Tapes

I found these three at the back of drawer the other day whilst tidying up and realised, since we now have no means of playing them left in the house, that I should probably throw them away. That said...

'Rockin' and Romance' was the first album I ever bought by Jonathan Richman (apparently it came out in 1985, meaning I was 16, but it's lucky I checked because I'd have put it a couple of years earlier at least) and it's still probably my favourite. I heard the track 'The Beach' on John Peel's show, I'm pretty sure, whilst sitting in the bath at my Nan's killing time during a particularly tedious family Christmas (ah, the fabulously maudlin teenage years; my listening habits at the time were probably about 80% the Smiths.) I didn't get to see the great man live until he was into his golden early nineties run for Rounder Records (the eighties were a bit 'wilderness years' for JoJo, I'm afraid, though he's never less than at least intermittently brilliant) - once in a packed tent at Glastonbury and once at the Leadmill in Sheffield, where most of the audience space had been filled, rather marvellously, with plastic garden chairs...

In 1984, everyone I knew had a copy of 'The Unforgettable Fire' (most people had 'War' too, and Beck even had a cassette copy of 'Under a Blood Red Sky', but everyone had 'The Unforgettable Fire.') Along with the first Smiths album and Billy Bragg's 'Life's A Riot', it really sums up the eighties for me. Plus, in retrospect, it's actually the only really good U2 album, balanced exactly at the point where the epic became poetic and literally just before they toppled into bombast ('The Joshua Tree', despite its super-massive status is nowhere near as good.) Still sounds great in the car too, though I had to get it on CD to find out...

The last one is the Palace Brothers eponymous second album. Apparently it's now called 'Days in the Wake', which is fine, but it doesn't say that - or much of anything else, in fact - on the tape-label. I used to listen to this repeatedly on my walkman on the night bus between Nottingham and Leek during a somewhat difficult time when I was unsure what I was doing with my life, back before I was the contented, well-adjusted (ish), happily-married, family man I am today - back when jobs-and-stuff seemed more important than they should - and I've always found it, despite it's bleakness, to be a really helpful record - useful, comforting and crackly. Amongst those many musical-missed-opportunity stories (driving to Sheffield for a sold-out Nirvana gig and then refusing to pay tout prices because you'll 'just catch them next time', you know the kind of thing), I remember being intrigued by a flyer for the Palace Brothers at Nottingham's esteemed (and now long since gone) Narrowboat pub before I even heard this record but not going because I had something else on that night and because I'd not yet heard this record. I eventually got to see 'Bonnie' Prince Billie some years later (in the company of middleman no less) at Edinburgh's very fine Queens Hall and he was every inch the mischievous hopping bearded and pot-bellied sprite that you might hope...

...I think I might just have to hang on to these after all...!