Easy Wonderful- Guster (2010)

When people wander into my gaff (Apologies- I've been watching old episodes of Minder again) and espy my vast CD collection (Stop sniggering at the back, this isn't Benny Hill!), there are a number of frequently asked questions:

• Wow, there's a lot of them aren't there? (Answer: Correct, astuteness is your middle name!)
• Why don't you put them all on i-tunes, sell them on e-bay and make room for pot plants and ornaments? (Answer: Because I don't want to, I love owning something I can see, now off you pop!)
• WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

To be fair, the last question is entirely valid because it is fair to say that a good proportion of the albums that I own have never threatened the popular music charts, not even with a wagging finger and a mild grrr. The Disc Jockeys of this fair country have never spun them on the airwaves. The artists have never appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, Wogan or anything featuring ruddy Jonathan Ross! So, you may ask, how on earth did they come to my attention?

Well I suppose it started off with the music press. And at this point I'd love to say that I read the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds under my bed covers at night, whilst listening to John Peel,  as that would make me sound at the cutting edge of cool. However, as anyone who knew me as a teenager, I was never near the cutting edge of anything (Least of all a pair of scissors when I went through my highland cow phase). In any case I was spending all my money on records so had nothing left for music papers. Which was just as well as Sounds was full of articles about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, absolute donkey droppings- Saxon, Venom, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden-Run to the Hills (I'm here all week!). Meanwhile a lot of the stuff in the NME at that time was written by pseudo-intellectuals who tended to go on about Situationism, Dadaism and any other ism you can think of, rather music which was the purpose of the paper in the first place.

No, my encounter with the music press came when I was at University and had more cash (This may sound confusing to people who have been students in the last 20 years but I had a grant, something that was swept away by the Tory Education Secretary whose name escapes me but he looked like a slug, which I freely acknowledge doesn't narrow the field down much) and bought Music Monthlies, Q, Vox, Uncut, Select and Mojo.  To be honest the articles in most of them are of a variable quality (Uncut have a thoroughly tiresome obsession with Neil Young, even though his recent CDs would be better used as frisbees and when Q went through their "saucy" phase and kept printing semi-clad pictures of Christina Aquilera and Britney Spears, the wife had me shedbound). But what really intrigued me was the reviews pages, they were full of reviews by bands I had never heard of. Now clearly any review containing the phrases "Shimmering soundscapes of beauty"  or "Squalls of feedback drenched guitar" would not getting me parting with my cash but many of them sounded intriguing and so, armed with more money than sense, I headed off to the Longplayer in Canterbury or the local Our Price (Ah those were the days) to take a gamble. Now occasionally I fell flat on my face (I still hang my head in shame when I think of the £5 wasted on Mega City City Four's Sebastopol Road) but more often than not the reviews led to me striking gold. My life long love for artists such as The Men They Couldn't Hang, Miracle Mile, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith have all stemmed from such leaps into the dark.

Now I have another wonderful way of discovering the unknown, the Internet. The marvels of Spotify and Youtube means I can test out a review before taking the plunge. Superb inventions which have saved me loads of money. I listened to a track by a band called Tale Impala the other day. The review in Uncut made it sound like the best thing since Victoria Pendleton. As soon as the track came on Youtube, however,  both the cat and I ran screaming from the study and hid under the bed as it sounded like an opera singer had had her foot trodden on by a rhino.

Then you have Allmusic! If you have not discovered this wonderful website go at once to www.allmusic.com and a world of wonder awaits. Essentially you type in the name of a band you like and it gives you a list of artistes who sound like them! GENIUS! As you can imagine this has led me to discover groups that I never knew existed (and in some cases bands that I suspect that hardly anyone knows existed apart from their mums and dads) and my world is a much richer place because of it. It was through All Music that I discovered Guster and their wonderful "Easy Wonderful" album (pun intended!) and it was while I was playing it that I got thinking of this whole subject. It's interesting because when I mention the names of obscure groups and artists (And, to be fair, Guster is a SHOCKING name), a number of people assume that their music must be weird or unlistenable. Again there is clearly a lot of unlistenable obscure music (If you ever get offered the chance to listen to a band called Einstende Neubarten, slap the person who is making the suggestion and scarper sharpish, unless you have a fondness for people banging industrial piping together repeatedly). However an awful lot of music that has never been given greater exposure to the public is actually very commercial, tuneful and thoroughly entertaining. "Easy Wonderful" is a fantastic collection of great catchy fun pop songs in the vein of Crowded House and Squeeze. If that sounds like your bag, have a listen on Youtube!

And that to me is the answer to the question that often comes after "Who are these people?", "Why do you listen to this obscure stuff anyway?", because it's great music. Now of course one man's meat is another policeman's encounter with Austin Mitchell. There are things that you've never heard of that you need never to hear (Ah Einstende Neubarten again!) but if you are sittting there thinking "Most of the music they play on the radio these days is shocking", "This reality TV music is like being punched in the ears by the Klitschkos" or "Surely there must be more to life than Mumford and Sons", there is an alternative! Pick up a music monthly, get on Allmusic, give it a spin on Youtube and take the plunge. Your ears will thank you! 

Absolutely-Madness (1980)

So here we go then..............

I love writing and I love music so for ages I had planned to write about music (Seriously the logic there is stunning) but write what? I'm not a student in the 80s so I can't write a fanzine and a book is too much like hard work for my liking and who'd publish it yet alone read it (I haven't got that many friends) so here I am in blogland!!

So when I have the time, when the kids aren't wrecking the house, when I'm not doing the ironing, I'll pop on here and give my thoughts on albums. They (whoever they are) say the album as a format is dying, that soon all that artists will release are songs. Well perhaps but for me music will always be about the album, I grew up with it, my house is full of the things, I have an awards evening with my mate, Alex, when we list our Top 10 albums of the year (And I don't care how sad that sounds!!).

This won't be about my favorite albums, because they change too often, or what's currently being released, because there's too much dross out there and life is too short to waste listening to bad music yet alone write about it (I could be ironing after all). It will just be albums that catch my eye as they lurk in my study or albums that I think need bringing to people's attention (on the assumption that anyone's reading this thing!) or albums that I think have been unfairly maligned by a cruel general public.

So why start with Absolutely? Well simply put it was the first album I bought my own hard earned money (or, in English, pocket money from my mum). I went into Cheriton Records (A quick explanation for anyone under 20: I am 48, I am old, When I was growing up, we had record shops. These were shops like the ones you have that sell phones only they sold records..."What's a record? you say....Oh never mind!), parted with said cash to the man with large beard and brown jumper and went back to the hallowed grounds of the Harvey Grammar School, where I was surrounded by oiks who wanted to know what I had purchased (And also thugs who wanted to see what you had bought so if it was something they didn't like, they could use it as an excuse to knock you about a bit, that was one of the disadvantages of vinyl, you couldn't hide the ruddy things...this caused me severe problems the day I bought the first Musical Youth album but that's another story).

So why did I chose this particular platter (Apologies, I sometimes lapse into the language of the buffoon when talking about music, I will try to keep it to a minimum)? After all, both at the time and looking back, it was a great time for music. There were so many other great albums I could have chosen: "Searching for the young soul rebels" by Dexys, "More Specials" by the Specials, "Signing Off" by UB40, "I just can't stop it" by the Beat- all albums in hindsight that I rate higher than Absolutely as good as it is!

Well, there were two reasons for making Absolutely the "First One". Firstly "Baggy Trousers"! I had always quite liked Madness. The Mod/Ska revival movement was the first one that grabbed my attention. But as good as My Girl and Nightboat to Cairo were, they lacked a killer single that really captured my imagination, unlike "Rat race" by the Specials, "Hands off.....she's mine" by the Beat and "Lip Up Fatty" by Bad Manners.  And in those days that mattered. These days you have Spotify and YouTube where you can listen to most of an album before you buy it. Back in the day, you had to rely largely on the radio which largely played singles.    A single had to be a great advert for the album (Girls Aloud would never have got away with Sexy No No No back then- Tangled Up, great album, Sexy No No No, such a dog of a first single it should have been put on a leash)

Baggy Trousers, however, was a blinder of a single! Much has been written about it, of course, how it captures the essence of secondary education from the point of view of those of us who were there in the early 80s, the fantastic video, the flying saxophonist etc. etc. All I would say is the moment I heard it, it captured my imagination, it sounded exciting, it sounded like a band breaking out of the ska/mod revival thing, it sounded like the sort of record that you wanted to play again as soon as it finished.

Secondly I loved the idea of Madness, they felt like MY sort of band. When I was 16 I wasn't staggeringly handsome (Checks mirror- that still holds true), or intellectual (also relevant) or built like a brick outhouse (You get my drift). But at that age you need a USP (Excuse the Business Bollocks) and mine was I was nutty!! I liked to give the impression that I never took anything seriously, that life was one big joke (Of course I was an adolescent and I was crying on the inside and writing bad poetry!) and Madness suited my image (If someone who once wore brown corduroy trousers can ever be described as having an image)

So back home came Absolutely after being pawed by Oiks and ignored by Toughs (who all liked Madness so good choice there then!) and was duly played on my battery powered record player (Note to the Under 20s- look that one up on Google). It was then duly overshadowed by 80-f by After the Fire, by that's another record and another story and that's the way with music in any case, one weeks great record is the next weeks dust magnet.

So what does it sound like now, after all these years (32 of the little tinkers)? Well it sounds like no one else but Madness (If you exclude any poor copycats like the Kaiser Chiefs, which one should). Madness are one of our greatest singles bands so Baggy Trousers and Embarrassment still stand out and sound great. But the rest is still very strong. There are no bad tracks (and how many albums can you say that about these days?). The commonly excepted wisdom is that Madness started out as a bit of a laugh and then became increasingly serious. However both Embarrassment and Shadow of Fear are about serious subject matter and the second  side of the album (Ah yes, the days when albums had sides, oh the nostalgia of it all) has a real area of paranoia about it.

Madness would go on to make a series of fantastic singles (Our House, House of Fun, The Sun and The Rain and so on) and one blinding album (The Rise and Fall) but there's something about Absolutely. Whilst other albums remain dust magnets, I'll get it off the shelves quite frequently and give it a spin and my wife will say "Not that old thing again", my three year old son will grin inanely and I will fail to resist the temptation to dance. Badly!

And besides it was my first one!!!