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...

1745. That’s how many CDs I own. Yeah... that is quite a lot, isn’t it? Whilst prices vary enormously, at a rough estimate that means I’ve spent around £10,000 on music. Of course, that ignores the cassettes, CD singles, and vinyl 7”, 12” and albums. If only there had been some handy way of just paying a sum each month and listening to whatever I wanted – I wouldn’t have a wall full of shiny silver discs. Just to depress myself, let’s assume a streaming music service (like Spotify) costs £10 a month. On that basis, I could have used it for 1,000 months for the same outlay as the CDs alone. Or about 83 years. Ah. Still, there’s something nice about having a physical product, and I’d always presumed I was the righteous one – until I got the calculator out a couple of minutes ago. For those of you fortunate enough to be growing up in the time of streaming services for music, and video content, you can get just about anything recorded, ever, to enjoy whenever and wherever you w...

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...

Streaming? Er... I watched an episode of Top of the Pops from 1986 earlier. At the time it was originally broadcast, I was 18. Yes, I am that old. At that point in my life, I’d grown up absolutely loving music. TOTP was one of my essential sources of the all important new songs and chart placings, along with Radio 1’s Top 40 show. I was buying lots of vinyl. Recording lots of cassettes. Things were fantastic. But I was just getting the first inkling that there were new styles, bands and artists appearing that – and this was quite a shock to me – I wasn’t particularly enthralled by. Why? Well, up to that point I’d assumed my love of all types of music would be everlasting. To discover otherwise was a bit of shock. Still, the years rolled by and there was still a lot of great music around. True, Rave/House never did anything for me, and most Rap doesn’t float my boat. Sections of the 1990s were rubbish, from my point of view. I was buying lots of CDs. And still recording tapes...