Of course I could go into this whole spiel about how music is subjective and not objective but it would just be a lie. Or, I could have spent the week looking up pieces of obscure music which would build up a picture of me as an intelligent and sensitive soul with exquisite taste. Or, I could just be honest and mention the fact that the music I like is not cool, has never been cool (even when it was cool) and will never be cool. I’m going for the third option.

The music I like is not cool, has never been cool (even when it was cool) and will never be cool. It’s not my fault. I blame my parents. Nothing to do with their musical taste – they’ve always been way cooler than I am – just the fact that they aren’t American. You see I should have been American. It would have made much more sense. I’m not saying that my musical taste would have been any better or that Americans have bad taste in music, but at least there’s a social group that I could have belonged to - White Trash.

Look, just go here and you’ll see what I mean. Are you back yet? Good. Understand now. Despite the fact that I spent years in London, fully immersed (some would say drownded) in the music scene, I wasn’t the cool one. I just basked in the ice reflected from F. As long as I looked fierce (and kept my mouth shut) I passed for one of them. It wasn’t that I hated the music of the indie scene, it’s just that everyone took it so damn seriously. Obviously the bands had to take it seriously – it’s their job. But the audience? I know everyone has a band they listen to when their depressed – you know – the one best listened to in the dark with a large bottle of wine and the knowledge that you are but an insignificant cog in a gigantic wheel. But surely, when your out on the town, dressed up in your best (or worst – with London fashions it’s often difficult to tell) surely then, you need something a bit high octane to bop to.

So if you’re expecting an insight into new and exciting bands. Forget it. I don’t have any. It’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant new and exciting bands out there. I just don’t know of them. From the music I like – I’ve gone backwards not forwards, looking up what influenced them, where they came from and how it all links together. Not that you’ll get any insight into that from these questions. They’re all slanted to capture a certain moment of time and it’s just bloody typical that the soundtrack to my biopic is one that you could use for an episode of Miami Vice.

1. A track from your early childhood

Although I have hazy fleeting memories of a time when I had no memory – brief glimpses of sensations and emotions: a dark room, the light of a door opening, the bars of my cot against the shine and the feel of feet encased in socks against sheets – my earliest proper memories are of music. Apparently though it started even earlier than that. My Nan has a tape of my dad playing and me singing/lisping along to “blackbird singing in the dead of night”. I couldn’t have been more than three and a half at the time. The strange thing is that I remember being told about the tape and I remember hearing the tape years later (it’s the sort of thing your grandma is bound to dig out of the cupboard, when you take a boyfriend to visit for the first time) but I don’t remember the lyrics other than first two lines until I looked it up to put the link on.

I can remember standing in the front room of my great grannies house engrossed in Bohemian Rhapsody video when it first came out (she died when I was 5 so do the maths but I stopped counting at 27) being almost hypnotised by the combination of the music and the strange swirling pictures in front of me.

Or walking along one of the lines (a netball court or something like that) painted on the school playground of my infant school and singing Ray Charles Hit the Road Jack. We moved away from that particular school when I was 7 so it must have been before that. I have no idea where I heard the track – probably on the radio, as it wasn’t my parent’s sort of thing at all – but the repetition of it must have stuck in my head. I remember being there so clearly. The dull wet grey of the playground, the sandstone wall in front of me, and more than that, my first perfect memory- being so totally engrossed in the moment, balancing along that painted line and singing/speaking the lyrics to myself.

I suppose it’s hardly surprising that herebe and I are obsessed with music. We grew up surrounded by the stuff. Piles of albums littered the house, albums often bought for the covers (Roger Dean was a favourite). A 24 track sat atop the dining room table; the sliders, knobs, and dials, wildly tempting to tiny fingers. The shelves on the far wall held glowering reel to reels, miles of tape whirring and spinning and making a weird catching clicky noise when it reached the end. Keyboards, the primitive sort, great walls of patchbays rising above them, were stacked up in layers, their keys kicking a heavysoft thump when pressed. Sofa’s and chairs were littered with guitars and there was usually a drum kit kicking around the place (most often in the bathroom – all those tiles make for good acoustics) The dining room itself was papered with egg boxes to muffle the noise of the stereo that was linked up to a stage PA (which had speakers bigger than I was – a fact that awed and amazed me when I was little) which was never turned up past 5 unless we were in the garden – otherwise you didn’t hear the music anymore – you just felt the vibrations.

The joy of it was that none of it was forbidden “grownups only” territory. So although there was a brief storm when herebe decided to test the sharpness of his new buck knife on the mixing desk (I think he was all of 5, but had a weapons cache he could have used to equip a guerrilla unit), for most of the time and provided we treated the gear with respect we were shown how to use it and left to our own devices.

Everyone we knew played something. From Spider who didn’t know the name of the notes but if you showed him where to put his fingers could play better than Stanley Clarke to S who thought (mistakenly) that he was the Mahavishnu orchestra, a typical weeks house party would involve some sort of album being recorded: tracks being laid down, tapes being spliced, rewound, stuck together backwards, forwards, inside out and upside down. The finished product would then be shoved into a drawer somewhere - in keeping with the times, the destination was not as important as the journey. We had the technology, and if we didn’t then mum and dad would take themselves off to the Manor and use theirs (thus giving rise to one of mum’s (many) immortal lines “Mike Oldfield? God, he was an annoying little so and so”).

Strangely enough, the two songs I would associate most with my early childhood are both songs I didn’t know the names of until I was much older. The first of these is lady elanor by Lindisfarne. It’s a classic song of its time – taking more than a few liberties not only with Poes the Fall of the House of Usher but also (if you get a copy and listen to the backing vocals) with the concept of singing in tune Apparently when I was little, this was my lullaby – complete with guitar accompaniment. I don’t remember this, but I do remember that when I heard it played years later (at a new years party given by jboys family when the inner circle – his parents and ours and us were sitting round the table, drinking and singing and generally taking our own liberties with the concept of key) from the first line of “glassy faced musicians…” I knew all the words. Its now one of the songs that I’d take with me to a desert island, not just because of all the memories it holds, but because of the wonderful circular (you would think that living with a guitarist I’d know the proper term for it and I did ask F and he explained something complicated about changing time signatures) guitar which keeps goes round and round and round, almost catching itself each time (apparently the first instance of this is Jeff Becks take on Ravels Bolero and the technique was then taken up and used by Jimmy Page in Kashmir. I’m paraphrasing here so excuse any important omissions. It is – or so I’ve just been told – hardly surprising that this was the case as in both instances you have a drummer, Keith Moon in Beck’s Bolero and Bonham in Kashmir, who elect to follow the guitar rather than holding to a straight rhythm with the bass line. In fact, when it comes to the Who – the reason they had such a unique sound is down to the fact that in that band it’s the bass and drums that take the lead – Keith Moon playing to the orchestra he has in his head and cueing in the horn sections he was hearing – while Townshend and Daltrey were left to keep the engine going. This apparently why Townshend never degenerates into long and winding solos. So now you know)

A month ago, the BBC ran a series of programmes on the development of British Folk Music. I watched them avidly. Not because I was so desperately interested in the development of the British Folk scene – although I do admit a sneaking fascination to it, especially once it stopped drinking real ale and started taking acid. The real reason though was that the piece the Beeb used as a lead in was a song I hadn’t heard for years. It was the piece that dad warmed his fingers up with when he first picked up a guitar on arriving home, the one song that could be guaranteed to get all the musicians scattered round the house playing as one. But for xx years I had no idea of what it was called. Now, thanks to the wonder that is television - I know.
Davy Graham’s Angi (later changed to Anji to fit better with the whole Eastern trip that everyone went on around that time). Up to that point, I didn’t know that it was a ‘proper” piece of music at all. Throughout (and despite) all the music I’d listened to, all the albums and bands I’d explored – I’d never heard the piece being played anywhere except in our house.

Obviously, the old adage “you always prefer the version you hear first” is correct. I could tell you that I prefer dad’s version because it reminds me of the long hot summers, no school (we were rarely sent to school when dad was home – partly because we saw him too infrequently for normal rules to apply but the reality was probably that having to be back in time to pick us up from school was too restricting for our parents schedule at that point) and the whole golden force field that we tend to put around out childhoods. To a certain extent that’s true. But the reality is that I prefer dad’s version because it’s faster and not so sweet.

2. A track that you associate with your first love

Bloody hell, which one? I’ve had several first loves. This isn’t because I’m a shallow obsessive person (and anyone who knows me and feels the need to interject something sarcastic at this point can just fuck off). Far from it, it’s just that I believed so profoundly in the idea of love being something that you only ever experienced once in a lifetime that every time I fell in love, that was it, and all the other times before that had been merely chimeras. As you can imagine, this led to an emotionally draining couple of years. Luckily, once I’d untangled the hormones (mine and theirs) from the emotions (mine – men don’t have them – at least not the ones I dated) then things got much less tiring (although then I had to cope with all the nice girls, who didn’t – or at least didn’t talk about it)

Following the line of thought that you only fall in love once, then the person is F and the song is hooked on a feeling from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack (although we all knew it as the Ouga Chaka song) At the time F was living in a house with god knows how many other Frenchmen (and Jgirl). It wasn’t exactly a squat because they all paid rent (at some time or another) and it wasn’t a commune because there weren’t any lentils, but the principle was the same. You slept where you found a bed, all food was shared (mostly food parcels sent from France – I do remember making pate de fois gras sandwiches with Asda saver white sliced bread because we didn’t have anything else in the house to eat) and there was a party all night, every night. We’d start off slow. A few songs, a bit of playing and singing (mostly old Rod Stewart as little O had a voice that was a dead ringer for him) and once the alcohol had taken effect then the bad 70’s disco would go on. By the time we’d got round to the Ouga Chaka song we were all already on the floor giving it our best Travolta moves. When day broke most of the furniture was too – so we’d pin a sheet over the window to shut out the light and carry on. The parties usually ended at about ten when one of the Frenchmen would brew up some fresh coffee and we’d sit around, sipping expressos and discussing politics and Balzac, a conversation that I was usually barred from due to the fact that I don’t speak French, I don’t do politics (at least not like the French who treat it as an ongoing soap opera), I hadn’t read Balzac and I was usually nursing a hangover the size of Russia. Happy days as my auntie V would say.

The thing is though, you’re going to get awfully bored with this, if for every mention of love I talk about F. I’ll go a bit further back and try to sort out something different.

So, shall I tell you about the charming Robert Plant look alike that I was absolutely besotted with when I was 16 (this was it – wedding bells and happily ever after as far as I was concerned) and who was equally charming to the twenty other girls he was two timing me with at the same time, despite his protestations of undying love. You know the one. The one that would waltz me round Greys monument in the middle of the night. God he was gorgeous. Thick as two short planks but who cared about that. He was a great kisser and could spout more sweet nothings than an explosion in a confectioners. Oh, I could tell you all about him. But it would be so embarrassing to admit that his particular soundtrack was the Whitesnake album (you know the one that had the bint doing aerobics over sports cars on all the videos) that being the album he left behind when he vanished into the night. Well not so much vanished – it would have been less mortifying to my already shrivelled to the size of a walnut psyche if he had –instead he just decamped to a girl who had her own flat and was therefore a safe bet. Looking back I don’t blame him. It must tend to put a crimp into ones burgeoning sexuality to have your girlfriend’s mum shouting, “do you want a cup of tea” up the stairs every 5 minutes (though it will be a trick that I will use should God ever hate me enough to give me a daughter.)

Or, there was my first boyfriend – no my second (they sort of overlapped a bit – I was going through my Janis “you got it today you don’t wear it tomorrow” phase). He was a glam. Or was it a goth? It was difficult to tell at times. No, I was right the first time – he was a glam, but the purple eyeshadow meant it could have gone either way. He was completely obsessed with Nikki Sixx but despite this, the only thing on his stereo was WASP. Actually though – now I come to think of it, I’m not sure that he counts as a first love because I don’t remember any emotional yo-yoing of my heart about him. I sort of dated him a couple of times and then we split up – although I did agonise over breaking up with him (I’d never broken up with anyone before and so ended up using the time honoured method of a message carried from my best friend at the time to his best friend at the time). To be honest, I think that I only dated him cos he asked me to, at that point I didn’t realise that when a boy asked you out – you had the option of saying no. I was working on the much more pragmatic principle that if you were asked then it might be your only ever offer so you better take it. So. No. He doesn’t count as a first love. (And it’s nothing to do with the fact that I utterly refuse to have WASP – Animal Fuck like a beast, as a song to associate with my first love – especially when he didn’t even get to first base.)

What about my first crush? That’s probably more like it. All the girls had a crush on him. I’m not sure why. He wasn’t especially bright, he wasn’t especially witty, he wasn’t especially good looking - he had that rubber lipped Jagger/Tyler thing going on but that was about it (now I come to think of it though, he had quite nice greeny blue eyes, oh and pretty hair – but this was the late eighties- all the boys had pretty hair then and he looked good in jeans and biker jacket too so I suppose he had quite a lot going for him really…) It wasn’t even that he was a particularly nice person – in fact he was shit. Actually that was why all the girls had a crush on him. Because he was a shit. But he was so charming with it that somehow you didn’t mind that - it was just part of his personality. In any case it wasn’t so much that he was intentionally shitty – it was just that he inhabited more realities than we did and on each of those realities - the steady girlfriend who was only around at weekends, the married woman (who was herself scooting round the space/time continuation as she was seeing him on the side of her husband and her regular lover), the girl he was actively trying to bed but who was a devout catholic, and a couple of others – he was a nice person. It was only when reality converged that things got problematic.

My best friend (at the time) and I first met him when we started hanging round Eldon Square on a Saturday. For any non-Geordie reading this, Eldon Square was/is a shopping mall and if you were into rock music (and you had to be – the alternative was either to be a NME reader and who wants to wear a polo neck and trenchcoat all the time, or to be into chart music and therefore a trendy – we call them chavs now) then it was de-rigueur to spend your entire Saturday making a slow pilgrimage round the record shops. Not that you ever bought anything – you never had any money. But, if you were too young to get served in Trillions (the local rock pub) then that was all you had available in the way of entertainment. Saying that, for you not to get served in Trillions you had to be in a pram – I used to bunk off games and go there in my school uniform and I never had a problem getting served (which made for some really interesting English lessons which was the lesson after that).

Anyway, there we were. My friend and I, taking our first faltering steps into the world outside of “people we knew from school” and there he was. (With the obligatory nice but not as sexy friend) For some reason he started talking to us. It soon got be a bit of a habit that we’d meet him every Saturday, and then – all of a sudden – all these people we’d watched wander round the record shops and who were the people we’d wanted to know almost more than anything in the world (I say, almost more than anything in the world because obviously we wanted to know Guns n Roses more than anything else in the world) suddenly became the people we hung out with. I must admit, the novelty of knowing them soon wore off, but that’s life – people are way more interesting when you don’t hear them speak.

I fancied him rotten. But he was much too occupied with his girlfriend, the married woman, the catholic girl and a couple of others to be interested in me. So all we ever did was the usual staring too long at each other, giggling (me) and hair flicking (both of us) and what I thought were some pretty fierce come on lines but in retrospect were as innocent as saying hello. (But can you remember the days when a “ hello” from the right person was a fierce come on line.)

Now if I were to stop the story right here then I’d have to admit that there wasn’t really a song. Because when you’re walking round and round a shopping mall there’s not usually a soundtrack or at least not one that I’d remember. So, the song up to this point would have been Metallica’s Master of Puppets because that was what was painted on the back of his jacket. However there is a final chapter. Although once real boyfriends drifted into my life we stopped meeting on a Saturday, we sort of kept in touch – if by keeping in touch you mean saying hi when we met in the Mayfair (local rockclub – now alas closed down to make room for a cinema or something) and I went off to university. Coming home for the first Christmas holiday I went out as normal on a Friday night and bumped into him in a bar.

To cut a long story short: the absence of any parental “you will be home on the last bus or else you’re grounded for a month” restrictions, feeling fabulous because I’d lost nearly 2 stone after having starved for the past term – because after all if it’s a toss up between food and clubbing which would you choose (at that age?), and generally revelling in not only my new found freedom but also enjoying being blasé about Newcastle because I now went out in London (the ultimate goal of course was to move to LA but London was as far as I could get on a student grant) coupled with the fact that he looked just as good in a denim jacket (times change - even in Newcastle) as he had in a leather one… reader I went home with him.

Sitting on the floor (there wasn’t a sofa, or at least not one that I could see), where so many girls I knew had sat before, playing with cooking fat (his cat – not a euphemism – he did have a cat called cooking fat and another one called Suzy. It was so called because everyone was always tripping over it hence ‘ that cucking fat” – you need the accent to get it right) while he made us a cup of tea (hey this is Newcastle –tea is always served at moments of high emotion. Someone’s dead - I’ll put the kettle on. “Your mother’s just run off with a crack smoking, jailbreaking gal from sunderland? - Do you take one lump or two?”. “You’re pregnant and the popes the father? – I’ll break out the rich tea biscuits, this is going to be a long night”) and there was my song. As if made for this moment. Dan Reed Network – Rainbow Child.

(Its still quite an embarrassing song mind you– but it’s less embarrassing than “in the still of the night” or animal fuck like a beast, or master of puppets.)

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