Musical Discoveries
On the Readers Recommend Overspill blog, poster DarceysDad has a disturbing realisation
More seriously, Abahachi’s comment (about new genre discovery and subsequent borderline-obsessive catching-up) got me thinking, and I’ve been hit with a freighttrain-sized realisation: Any band/genre that I believe I discovered for myself is likely to still be right up there in my all-time faves. Anything I can specifically remember being introduced to by someone is much more likely to have fallen away again in my estimation (or at least in the frequency of plays). This is REALLY scary, and not a little conflicted: random picking of songs I hear via radio and magazine covermounts thus appear to mean more to me than the considered opinions of my friends! Am I some kind of anti-social loner, musically? A cooler-than-you snob? What the f???????
I don’t think that’s true of me; I find there’s little correlation between how much I like any artist and how I first ‘discovered’ them. It’s a random mix of recommendations from offline and online friends, radio, reviews in the media (usually the least reliable), covermount disks, seeing them live at festivals or as support acts, or in one case, through being invited to a gig by an actual member of the band.
I’ve thought about some of the bands I’ve really been into over the years, those for whom I’ve got most or all their albums, or seen live many times.
- Rainbow: I’ve mentioned this one before, but they were the very first hard rock band I ever got into, and it was hearing ‘Eyes of the World’ on Nicky Horne’s late night show “Your mother wouldn’t like it”.
- Pink Floyd: Blame Nicky Horne for this as well; he played “The Wall” more or less to death. That was actually the first album I bought.
- Deep Purple: The natural follow-up from Rainbow. In my case I bought an album more or less at random from a secondhand record shop for a couple of quid. It turned out to be the classic “Made in Japan”. Pity there was a bad scratch right across ‘Child in Time’.
- Blue Öyster Cult: This was was the first one I can definitely track down to a personal recommendation - it was a college friend who played me ‘Astronomy’ from the live album “Some Enchanted Evening”.
- Black Sabbath: Hearing “Heaven and Hell” and “Children of the Sea” on the late Tommy Vance’s “Friday Rock Show”. As soon as I heard those two slices of operatic metal melodrama I knew I had to get that album the day it was released. Even to this day I prefer them with Dio than with Ozzy.
- Marillion: They were the first completely new band that I got into right at the start of the career. I remember hearing their demo on the Friday Rock Show, then seeing them at the 1982 Reading Rock Festival. I bought their debut single and album on first release, and saw them blow Black Sabbath off stage a year later at Reading in 1983. And I’ve followed them (and Fish’s solo career) ever since.
- Porcupine Tree: The Porkies (as they’re known) sort of crept up on me. I bought “The Sky Moves Sideways” largely out of curiosity after hearing Steve Wilson’s work on Fish’s excellent “Sunsets on Empire”. I followed up with “Stupid Dream” and “Lightbulb Sun” on release, which got a few plays but never really became favourites. Then NRT told me in a blog comment that they were playing at Manchester Academy, and I decided to go along. On seeing them live, their music suddenly made sense.
- Mostly Autumn. You might not have guessed if you’re a regular reader of this blog. But like Porcupine Tree, they’re a band that didn’t happen overnight with me. It started with the cover mount disk on “Classic Rock” containing ‘Half the Mountain’. That encouraged me to buy the album “The Last Bright Light” which became a regular in the CD player. I bought “Passengers” when it came out, but just like Porcupine Tree, it all made sense the first time I’ve saw them live, a low-key gig at Jillys in Manchester that I only found out about by pure chance.
- The Reasoning. Again, this started with a covermount disc. Not The Reasoning themselves, but Rachel’s previous band Karnataka, with the superlative ‘Talk to Me’ from their live album “Strange Behaviour”. Before I got the chance to see them live, Karnataka imploded. I joined TheStorm yahoogroup to find out what on earth had happened. I found that nobody was willing to say what happened, but I did find it was an quite an interesting discussion list, which was where I first heard of the formation of The Reasoning, and of their first ever gig in Swansea, which made the journey down to.
- Breathing Space. I said that I got into one band by being invited by a band member. Breathing Space was that band. The occasion was the launch party for Mostly Autumn’s “Heart Full of Sky” in London. The gig finished at a ridiculously early time of half past nine, and Anne Marie Helder invited the entire audience to pub round the corner, which wasn’t actually that large a place. That’s where I first met Livvy Sparnenn, Mostly Autumn’s backing singer, who also sings lead for Breathing Space. She was very persuasive when it came to their gig in York the following weekend
