD I am talking about. What's the world coming to? How long will it be before you can type in 'Where have I left my keys?' and it will tell you? Anyway, one of the songs on it was 'River of Orchids' by XTC, a band I had liked for years but had lost touch with. The song was very different from the things I remembered - 'Making Plans for Nigel', 'When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty'. Instead of angular guitars and fractured narratives this song was a dreamy, beautiful ecological ballad, slowly building up , almost like a classical piece. It took me right out of the shop and off to somewhere beautiful and calm (across Morecambe Bay to the Lake District on a warm, sunny afternoon - okay there aren't many warm, sunny afternoons in this part of the world but I can dream!) So what did I do but play it in the shop to anyone who would listen, including my co-worker and a guy called Cal who had started popping in for help with filling out various forms but ended up spending hours talking to me about music and recording and guitars and whatever else we were both interested in. Incidentally, a few years later Cal joined me, my wife and family and a group of friends on a camping holiday in Gloucestershire, which ended up being the wettest, muddiest and windiest ten days I've ever spent. But heck, that's camping in Britain.

I realise that I've got to the end of this post and, not only have I said very little about XTC and 'River of Orchids', but I've also meandered all over the place. Perhaps I can convince myself that incoherence is a virtue - perhaps I could have that  printed on a tee-shirt.

Let me know what you think about 'Insurance Men'. Whatever you think, I won't be offended. Honest.

1967 - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

Living in a shed

I love my shed. It's my own private world. Okay, it's only about eight feet square with one window facing Half Moon Bay and a door to the back garden, but I can shut myself in here and not have to think about anything else. I've got a couple of comfy chairs in here and a small table and, of course, my record player (a Fergurson in a wooden case with a sort of grey leatherish lid. It's five watts! You could buy an extension to plug in to make it stereo but I don't have that.

Ferguson Record Player

In fact I've never heard stereo, the first time I hear a record in stereo is at my Swedish friend Mick's flat on Euston Road. He puts on Yellow Submarine and it's amazing, the voices moving across the room from left to right - or possibly right to left). Of course this is a long time ago and, my memory being what it is, which is mainly defunct, some of the facts may be wrong. But it's my story and this is the way I'm telling it; think of it as a kind of unreliable biography.

But the shed is real - and the record player - and the window looking down to Half Moon Bay.

I'm not so sure about the comfy chairs and the table but they do give it a more homely feel. The walls were bare brick but I remember we (probably Steve and I but I'm not sure on this) did paint it to make it a bit more liveable in. I wasn't actually living in the shed, just spending all my time there apart from when I was out at work or down in Steve's cellar or sleeping (so yes, I more or less was living in the shed). My mum let me have it so that I could have friends in and listen to music without disturbing the rest of the family (I say my mum, not my mum and dad, because it was my mum who ran things, who made the decisions. My dad was a shift worker so was often either out at work or in bed, and when he was at home he was generally involved in one of his hobbies - collecting wildflowers, astronomy, wargames, stamp collecting, model making - he was a man of many interests). Our house isn't a big house; it's a small house in a terrace on a council estate and there are too many people in it! Apart from my mum and dad there's my little sister Karen (who's about eight or nine) and I think my older sister and her three kids were still living with us - she'd left her husband and come back home. Plus the dog, Laddie, a brindle (I think that's what you call it when they have stripes) sort of greyhound, great dane cross. So with three adults, four kids, a dog and me in a three bedroom house you can see that there isn't loads of room. Being a teenager I needed a room of my own so I had the box room, a tiny room with room for a bed and not much else. I had painted it - three red walls, one black wall and a black ceiling - to give it that nice, homely feel. Most of the walls were covered in posters, mainly of the Beatles, but the black wall made a useful blackboard. Steve and I were into making up long, elaborate stories with cringe-making punch lines which were just plays on well known titles or phrases. I remember one of Steve's ended with 'Darling, piston, they're laying our gong' (GROAN!) Here's another (I know your'e dying to read it!) about three people in some sort of love triangle, 'It was just the old external train mangle'. I have to say I think that was one of mine.

Prosecuting Attorney: My lud, I believe that these despicable creatures - pointing at the two  long-haired, cowering creatures in the dock dressed in bright satin shirts, red trousers (in the case of one of the defendants), and small rectangular sunglasses (in the case of the other), both with various scarves, bells and badges and smelling strongly of patchouli oil) - are guilty of criminally abusing the English language in a way which is likely to cause criminal distress to all right thinking Englishmen

Defense Lawyer: But look at them. They're nowt but young lads. They didn't mean any harm your honour, they were just having a bit of fun. Alright, it got out of hand, that joke about Her Majesty the Queen was definitely a bit much. But they're good lads even though you can't tell if they're boys or girls.

Judge: This is one of the worst crimes against decency and the British way of life I have come across in many a long year. To send out a message to the rest of these long-haired louts with their drugs and their free love I sentence them to one hundred and twenty hours of Max Bygraves. Take them away and play them the music!

So how do The Beatles fit into this rambling soliloquy? Well, I was still working at the Co-op (remember Heysham Village and torturing the delivery boy in a previous post?) I'd moved around a few times since then and was based at the big Co-op, Centenary House in Regent Road in Morecambe. It's long gone; the building's still there but it's probably flats or a cash convertor now. I was a Beatles fanatic, I had all of their records (including the Beatles with Tony Sheridan EP, which wasn't much cop) plus I was in The Beatles fan club so had all their fan club Christmas Records - in fact I still have a couple. Sadly, I think I can still remember the name of one of the women who ran the fan club - Bettina Rose - that shows how fanatical I was! At that time the release of a new Beatles LP was a big deal, especially after the records they had released over the previous couple of years - Rubber Soul, Revolver, Strawberry Fields Forever - so I was very excited about this. I had ordered my copy of Sergeant Peppers in the record department at Centenary House and seem to remember getting it the day before it was officially released (this may of course be total fantasy but I do remember it this way). Just holding it in my hands and looking at the sleeve was almost overwhelming -  nothing like this had ever been released before - gatefold sleeve, brilliants colours and to top it all off, an insert with cutout badges and things. I couldn't wait to get home and play it.

There is something magical about LPs that doesn't happen to the same extent with CDs (and of course is totally missing from downloads). It's the tactile pleasure of holding it, taking it out of the cardboard sleeve, sliding it from the inner sleeve and looking at the label and that shiny black vinyl in which is imprinted all that (hopefully) fantastic music.

No time for tea when I got home, it was straight to THE SHED! to give it a first listen (of course with a cup of tea (three sugars) my mum had made for me). Then the ritual, open record player lid, lift and slide the arm which holds the records in place on the spindle, carefully place LP on deck - being careful to hold it by the edges so as not to damage the grooves - select correct speed, place stylus on run-in groove (wonderful sound of stylus hitting groove and straight into the first track. I LOVED IT!! I couldn't believe the complexity and variety of the sounds. I thought it was the best thing I had ever heard and made everything else sound ordinary. Of course when it finished I played it again...... and again.... and again. I don't know how many times I played it that evening, probably five or six. And I continued playing it every night for about six months. My family must have been sick of it; the neighbours must have been sick of it; even the shetland ponies in the back field must have been sick of it. But I LOVED IT!! (I think I've already said that).

So what about now? How do I feel about Sergeant Peppers in 2012. I still think there are some great songs on it - A Day in the Life (of course), Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Sergeant Peppers (both versions), but I certainly don't think it's the best thing I've ever heard, or even the best album by The Beatles. I would rather listen to Rubber Soul or A Hard Day's Night (I think that one's my favourite). But, whatever I think, Sergeant Peppers did change things. Music after it became more elaborate, more orchestral. There were more concept albums (not that there hadn't been concept albums before but there were certainly more after) and even a cheeky parody in We're Only in it for the Money by The Mothers of Invention (another album I really like). They opened up the possibilities for recorded music.

 And it certainly had a huge influence on my life in the shed!

2000 - Yellow, Coldplay

'And the stars look very different today'

I'm not sure where this is going so bear with me. It seems to me that there's an honesty about 'good' art. I'm not talking about factual honesty, the actual correctness of what is being stated. Nobody really believes that there are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (and I should know as I work in Blackburn). It's not even about whether the singer is telling the truth; when Michael Stipe sings that 'this one goes out to the one I love' we know that this isn't factually true and that the last thing the singer feels for this person is love. What I'm trying to say is that, for a song to work you have to believe it. I believe Michael Stipe; I believe John Lennon. But I don't believe Chris Martin. Why is that?

It's the lyrics, and particularly that first verse;

     Look at the stars  

     Look how they shine for you 

     And everything you do 

     Yeah, they were all yellow

Now either Chris Martin has never actually looked at the stars (and that's possible; I'm sure rich and famous rock stars have more important things to do than look at things. He probably has someone to do it for him) or he just needed a word that fitted and yellow seemed as good as any. There is a third possibility, that I'm just stupid and so I'm missing the deeper metaphorical meaning behind the lyrics. So maybe, metaphorically, the stars are all yellow. But I don't think so. Because honestly, categorically, and even to someone like me who is colour blind, stars are not all yellow - some of them are, in fact many of them are, but others are red, or blue, or white.

And they were all yellow?

"So what?" you cry. "Who cares? I never really listen to the lyrics anyway. All I'm bothered about is the sound. Do I like the sound?" I used to be in a band with a bass player who was into a lot of lates seventies and early eighties post-punk bands (The Pop Group, Public Image, Magazine, Young Marble Giants) and we would sometimes get into arguments about a particular song. He would love it because of the overall sound while I would be complaining that the song didn't work, the lyrics didn't make sense. I once read that Paul McCartney, when he was writing Yesterday, before he came up with the final lyrics he would sing 'scrambled egg' to the tune. It was a sort of placeholder for the eventual words. I wonder how many copies it would have sold if he left the original lyric?

There was another song around the same time that also got me going (the boy's on a bit of a rant here, maybe a bucket of water over the head would cool him down). I think it was called something like Secret Smile and the line that wound me up went something like this;

    

    'Nobody knows it but you've got a secret smile and you use it only for me'

What can you say? Is this man so arrogant, or so naive, that he believes he knows his significant other so well that he can guarantee that they only employ that smile when he's around? I bet they're flashing it all over the place; in McDonalds, Next, at the pub, everywhere. Or possibly the song is meant to show that the singer is arrogant and naive..... possibly.

By the way, I looked up some of the history of Yellow and, seemingly, Chris Martin was looking for a word that fit the song he was writing and noticed a copy of Yellow Pages. Bingo!