Vinyl Diaries I

This is the first (well second technically, but the first with this thought in mind) in what will be an occasional delve into a matter fairly close to my heart - the world of music. It will no doubt jump all over the place, according to whatever whim takes hold at the time, and may well prove painfully dull and dreary. But we'll see how we go...

It will be by no means chronological, or any type of logical i'm aware of, but for the sake of getting off to a start I may as well start at the start.

***

My parents liked to host parties. Late, long, loud. Not ideal for producing a bright and bushy schoolboy, but it did sow musical seeds that have long since taken.

Many a night was spent reading and drifting in and out of sleep to music of a particular time - the 80s had arrived, but this playlist was stuck fairly and squarely in the 60s and 70s.

By day I would take out these albums and examine the sleeves for clues as to just who it was I was spending my evenings with, from whence these amped lullabies came. Men with bad haircuts crossing a pedestrian crossing. Blimps and too much brown. Prisms shooting off a rainbow.

By night there were no sleeves, just drums basslines riffs wails.

It was a fairly typical cast of suspects - The Beatles, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and, of course, Pink Floyd. Other nights may be spent with Yes, Van Morrison, Neil Young, but it wouldn't be long before the status quo was restored (perhaps in the form of Status Quo themselves).

Abbey Road was an early favourite - there was something about that bass bounce-to-slur when Come Together kicks off the album that is just so instantly gratifying - and who could fail to be won over by old flat top, grooving up slowly with his Joo Joo eye-ball and hair down to his knee? Certainly not little-me.

I was quite taken by Ian Gillan's vocal dexterity - scatting and scaling the most remarkable heights, it seemed beyond the realm of what anyone should be capable of doing. Even then Smoke on the Water never really took me, I preferred my Deep Purple more out of control, careening at breakneck speed with the always present threat of a beautiful carnage.

Roger Waters has his own way of freaking me out, and I think that if it was The Beatles that first tought me about music's playfulness and storytelling (however superficial) it was Pink Floyd that was my first taste of its electrifying doom. The downbeat paranoia and panning dystopiascape of Dark Side of the Moon may be a farly cliched touchstone, but it's an album I can to this day hear in my head from start to finish; its spaced out claustrophobia and deadpan detachment the perfect soundtrack to an 8-year-old's growing fascination with the universe beyond this rock he lives on.

These are albums and eras I rarely revisit as such, but there must be something of them in my hardwiring as they haven't left me to this day. Many a stepping stone has since been hopped across, and my current listening is oft found a million miles away from such beginnings, but there is certainly a soft spot for these old, dried-up, drug-ruined rockers and their Faustian flirtations with the devil.