Catmachine

 It's surprising what can catch your attention and become of special interest – especially during childhood – when you've got the kind of brain that thrives on that stuff. In 1981 I narrowed my focus in on the bands appearing on Top of the Pops not least because I wanted to know when and how often Toyah would be appearing. So I became very familiar with the rules surrounding how often an artist could appear. The only way a song would be played two weeks on the trot was if it was number one. In order to get two plays (including the viewers' holy grail of both the video and a mimed studio performance) the song would have to be going up the chart three weeks in a row and ideally by leaps and bounds. To get three plays it would have to have been at least five weeks in the chart and probably be heading into the top 10 at least. I used to write down the lineups in my diary despite parental scorn. This meant I was watching when someone cheated. The Jets' song "Yes Tonigh...

As somebody who has amassed a large number of CDs and records over the years, one of the minor problems I've come across is what to do about Hype Stickers. No, I didn't know that was what they were called until now. These are little – often very nicely printed and designed – sticky labels attached to the exterior of the CD or record. Sometimes (more often in the old days) they'd read something like: " Contains the hit single : Hitty McHitface!" but more often these days they give the name of the album and artist (and sometimes catalogue number) as the album cover design is a work of art in itself which doesn't want to be sullied by text. All well and good. However, the problem arises when said record or CD is sealed in cellophane and then the sticker is put over the top of that. You need to remove the cellophane to get at the album but that means disposing of the sticker. Which some people are fine with and all power to them. However as a collector there is d...

Earlier this week I went to the launch of a book: Conform to Deform: The Weird and Wonderful World of Some Bizzare a history of the notorious indie record label that sprung out of the mind of the teenage Stephen Pearce at the beginning of the eighties. While there I realised that Some Bizzare had been a huge influence on my musical taste and personal aesthetic, ultimately contributing the mental DNA of whatever it is that makes me me. Quite fittingly this happened by stealth. It all started when I got into Soft Cell in 1981. For some reason (well I was on holiday – a school trip to the USSR) I completely missed out on the summer of Tainted Love and my introduction to them was their far more subversive follow up single Bedsitter . Before long I'd become an obsessive as was so often the way with me and the completist in me led me to seek out the Some Bizzare album , a compilation LP (which I seem to recall may have had a "Pay no more than £2.99" or similar sticker on it?)...

Any regular readers of this blog (and excuse the hubris of even imagining for a moment that such things exist) may recall that I have blogged on more than one occasion about  Lush, one of my favourite ever bands , who I used to go and see as often as possible in the nineties and who recently announced that they would be reforming after twenty years. Of course I was going. They announced a couple of dates at the Roundhouse, for both of which I booked tickets, plus one in Manchester for which, after a moment's hesitation, I also booked a ticket. I could work out travel and accommodation later. I drew the line at the American dates - that would be ridiculous. And then with less than two months to go, they announced a warm-up gig in London a ticket for which I booked at the drop of a hat, sitting nervously in front of the computer refreshing the browser as the time approached 9am, waiting for them to go on sale. A long way from twenty years ago when I sent off a cheque or (rarely...

Recurring dreams don't have to be recurring nightmares. Most of the time they are though. You know the ones, where the creatures are coming to get you . They never quite succeed but as you wake in the dead of night the fear that they might do next time is very real. But I used to have a recurring dream that wasn't a nightmare. In fact it was quite the opposite. If you've been reading this blog for a while you may recall that one of my favourite bands of all time are Lush. An account of following their Split tour around in 1994 appeared on this very blog back in 2011 ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 ). Due to the tragic death of their drummer Chris there were no more Lush gigs after 1996. I don't think anyone expected there to be. Except, for some reason, my subconscious. From the first few years of the twenty-first century onwards I started having dreams that I was going to a Lush gig. It was always a gig by the reformed band (as opposed to a dream set in ...

Of course I believe in coincidences. They happen all the time. What I am doubtful about is that they mean anything. For a start if they meant something then they wouldn't be coincidences by definition. Furthermore as discussed in a recent blog the human mind is trained to see patterns in things above everything else so any such interpretation should be taken with a pinch of salt. But sometimes you wonder. At the beginning of 2014 I finished the first draft of my latest novel. Like the previous one it was partly set in and around the music industry, this time in the early nineties. The central character  - who'd been a supporting character in the previous one - was the singer in an indie band, a band described in the book as shoegaze but with more aggressive vocals than was usual. I must admit that when I was first writing I didn't know exactly what the band (Beam - a very nineties name, I could almost see the logo on the t-shirts) sounded like although I knew that I ...

I can't believe that it's already five years since I wrote the first blog in the I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  series, a series which turned into a book self-published on kindle and paperback . Five years now is very different from five years back then. As a Teenage Toyah Fan five years was the gap between my first Toyah LP The Blue Meaning  and the realise of Minx - five long years of adventure many of which are detailed in the book and which at the time seemed to last forever. Whereas this last five years seems to have lasted just a few months in comparison. That is not to say that the most recent half-decade was without incident - far from it. The self publishing was an adventure in itself which gave me far more confidence in my writing as a whole and contributed to the fact that I have now had several short stories published (with more on the way). Fingers crossed for the novels as well... Plus since writing those first blogs - quite by coincidence - there was a re...

Previously... Top of the Pops was the centre of the musical week but as more and more bands begun to produce promotional videos the mimed performances were often a disappointment as you wanted to see the video. This early eighties over-experimentation with video didn't go unnoticed by the satirists - nowadays they can't show a retrospective of early eighties music without wheeling out the Not The Nine O'Clock News parody Nice Video, Shame About the Song . But even though I did like Not the Nine O'Clock News and thought that the parody was well observed in places I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the writers didn't quite "get" it and were probably in the process of turning into a parental generation banging on about the rubbish that young people listened to in the name of music today. Or rather the rubbish that they watched. By now everyone had to have a video and inspiration was beginning to wear a bit thin. Having scored an unexpected ...

Like Doctor Who , Top of the Pops was always a part of my childhood for as far back as my memory goes. It was just something that was always there, and my infant brain saw it in much the same way as Winter, Spring the Sun or the Moon. I remember dancing in front of the large black and white television in the family flat in Birmingham much to the amusement of my parents plus Tony and Jill, the couple upstairs who didn't have a TV but always came down on Thursday evening to watch. Personally I couldn't quite see what was so funny about my dancing - I had decided that it must consist of clenched fists bounced up and down in front of me - but I enjoyed the music and the experience plus I was getting attention so it was all good. There was always music around whether it was the records my parents would put on - the Beatles (interesting if sometimes scary) or Bob Dylan (inexplicably sad because I thought the combination of his voice and the harmonica sounded like crying) but ...

Things may have changed a lot when it comes to listening to music. Whilst the fact that I have no idea what is in the charts these days is most likely to be an indication of advancing age than anything else, it does nevertheless feel that people aren't as into music as much they used to be. Whilst the tribes seem as strong as ever ( Belieber or Directioner ?) it's more disposable and the energy seems to be missing. However I can't really judge without being young myself and the only experience I have of that was in the past. It was exciting back then - all these new things to discover. The absence of an internet meant that information was far more difficult to come by and therefore far more precious. You scoured the music press for the smallest clipping. And as for the music - well without YouTube , SoundCloud , Spotify , Last.fm , illegal and legal downloads you simply had to wait. Sometimes if you were lucky a DJ - John Peel or Kid Jensen, sometimes even Peter Powell ...

The other week I was delighted to discover, via the medium of a #FollowFriday tweet , that Claudia Brücken was on Twitter. Claudia Brücken! One of my favourite singers from the 1980s. Now whilst any regular readers of this blog may already have noticed from earlier entries that during the 1980s I was a big fan of Toyah Willcox, there were of course many other bands that tickled my fancy during that era. One such band was Propaganda . Picture the scene. It was 1984 and the pop world was in thrall to Frankie Goes to Hollywood as they bestrode the charts like Liverpudlian colossi thanks to the skilled media manipulation of their label, ZTT Records .  It was impossible not to be aware of the furore and whilst I as a 19 year old goth might have liked to scoff at the blatant commercialism, I couldn't help but be caught up in the hype. Despite what people now might remember, Frankie were not the only band signed to this cunning outfit.  Propaganda were also on the roster and...

As far as buying our music is concerned, we've come a long way in what feels like a very short time. These days it's far quicker and easier to buy music at the drop of a hat - furthermore there's a far greater range of music to choose from. We can pick and choose the tracks we want and best of all we don't even have to leave the house. The downside of this is of course that it can be dangerous going online drunk - a hangover is rarely improved by the discovery that one has bought the box set of Mantovani's 100 Golden Moments because it seemed like a funny idea at the time. In general this means that things are more convenient and in some small way we are conserving resources. What's more we no longer have to cart around half a metric tonne of vinyl every time we move house and lets face it those cardboard boxes were always the heaviest ones. Usually designed for transporting bananas they also had a nasty habit of disintegrating halfway up the garden path ...

Thursday 9 June 1994 What I really enjoyed back then about hitching around to see bands was being on my own. Nobody else seemed to understand that, for most people it was a social thing.  I on the other hand always got frustrated when I found someone else doing what I was doing - often before I knew what was happening I'd been pressured into travelling with people I hardly knew and having to hang out with and talk to them. This was unsatisfactory. You could never rely on other people. This was another reason my 1994 Lush expedition felt so special. There was no-one else on the road. Sure the gigs themselves were packed, but the only other people experiencing all the gigs were the band and crew. It had been so deserted walking out of Bath earlier that night I had considered lying down by the side of the road on a grassy verge and catching some shuteye, but I'm glad I didn't. In the end I made my bed by 4am and listened to my Split CD whilst...

Tuesday 7 June 1994 Once again I found myself standing at the exit of a service station with my thumb out. Compared with the previous day's journey, today's was going to be a piece of piss. I'd got the bus from Manchester City Centre to just beyond the suburbs and made my way down country lanes to Knutsford Services where I'd sneaked in the back way and from where I was hoping to get a lift straight down the M6 to Birmingham. It didn't take that long and I did it in one hit. Once in Birmingham I had ample time to find somewhere to freshen up, get something to eat and make myself feel slightly human again. After that I went in search of the venue. It was called Edwards and I eventually discovered it tucked away in a side street slap bank in the city centre. The entrance was tall and narrow, squeezed in between two other businesses; once inside there were a couple of flights of stairs leading up to a dark nightclub decorated in black, blue and mirrors. I arrived ...