A short while ago I got a phone call, quite out of the blue, from a former girlfriend (Gill), who informed be that a mutual friend of ours (Rosemary) had died. I knew that this friend’s husband (Ian) had died relatively recently too and felt suitably sorry that we had neither kept in touch more, nor managed to see each other for many years. What was even more remarkable was that the couple had left me their music collection, something that I found to be both surprising and humbling.

To explain how this came about I need to go back 36 years to one of the two big changes in my life, both of which were marked by the death of one of my parents. It was 1988 and I was 24 years old when my mother had died of cancer after a nearly year long illness. I was working in a bank and in the thrall of an evangelical Christianity which, amongst other things, had taken me away from my love of music (I even went to a Cliff Richard Gospel Show for goodness sake). However, I had also taken the opportunity to visit India, ostensibly to look at missionary projects over there but, ironically, became fascinated by the temples and rituals of Tamil Nadu; not so much from a spiritual point of view but remember being caught in the incredible bustle, sights and sounds of a local festival… and remember lying in a mosquito-netted bed out on a veranda listening to the amazing noise and rhythms of something that was well beyond my experience. It was a thoroughly life changing moment both spiritually and psychologically.

It was the beginning of the end of my belief in any religious system, but the start of a lifelong interest in the nature and concept of religion. So, in the few months after my mother died, I left my childhood home to study religion at the University of Wales in Lampeter, and moved from a position of devout belief to atheism… it was quite a ride, but in many ways it felt quite natural.

That is all background to help explain how I ended up in the middle of West Wales at the age of 24 feeling somewhat discombobulated. As I have already mentioned I had somewhat lost my interest in music, one that had ridden the wave of glam and punk, then moving into post-punk, New Romanticism, ska and the new wave of British heavy metal… but coming to an abrupt halt somewhere in 1983/4… with only my legacy record collection and a few more recent releases by New Order and Gary Numan marking any continued interest.

I thought that University would be the moment when I re-discovered the radical scenes that I had once enjoyed, but remember my immense disappointment on my first night hearing ‘Brothers In Arms’ coming out of a number of rooms in my block… This was 1988 and the mass-market music scene was not what it was… the bands from that era that I now listen to were now less evident as the country perhaps became more conservative again.

I was happy in my new environment though, it was a lovely quiet area which allowed for much contemplation on nearby beaches and hills, and the sort of education which took in the major world faiths as well as philosophical and cultural theory… it was a long way from my previous life, and those who knew me from before said that I had changed a great deal in a short time… I certainly felt a great sense of release…

…and this took another step as a result of Gill meeting Rosemary, who lived locally but had no connection with the life of the University. We started going round to Rosemary and Ian’s house for meals… which led into long evenings of drinking, smoking and listening to Ian’s music collection. Ian was around ten years older than me, and so had had a similar musical revelation at a peak moment as I had had with punk. The late 1960s and early 1970s were certainly an amazing time for music… the difference was that Ian had carried on with his musical journey where I had fallen by the wayside…

As a result, those evenings became revelations for me as we explored contemporary bands that I had never heard of: The Pixies, Ministry, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Nirvana and Sonic Youth to name but a few. Those nights totally re-ignited my love for music and my desire to explore new horizons… I had fallen into the nostalgia trap of only liking music from my youth and not taking time to let my taste grow and mature… from then on I have gone through all sorts of phases, but I have never stopped searching out the new and exploring the past which I had previously ignored (see my piece on rediscovering Black Sabbath, for instance)… without those nights in that smoky room in West Wales, drunk on red wine and cheap brandy, I may have never come to have the renewed the love of music that persists to this day (and is the inspiration for this website).

Which brings me back to that phone call that took me back to West Wales earlier this year. I was, of course, apprehensive about going back… I am not generally the sort who feels the need to revisit old places and attend such as reunions, but I was also intrigued how this place in which I had spent four happy and decisive years of my life would be. In some ways it was disappointing… the sizeable student population of this relatively small town was much diminished, and it felt like it was returning to a previous sleepiness. Going back to Rosemary and Ian’s house was also strange… yes there were ghosts, both in the town and in that previously smoky lounge, but not the overwhelming emotion that I had expected… maybe feared… what there was was Ian’s vinyl collection which, numbered about 500 lps.

As I began to go through them it struck me that this was the collection of someone who loved music… who, like me, bought records to listen to and not just to say that they possessed them… and listen to them he certainly had… around half were so absolutely scratched that they looked completely unplayable… every album seems to have been played many many times. But, strangely it was not a collection that I had particularly heard as Ian switched decisively to CDs early on, and it was these that we mainly listened to.

As a result Ian has had a whole new effect on my musical taste and understanding from beyond the grave… I’m an only child, but I imagine that this is what it would have been like to go through the record collection of an older brother. Ian bought records voraciously from around 1968 onwards, and I visualised him pouring over the Melody Maker and spending all his spare money on records (as I did a decade later with Sounds), and while only half the records I found were remotely playable I have had an amazing time going through each one individually and cataloguing them on Discogs… going through the minutiae of different labels, pressing, misprints and runout matrices…

But most of all it has been about the music… I have rediscovered and extended my understand of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Syd Barrett, Tom Waits, Pere Ubu and Brian Eno, have got to know more about Soft Machine, Traffic, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Santana, Allen Toussaint and Frank Zappa… I’ve even expanded my Joy Division/ New Order collection… and I am going to have another good go at listening to Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and The Grateful Dead… nothing is off limits…

Moreover, perhaps what is even more exciting is that I am learning about the influences of some of my favourite bands… hearing effects, chords and motifs that are very familiar to me, but in other settings… it feels like fitting new pieces into an intricate sonic jigsaw and further adding to my pleasure as I view it as a whole… it also weirdly tells me that I was on the right track…

What I have also learned is that new pressings of old albums are not necessarily the best pressings… and some of these albums have cleaned up amazingly well. For instance, the first pressing of the first Black Sabbath album sounds just incredible, where it is playable… and even those which are a bit more crackly sound very atmospheric…

When I first brought these 250+ records home… I brought a little bit of Rosemary and Ian’s home back with me as the records emitted the smell of what was probably thousands of cigarettes and joints smoked in that lounge over the years… it was like they were reminding me where and who they were from, and this had added to the whole experience… but as that dissipates what I am left with is a legacy of Ian’s great music taste which he has, perhaps unwittingly, passed on to me… all I can say that I am immensely appreciative and humbled to take over its custodianship… and that exploring it is proving to be an immense pleasure and education.

It would have been hard to imagine lying on that veranda in India listening to the hubbub of an all-night Hindu festival, or the silence of a hospital waiting room on the night my mother died, or on that September night in 1988 when I disappointing heard ‘Money For Nothing’ coming out of neighbouring rooms… that the sounds that I would be listening to over 35 years later would pre-date all these moments and yet feel as contemporary and relevant to me as anything I had heard in the meantime, but they do… so thank you Ian, and Rosemary, for entrusting them to me… I am listening and will listen well!

-o0o-

Hey, 

Thanks very much for reading my blog, I really appreciate this. I write it as a labour of love to help me enjoy music, and to give something back to the many talented people who put out these incredible sounds.

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