Old farts (40 plus thread)

I almost made a 1982 Clash show (with The Who and I liked both bands. I would see The Who in 89 and B.A.D play for 4 solid hours in 1991-they had just launched into a cover of Prince's 1999 when I decided my stamina had given way at last) but the older adult my Mom had selected to take me bailed. I was considered too young at 14 to go by myself.

They were indeed the business when I saw them! I didn't know he owned the rights to that and that's pretty awesome! Must set him up for life I am sure!

I was let off at about the same point. I'll be seeing The Bunnymen this weekend and for the first time since 85 and they were one of the first shows I went to on my own! I saw REM a year later on their own and they were amazing! That was probably the Life's Rich Pageant tour. I saw them again for Green with the Throwing Muses (The Feelies were the support on the earlier tour). Buck was a god then. I was pretty in love with IRS era REM. I got to feeling they'd stayed too long at some point the early 90's and probably about the same time Bill Berry came to the same conclusion.

Hahaha! 

Yeah the Warner REM had some good moments and I do like some of the hits from that era but it doesn't cut the mustard when stacked up next the IRS years!

Loved the Good Earth! 



That in particular!

I had the fortune to meet the drummer of The Feelies a few years back and get his take, and a member of the Original Sins, on Buck as a producer (not too great). He was a really nice guy and they were very into the Velvets and as this was a Garage Rock gig he was at the 60's influences were pretty obvious!

So Mac was complaining about Rafa eh? Now I am Reds fan too (albeit I live in NJ) so I would have loved to hear what he thought about Rafa! I was worried those guys would be Toffees!

April 12th 1981. What a great day

I seem to remember quite liking some of it - and it was certainly described as a return to form! 

Other than that, I must edit the tone of what I said earlier. While Bill was in the band I loved them as much as life itself and hoovered up everything they released, on multiple formats. We are talking full-on teenage obsession here. I have White Label stuff and rare promos and 12" singles. I coped with the jump to Warners with no trouble, until Shiny Fucking Happy Fucking People and Everybody Fucking Hurts, which should have been strangled at birth. Not a great fan of Losing My Religion or Drive either.  Then Bill left and it just wasn't the same. Up was admittedly better than the previous two or three albums, but it was the last one I could even make a stab at the track listing. I continued going to see them live and I did buy the albums out of some kind of loyalty. When the news came that they were finally calling it a day, I applauded, and sat and listened to all my old vinyl albums, up to New Adventures in Hi-fi. I was pretty ripped apart by the end, but what a journey. I'll be eternally grateful for all those Berry / Buck / Mills / Stipe compositions. My favourite song is 'Voice of Harold', an alternate take on 7 Chinese Brothers, and pretty much all of Lifes Rich Pageant, especially Cuyahoga. Country Feedback is also a great song. So, yeah, when I say I don't like their later stuff it's in the context of just how much I do love the earlier albums. 

I was never a massive Big Country fan but they were pretty good, it did annoy me how they were perceived as 'uncool',  not really sure why that happened  .  Must have been pretty cool taking pictures of bands, although if it was a band I really loved I'd probably rather be in the crowd.  

I was really loving the 60s back then.  Listening to Jim Hendrix, Love, The Doors etc.  I'm so glad I managed to see Love a couple of times before Arthur Lee passed away.

This song came up on my big random Spotify playlist yesterday, and it got me thinking about the first contemporary songs that really entered my consciousness. My elder sister had one of those compilation albums of various recent hits, and I used to listen to this song a lot as a four or five year-old.



Another from that album that really stayed with me was:



My dad had the first Dire Straits album. (Yeah, dad-rock. Fight me.) I used to dance around the living room to the guitar solo at the end of Sultans of Swing. The fact that the radio edit cuts it off is one of the greatest travesties of rock music.



So what are the earliest songs that you remember falling in love with from your lifetime?

Well, personally I believe that one is never too old to do what you like. I am 47, married and 2 kids, and I like to play video games. And I simply do not care what others think about that. You are as young as you feel, so if someone is 30 years or older and wants to play video games or whatever ... then just do it.

My grandmother had the single of Popcorn. She also had Boney M's Nightflight to Venus album.

I'm not averse to a bit of early Dire Straits myself, and definitely a good call on The Cars.

The first song I have a concrete memory of is Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road. Edgy, huh?! Though there actually was a serious reason behind it - I heard the "Woke up this morning and my momma was gone" line during a period of 4 months when my mother was quarantined in hospital with Tuburculosis. I saw her once in that time, and she was on the opposite side of a massive room wearing a face mask. I was less than three years old, but it's all still vivid in my memory. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody traumatized me slightly as a six year old, though it is obviously one of the greatest songs of my lifetime.

I was ten in 1979, and that's the age I first started to develop my own taste, rather than simply go along with my older brother. The first thing that kinda stopped me in my tracks was this -



and then this - 



before my world shifted on its axis with this - 



It was an objectively golden era for singles, and I could almost as easily have posted links to Blondie, Peter Gabriel, Squeeze, The Clash, XTC, Buzzcocks, Pink Floyd, The Pretenders, Kate Bush, The Stranglers, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Stiff Little Fingers or The Undertones. And it's hard to express now without simply sounding like an old fart how important these songs were because there was little else to distract us. You could see these people on TV once a week, and once a week only. If you were lucky. Most of us set tape recorders in front of the tv speaker to tape our favourites because the tv had better sound than Medium Wave radio, and we didn't have a radio with a built-in tape recorder anyway. I know I sound like a Monty Python sketch, but that's how it was. And I ain't complaining.