My bromance has started up again. Andy was round the other night and we watched the latest episode
of The Walking Dead, drank some wine
and then started listening to Elbow’s excellent new album The Take Off and Landing of Everything, and generally having a good
time.
It’s what all bromances should be like.
But as we were listening to the music Andy said, “There’s something
wrong with your left speaker.”
“What?”
“Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“There’s a faint crackling sound coming out of the left speaker. Are
you sure you can’t hear it?”
“All I can hear is the music.”
“No – listen carefully. Can
you hear it now?”
Of course I could hear it then!
Once Andy had pointed it out with his bat-like ears I couldn’t help but hear it.
I’m probably going to have to go out and buy some new speakers – even
though I don’t need them, because there’s nothing wrong with the ones I already
have. They’re perfectly fine for what I want, but because Andy heard a crackle in them and pointed out which speaker it was coming
from, I can now hear that crackle. If it hadn’t been Andy that pointed it out I
probably would have suspected that there wasn’t a crackle at all and that he
had made it up as a joke. I would have suspected that he used the used the
power of suggestion to make me think
there was a crackle and that he did it to everyone before going home and having
a good laugh about it.
But Andy’s not like that. He wouldn’t have gone home chuckling to
himself before selecting an album from his fine collection of vinyl records
that he owns, which he would then place onto his top-of-the-range deck and listen to it without any crackles.
The thing is – Andy can genuinely hear things like that. He’s not like
the rest of us poor demented souls who have been going slightly deaf for years
without realising it. People like us have to pay regular visits to the nurse in
order to have our ears syringed with warm water. I’ve been so many times that
if I’d collected all the stuff that was forced out of my ears at high pressure
I would now have an impressive set of tapers that would rival my
friend Gillian’s collection of Yankee Candles.
Andy treats his LPs like children. He cares for them lovingly and if I
didn’t know any better I would probably say that he sings lullabies to them
before going to bed. I don’t have any vinyl records. I replaced all of them
with CDs years ago and since then I’ve replaced all my CDs with downloads.
Downloading music has virtually brought about the disappearance of the
independent record shop on our high streets, which is something of a relief to
a lot of people. It wasn’t that I didn’t like going into record shops – on the
contrary I loved being in them. I could spend all day flicking through the LPs.
The worst part about being in a record shop wasn’t looking – it was buying.
The staff employed in independent record shops were required to have
three distinct qualities. The first was unhelpfulness. I remember one time in
early 1970 when I went into a record shop in Blackpool to buy my mum an LP for
her birthday and when I asked where I could find it one of the assistants rolled
his eyes and pointed vaguely at all the records in shop and said, “It’s over
there somewhere.” He then ignored me completely to continue talking to the
other unhelpful assistant about the concert he’d been to the previous night
because I’d just had the nerve to ask him for the latest Englebert Humperdinck
release.
The second quality required was condescension. My friend was a big fan
of Jimi Hendrix and in the October of 1970, a week after the great guitarist
had died, he was walking out of a record shop after he’d just bought and paid
for the album Band of Gypsys, when he
heard one assistant whisper to the other, “I bet he’s only bought that because
he’s just died.”
My friend stopped in his tracks and said, “I haven’t bought this just because Jimi Hendrix is dead. I’ve
been a fan of his right from the start.”
One of the assistants sniggered and the other gave my friend a
condescending look, before saying, “Yeah, right.”
The third (and probably the most important) quality required was to be
judgemental. No visit to a record shop in the 1970s was complete without the
assistants sneering at your choice of LP. They didn’t even need to speak – one
look would tell you that they thought your taste in music was shitter than shit.
There’s a great scene in the film High
Fidelity that perfectly illustrates the judgemental attitude of these
assistants, where Jack Black, won’t sell a customer the album Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart
because he didn’t look cool enough to own it.
Back in 1972, when I was going out with a girl called Patricia (not
her real name), I had a growing collection of LPs and Cassettes. I liked, and
have always liked, music that’s a little bit different to the mainstream
rubbish that often appeared on Top of the
Pops. Patricia had her own car – a mini – and when she picked me up one day
she announced excitedly that she had just bought a cassette player.
“Brilliant!” I said, and then asked her to wait while I went back to
my room to gather up some of the cassettes I’d just bought so that I could
attempt to force my opinionated taste in music on her. Trust me she needed it –
she was, after all, a fan of the awful, twee chirpings of Gilbert O’Sullivan. I
was a massive fan of Rory Gallagher, John Mayall and Paul Butterfield – or
indeed anything with a basis in blues.
Real music, in other words.
I’ve been into blues ever since I was sixteen and discovered that my
mother hated it. I remember bringing home my first blues album – it was a
sampler album that I had bought in Woolworth
for about 2/6d and it featured twenty of the best of the original black Chicago
and Delta blues artists. There was the likes of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters,
Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Lightnin’ Hopkins and the
great Robert Johnson.
As I placed side one of the LP on the turntable of my Dansette record player and the first
strains of Muddy Waters came out of the tinny speaker at the front, my mother
came into the room and asked, “What the bloody hell’s this rubbish you’ve got
on?”
“It’s blues, mum,” I said, “it’s brilliant.”
“Well, it’s making my bloody ears bleed,” she replied. “Turn it down,
will you.”
“It’s meant to be played loud, mum.”
“It’s meant to be turned down or off, if you want to go on living in
this house.”
Mum was a fan of Val Doonican, Englebert Humperdinck and Cliff
Richard, which meant that she had no taste in music whatsoever and was, by that
token, not educated enough in the development of music in the western world to
comment on anybody else’s taste in music – and by that I obviously mean my taste in music. This caused a problem, in that I was living
in her house and she was just as opinionated as I was.
I dislike opinionated people – especially if their opinions differ
from mine – and so I went out each week and bought a new blues album to add to
my collection. This had the desired effect of driving my mother almost to the
point of insanity and when I arrived home she would often have her Val Doonican
records playing at full blast on my Dansette.
This had the desired effect of driving me almost to the point of insanity. Luckily I joined the RAF a few
weeks after that and never had to listen to them again. Unfortunately Patricia’s
taste in music was almost as bad as my mother’s and so I was looking forward to
educating her in what real music should sound like.
I was in for a shock. When she had told me that she had got a cassette
player she had not specified what type
of cassette player she had actually acquired.
Patricia had not got the type of cassette player that I, or indeed
virtually everyone in Britain, owned. No – Patricia had gone out and bought an
8-Track Cassette Player.
Remember those monstrous cumbersome things? They went the same way the
Beta-Max Video Player did fifteen years later. They were on their way out even
when she bought it. The cassettes you played in these things were about the
same size as a packet of Paxo Sage &
Onion Stuffing and they were more expensive than ordinary cassettes.
Worse still, they were on a continuous loop and so once she put in the
Gilbert O’Sullivan cassette it would never stop playing – ever – and would
continue to play until the end of time, or until someone smashed the thing that
was playing it with a sledgehammer. Even worse was that, because the tapes
inside their casings were of a fixed length, tracks would often fade out and
then fade back in when it turned itself over.
Who, in their right minds, thought that that was good idea? Imagine
listening to Stairway to Heaven by
the mighty Led Zep only for the song to fade out just as it was getting to the
best bit.
I’ll tell you who thought that it would be a good idea – people who
don’t like music – that’s who! People like Patricia and my mother who listened
to insipid, middle-of-the-road shit – that’s who!
There was only one thing for it. There was only one way to stop her
playing the rubbish that she so obviously liked.
“There’s something wrong with the left speaker.” I told her.
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