Black Plastic Gold

A very Happy New year to you all, I trust that it will be a blinder for you what ever happens.

Now that Christmas has sadly passed into a distant memory I must reflect upon the totally appropriate Christmas gift the present Mrs Rock God purchased for me. This was a record deck, a hi-fi turntable, something on which I can play my vast collection of Vinyl albums once more.

You may think that in this day and age of the CD or better still the MP3 player where I store my entire record collection from nearly forty years of musical fanaticism onto a machine the size of credit card, and it’s only half full, that the purchase of something as archaic as a ‘record player’ is a bit of a case of buying something for the sake of it.

However, there is method in my madness and the inspiration was very timely.

As I have mentioned several times in these pages, I used to perform in a band called ‘Amaziah’ and we recorded an album which has since become highly collectible.

Back in the summer I received an e-mail from a chap who being a DJ of note had with his colleagues been reflecting on the songs that had been the soundtrack of their youth. Blow me down but the guy has picked a song off of the Amaziah album and was requesting that he take the song, re-master it and then turn it into a 10” dance remix.

This has now been done and I eagerly awaited the finished result. I have never had the honour of having been ‘re-mixed’ before, let alone to become a dance track (talk about getting down with the kids).

The trouble of course was, like so many now, the 10” re-mix would be on vinyl and I would have had nothing to play it on. Problem solved, my wife had no idea what to buy me for Crimbo and a quick trip to Richer Sounds solved the problem in one go.

Of course, now I can play my old vinyls again I have been embarking upon a massive trip down memory lane, a journey which very much maps out my growth as a person and as a performer.

The very first album I purchased was ‘Alan Freeman’s a History of Pop’, which featured songs from both the 50’s and the 60’s. I have always maintained that I was grounded in good old fashion rock & roll and this record proved it.

My first ’45 single’ purchase (remember those seven inches of wonder which usually meant the investment of a couple of weeks pocket money and driving your parents crazy playing the same song over and OVER again) was not quite so auspicious. It was ‘Do you want to touch’ by Gary Glitter. Now in the light of recent years events the answer to that question would be a resounding ‘Absolutely NOT’, however; you have to remember that this was the 70’s and Glam was very much the thing and GG was the king of glam.

I hope that I redeemed myself with my second single purchase, which was ‘Part of the Union’ featuring an amazing honkey tonk piano solo by a then unknown keyboard player ‘Rick Wakeman (I was actually asked to tour with him as a support many years later, shame it didn’t actually happen in the end).

My album purchases started off being, shall we say, a tad embarrassing to say the least, however; I look back now with great fondness and pride. ‘Mud Rock Vol 1’, it cost me £1.99 and took me weeks to save up for. Listening to it now it sadly isn’t that great, but then it was the bees knees.

Does anybody remember ‘Top of the Poppers’? My copy was from 1972 and featured artists covering the hits of the day such as ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ by little Jimmy Osmond. ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ by the New Seekers and a song by a band I hadn’t heard of before but who blew my socks off, ‘Gud By T’Jane’ by a band called Slade.

From that point on I stopped buying pop records and purchased stuff that had more of a rock element to them. Of course anything and everything by Slade, I became and remained a HUGE fan (more of them at a later date), Status Quo, Deep Purple, Mott the Hoople and then a massive find deep in the middle of 1973 by an unknown band of the time ‘Queen’.

All these records I still keep and I intend to play them all again faithfully and religiously despite having virtually all of them on my Ipod (except ‘Top of the Poppers’ maybe). The thing is, as much as I adore the medium of digital music and downloads you just can’t recreate the sheer joy of cradling the album sleeve whilst you listen to your knew purchase that it has taken you weeks to save for and track down and purchase.

You also can’t recreate that gut wrenching moment when the damn thing sticks and then scratches right across the full length of the record leaving a pure white groove as it goes. Now that I don’t miss!!!!