Last year I filled in time by posting selected photographs. I may yet return to that, but I thought that a slow trawl through the largely embarrassing and obscure depths of my musical history might amuse an enlighten. If it's good enough for Tim Burgess, it's good enough for me. (Talking of Tim Burgess, I first saw The Charlatans in the late 90s in the depths of their unpopularity. Midweek gig, half-full in a provincial town. They played like it was a packed stadium and they were at no. 1, so I've always respected that band).
As luck would have it, I'm half-way through photographing my 7" vinyl collection, so I'll post a picture and hopefully a recording of each song. Some caveats: I listen to a wide range of music that isn't reflected in this particular format - almost none of my classical and folk collection is on 7". I've never stopped buying music in large quantities but I rarely buy 7"s any more. LPs for rock/indie, CDs for classical and the occasional download these days, but never singles: I'm no longer as excited by the immediate as I was then. Nor do I have a weekly music press to tell me what to think. I was such an NME victim, partially mitigated by being in Cymru Cymraeg at a particularly interesting period.
So what you're really getting is my teenage and early-20s idea of what was cool, plus all the music forced on me by the charmingly insistent staff of Recordiau'r Cob in Bangor, but minus the 400 rarities I sol in the early-2000s when my £6000 p.a. PhD scholarship proved insufficient. I'd go in each week from 1993-8 and order from the list of next week's releases. Then they'd tell me that everything I wanted was awful and add their own choices. Not entirely coincidentally, their additions were by their own bands or the record labels they ran. It felt like something between a mugging and an education.
Because I'm a nerd, my collection is in alphabetical order, so there's no slow chronological revelation or development. Hopefully though there might be the occasional re-evaluation of the ephemeral. Inevitably though, the first band is A. How they must have chortled when they picked their name. Guaranteed to be on the front rack in every record shop. The hilarity was doubled when they called one song 'No. 1' (spoiler: it wasn't). Genius! But history has the last laugh because they're essentially undiscoverable in the era of web searches.
I don't think you need to hear every A single I bought, and I clearly didn't feel the need to buy their album - though I did buy both releases of 'No. 1', but my memory is of catchy pop-punk.
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