Saturday afternoons in the late seventies mainly consisted of me and my sister heading over to her friend Jackie's for us all to sit around her record player to listen to our collective singles. Being the youngest I had to carry over our box of singles to Jacks house, a carefully selected mixture of classics and if we were lucky a couple of newly purchased 45s from Woollies that we had got for 79p with our pocket money that morning. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a record player; it was just the Jacks record player would allow you to stack loads of singles on the spindle in the middle and it would click back and drop the next song and automatically keep going until the record arm was at 90 degrees to the pile of records or the records got slippy because there were we too many on the turntable.
I remember despite a historical amount of punk rock being around at the time we were mainly singing away to my sisters multiple Osmond singles, Abba and Boney M Songs. Jackie kept her singles in a giant toast rack thing where covers became dog eared as we eagerly created another stack of tunes to mime to with hair brushes around the room to.
None of us could afford Album’s, let alone develop the attention span to sit down and listen to one whole side of just one person. I remember my Dad playing Rod Stewarts Atlantic Crossing from start to finish and me and my sister thinking it was nearly the equivalent of sitting on your hands for an entire summer holiday. The closet we got to listening to a whole album was when my sister got Grease for Christmas and that just felt like a greatest hits package.
As I got older I got more educated with my attention span to music, two of the first albums I brought for myself were greatest hits packages, David Bowies Changes and Once upon a time from Siouxsie and the Banshees, these eased me into the idea of listening to the whole album as a complete work. Frustratingly the first non greatest hits record album I brought was Outlandos De Amour by The Police, which is basically the type of album that is four great singles and a load of shite. The real breakthrough came with Dare by The Human League I use to listen to that all the way through side one and flip it straight over to side two, with my massive WH Smith headphones at full volume, on what I thought at the time was a fucking journey into outer space, I had never heard of such weird bleeping and drum machines before I was mainly been use to Boney M, The Nolan’s and anything else my sister forced upon me.
Pretty much from that moment on I’ve always tried to listen to music as a body of work as presented by the artist, but most of the time I get the feeling that they don’t put in as much effort as I do putting them together. Take Park life by Blur, some great tracks of there, but the running order is completely shite and there are a couple of really duff tracks. The pursuit of the ultimate album that satisfy my required criteria is my endless quest, the criteria is simple, it must be able to take me on a journey, have tracks that all become favourites at different times and can be instantly related to disastrous relationships during the time of release ( the last one I’ve made up).
Incidentally Atlantic Crossing is a great album to listen to and not just because my Dad forced me to, I like it and it doesn’t remind me of him, side one is fast and side two is soppy, that’s me. Last night I listened to Radiohead’s OK Computer that for me is one of the closet things to perfection for a whole album it perfectly sums up the end of the century angst, loads of fantastic moments and is totally fucking depressing. Actung baby by U2 and I fucking hate U2 but that’s good, Wish you were here by Pink Floyd, Born to Run by Bruce, The Clash First album and Bat Out of Hell, all on the list of great albums, REM Out of Time, Carole Kings Tapestry and Marvin Gaye’s What Going on, I do go on!
I must confess with the advent of the iPod I am slowly giving up my attention span and in a small way I am still sitting on Jackie’s bedroom floor loading up my playlist like I did that record player. The difference is I guess that I can don’t have to carry a giant box around with me anymore or be forced into wearing my sister pink leggings for her friends amusement.
What's your favourite ?
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