Column 1 - Nostalgia

I have been uploading my music collection on to my computer, prior to a move to Australia. I'm aware of the loss of sound quality thus engendered, but feel quite strongly that CD was a rubbish format anyway. I have been caught clutching certain vinyl records close to my bosom, vowing never to be unfaithful again. I have been listening to snatches of the weirdest of people - Cliff Richard (British God-fearing, tennis-bothering scourge of righteous criticism, who has undoubtedly recorded the worst series of Christmas songs ever); BeyonceBeyonce (although when I realised how much energy and joy was being communicated, I left the album on repeat the entire evening); Echo And The Bunnymen (no one in the UK ever liked The Smiths, you know); Nicky Wire (truecore-hating bassist of Welsh iconoclasts Manic Street Preachers who made a solo album full of truecore...)

I was asked by a concerned reader whether it hurt me to behave thus, to part company with my beloved music. 1) I'm not parting company with it, merely saying farewell to imagery and packaging that have always been secondary. 2) She's right, inasmuch as this is not a way to survive, or continue: but there's a great sense of cleansing. The most liberating year of my recent life was in 1999when my future wife and I lived in Australia with only a suitcase each for provision. Even at the age of 19, I felt that my three record cases full of 12-inch vinyl - loved as they indeed were - were a millstone round my scrawny neck, prevented me from enjoying life to anywhere near its extent. 3) Yes it does hurt, yes I feel tearful on occasion, but why look back? That way lies only death.

And without this seismic change happening, I never would have rediscovered such former loved aesthetics such as Mr David Thomas, the former singer with Pere Ubu. During the Eighties, David Thomas released a revelatory series of solo albums in the company of left-field jazz musicians such as saxophonist Lindsay Cooper - some of which touched upon surf music (way before Black Francis, whom he remains a major influence upon) and spoken word. This was some far-out, paranoid shit. Live, David Thomas could come across as an avuncular, scary, pre-apocalypse Orson WellesOrson Welles figure - I caught him one time in Detroit, fronting the incredible Rocket From The Tombs (the band that were one of the primary influences upon No Wave from Buttfuck USA, 1975), and he wielded a walking stick to terrifying effect, sitting down for breathers between his hiccupping stream-of-consciousness vocals. He has a voice, that's for sure - ask Make Up's Ian Svenonius, another figure clearly influenced. The dementedly intellectual Pere Ubu, meanwhile, were so underhanded they once tried to worm their way into the mainstream by supporting Kool And The Gang on tour. Now that's a pairing I would've liked to have caught!

...and because of all this, I get to be listening to X-Ray Spex at 11.04pm; and frankly, anything that causes me to listen to Poly Styrene giddily screeching her way through post-modernist lyrics about existing in a clichéd sterile existence and the parasitic interdependence of friendship, is a very good thing for me. So bollocks to CDs and bollocks to aspirations of librarianship - this boy is breaking free!