grumpyf1

I wish I could go back there again...  ELO lyrics aside, One thing that has become increasingly clear as I've got older is that, broadly speaking, a lot of the music since the 80s sucks. Big time. Prior to the 80s it was pretty good, but the peak was definitely during that golden decade. Annoyingly, that neat "best decade" argument isn't quite right for me. By the late 80s, with more hip-hop, rap, rave culture and shoegazing tunes coming in, the later 80s become patchier. A steady downhill slump was in progress, that continues to this day. There's still good stuff out there - just less of it. Here's where it gets interesting, and I'd like to test a theory out with you. I was a teenager between 1980 and 1986, and that's pretty much the exact years my favourite music comes from. Ponder that for a second, and have a think about your own musical Golden Years - does that work for you too? If pushed to make a call - and it is a tricky one - I'd go with 1...

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve never heard of Mark Hollis. Even though he was in the news this week, following his untimely death at the age of 64, the passing of the 80s musician briefly made the front pages of news websites in the UK, but was quickly displaced by Brexit shenanigans, the unseasonably warm weather, and yet more Brexit. Hollis was the lead singer of the band Talk Talk, who formed in 1981. Over roughly the following decade, they released a couple of dozen singles and a handful of albums, with top chart positions of 13 for a reissue of the “It’s My Life” single and 8 for the “The Colour Of Spring” album. Somewhat hard to categorise, calling them “synth-pop” somewhat unfairly implies an overtly poppy, lightweight, sound – and they were far from that. As their music became more experimental in the mid-eighties, “post-rock” or “art rock” might be fairer. They did sound different to everyone else – and hypnotically so in some cases, with hints of early Rox...

Sorry, just checking... where are we meant to be blessing the rain again..? What was the most streamed song in 2017? Something by Ed Sheeran, maybe? Or Adele? Nope. It wasn’t even a song from that year. It was quadruple platinum, soft-rock, 1982 epic “Africa” by Toto. Yes, the vintage track saw off all the newcomers a couple of years ago, continuing it’s relentless march through a rhyming desert landscape of baffling lyrics and impassioned vocal pleas. And repeated blessings of the rain. Definitely in the ‘Marmite’ category (you either love it or hate it), the classic continues to make the headlines, and there’s nothing a hundred men or more could ever do to stop it. Just two months ago, a DJ in Bristol went for the “ultimate guilty pleasure” track as his choice for a same-record-all-night charity gig. After five hours on loop, I bet the drums really were echoing that night. Even the band’s Steve Lukather suggested in a Tweet that the Africa marathon “could be worse than wa...

Old... Gold. There really is something rather joyous about seeing a favourite band live. And there’s something rather miraculous if you’re seeing them getting on for 40 years since you first discovered them. I was lucky enough to see both Midge Ure (former owner of pointy sideburns, Vienna means nothing to him) and The Human League (still concerned in case you don’t want them, baby) last weekend, and both were fabulous. Both were also hitting the top of the charts in the early 80s and whilst they have had long careers, many people will remember them largely for their first flourishes of success. Neither Midge, nor The League’s front-man, Phil Oakey, are exactly youngsters now, with bus-passes just around the corner, and the interesting hairstyles long gone. But boy, they still go for it, rattling out the hits and taking their audience back to a time before worrying about pension funds and aching knees became the norm. Neither insisted on playing much in the way of later nu...

There are many good explanations as to why I have poor memory skills. Drinking. Smoking. Styling mousse over-indulgence in my early 20s. But there is one less obvious one... Whilst the march of time seems the most plausible, scientific scenario, the gentle decay of my grey matter is only a minor contributory factor in the great scheme of things. For sure, genetics comes into it too – my Mum had a similarly scatterbrained storage system, whereby important stuff like her bank card PIN eluded her, but what I wore on my 4th birthday was recalled with photographic detail. I’m utterly hopeless with road names and numbers. If I head to the tropical climes of the South, I know I use the M6 for the first bit, but I’m damned if I can remember any of the others. I know the name of my road in Arnside, and I recognise a lot of the other names if they’re mentioned, but can’t quite work out which name goes with what road. It would explain why I didn’t get that job as an ambulance driver. ...