LINER NOTES: HARMONY IN MY HEAD [2007-08]

1.     No Pussy Blues – Grinderman

2.     Big in Japan – Tom Waits

3.     The Decision – The Young Knives

4.     Evergreen – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

5.     What Have I Said Now? – The Wedding Present

6.     Wings – The Fall

7.     House of Cards – Radiohead

8.     The Rip – Portishead

9.     Sugar Mountain – Neil Young

10.   Brides of Jesus – Little Feat

11.   The Pink Room – Angelo Badalamenti / David Lynch

12.   Pânico – Mercenarios

13.   Give It Lose It Take It – Field Music

14.   Bennie and the Jets – Elton John

15.   Contact – Bridget Bardot

16.   Lucky Number – Lene Lovich

17.   Harmony in my Head – Buzzcocks

18.   On My Radio – The Selector

19.   Gangsters – The Specials

20.   Pull Up to the Bumper – Grace Jones

21.   Let’s Dance – David Bowie

Bonus Tracks:

22.   L.E.S. Artistes – Santigold

23.   Black Magic – Jarvis Cocker

24.   Prodigal Son – The Rolling Stones

25.   Bird of Beauty – Stevie Wonder

26.   Cracked Actor – David Bowie

27.   Wordy Rappinghood – Tom Tom Club

28.   The Hungry Saw – Tindersticks

In his book A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes affirms that, 'Religious temperament without religious conviction has branded some of the greatest works of the twentieth century.' He offers up Luis Buñuel, Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman and Graham Greene as examples of artistes who have attempted to make sense of suffering in the absence of Christ, to comprehend that which might be deemed sacred when divested of doctrine. Theism is antediluvian – predates the profits – and contemporary morality is derived, consciously or otherwise, from scripture, vouchsafed by the supernatural. In other words, you can’t get shot of God all that easily.

Fuentes might also have cited Nick Cave, who is not a man of proclaimed faith but nonetheless likes to make reference to Judeo-Christian subjects in his work. But not so with Grinderman. The album Grinderman is the sound of midlife crisis conveyed with such humour that you probably shouldn’t assume that the midlife crisis in question is necessarily Cave’s – or if it is then viewed from a distance. According to Cave, the song 'No Pussy Blues' was inspired by the negative reactions his Zapata moustache received. Cookie dusters are divisive at the best of times, so the result in and of itself is no firm indicator of middle aged angst, but the fact that Nicholas grew such a thing in his late 40s/early 50s maybe is.

I hadn’t made the connection when I put this compilation together – both tracks were provided by the lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, so I might have expected to – but Tom Waits was also 50 years’ old when he recorded 'Big in Japan' and also appears to be railing against his advancing years. Whereas Cave just isn’t getting any, Waits can at least console himself with the fact that he’s doing business in Asia. Despite Tom’s gruff incantations that form the spine of the song, 'Big In Japan' is a far more buoyant tune than 'No Pussy Blues' but still rough enough to perpetuate a sense of anxiety.

'The Decision' by The Young Knives ensues, a continuation of the millennial post-punk revival, which was by now on the slide. Credit to them that their album Voices of Animals and Men was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Prize in the face of this. 'The Decision' contains the lines, 'I'm your monarch, your supreme monarch. That decision was mine,' which I take to be a comment on the illusory nature of monarchy: as if to say, 'I am the Queen's subject, but might I not make the same claim for myself: that actually the Queen is in fact my subject.'

Have you seen the documentary Dig!? If you haven’t, and if you like music, which you doubtlessly do if you’re reading this, then I recommend you watch it. Its subject is the trials and tribulations of bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols from the mid ‘90s through to the early 2000s. I was done with The Dandy Warhols but had heard nothing by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, so I bought the double compilation album Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective which gathers together 38 tracks spanning a period of nine years. The Brian Jonestown’ sound is various but can be categorised roughly into three parts: melodic folk rock numbers, like 'Servo', 'Prozac v Heroin', 'Nevertheless'; tripped out psychedelia of the kind you hear on 'Anemone' or 'Whoever You Are'; and, especially early on, a kind of lo-fi take on shoegaze. 'Evergreen' is from the band’s first album, Methodrone, and sounds like Slowdive jamming with Yo La Tengo. The common thread running through their work is lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Anton Newcombe, who comes across as a sort of malevolent genius and wears his heart and influences on his sleeve. His obsession with the 1960s is not parodic; making use of 12 string guitars, tablas and sitars does not exempt ingenuity. 'The Beatles were for sale. I give it away,' Newcombe tells us 20 minutes into Dig!. You can be cynical towards that, but it’s not the sentiment of someone interested in pastiche.

I used to listen to a taped copy of The Wedding Present's Bizarro during my second year at university. I’d got rid of all my old cassettes by now and didn’t have anything to play them on anyway. Cue Bizarro, completely remastered and repackaged with seven bonus tracks and extensive sleevenotes, on compact disc. This time around it was the tune 'What Have I said Now?' that stood out – specifically the moment when, after chugging along in F (with transient forays into A#, A and C), it crashes into E after the second verse.

Cologne

It took a while to compile this compilation. The reasons might be: my continued indifference to current music; a temperamental MiniDisc player and my decision to switch over to MP3; the difficulty of converting vinyl to the MP3 format; training for the Fuller's Thames Towpath Ten (mile) run; vacations to Cologne, Istanbul, Lisbon and New York; handing in my notice in July 2008; a five week sojourn in Southeast Asia and the period of unemployment that followed; apathy. I’d also taken to making ‘best of ‘ playlists of individual artists: Best of… Stereolab, Best of… Talking Heads, Best of… The Fall, and so forth. Putting together the best of The Fall was especially rewarding for I had added the records Perverted by Language and Grotesque (After the Gramme) to my collection, as well as acquiring digital copies of The Wonderful and Frightening World of…, The Frenz Experiment, Extricate, Code: Selfish and Shift-Work to supplement what I already possessed on vinyl. Such was the weight of material that I felt it necessary to divide my anthology into two parts. (The only other artist that has bid the same approach of me is David Bowie.) I took five tracks from the album Perverted by Language alone, although two of these – 'The Man Whose Head Expanded' and 'Wings' – were singles tacked on the end of the re-issued CD in the form of bonus tracks. For the sake of this compilation, I went with 'Wings', whose tempo and monotonous groove is consistent with the tunes I’ve placed before and after. In this respect, this playlist is more calculated than many of my others, which is the benefit of working with MP3. Although MiniDisc certainly provides for a cut-and-paste approach to recording, with MP3 it's almost compulsory, and so one pays more attention to the order of things. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead does a good job of following on from 'Wings' but works even better as a precursor to 'The Rip' by Portishead. (Footage of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead playing an acoustic version of 'The Rip' appeared on the internet shortly after.)

I received my copy of Decade by Neil Young at the end of 2006, so by rights 'Sugar Mountain' should have kicked off this compendium. It wouldn’t have worked. 'Sugar Mountain' is a lament for lost youth (written when Neil Young had freshly turned 21) and nearly six minutes’ long, and it’s not going to get any party started.

Atheism, as it is currently understood, may one day prove to have been a passing fad, if only because its antithesis – theism – might itself lapse. Such a narrow view of things is problematic, not least because the subject is rooted firmly in semantics. The scientific and the religious – and I refer to the religious in the theological sense rather than the dogmatic, which is merely the realpolitik of organised religion – are interested in the same thing and destined to converge upon ontological grounds. Whether this terrain will be defined as Cartesian or monistic remains to be seen.

Jesus has a firm hold on our collective consciousness and his presence looms large within the realm of contemporary music, through gospel, blues, country, soul, and thus rock and roll. 'You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus, you just want to see his face,' incants Mick Jagger on 'I Just Want to See His Face', and he’s not alone: The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Manassas, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Felt, Spaceman 3, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The Verve, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Half Man Half Biscuit… The Nazarene turns up in the most unlikely places.

Not a moment too soon, I discovered Minus Zero/Stand Out Records off Portobello Road. What’s this they’re playing? 

'The Factory, Lowell George’s first band – you know, the guy from Little Feat.' 

I didn’t. After releasing but two singles, Lowell George joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist. His tenure was short lived and after contributing to Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped my Flesh he left to form his own band, called Little Feat. Not long after clarifying this chronology, I returned to Minus Zero / Stand Out Records and purchased the Little Feat and Dixie Chicken albums, paired together as part of WEA’s slightly weird ‘2 Originals’ series, which repackaged two albums by the same artist in a gatefold format. The music is reminiscent of that I heard playing in the Eiffel Bar in Copenhagen more than a year earlier, although persons I’ve played it too have tentatively asked if it might be the Rolling Stones – songs like 'Strawberry Flats' can give that impression.

The title and the lyrics to 'The Brides of Jesus' suggest the Parable of the Ten Virgins [Gospel of Matthew 25:1-13], yet the reference in the final line to ‘entertaining angels unawares’ is attributable to Hebrews [13:2]. It could be that Lowell is playing one proverb off against the other, saying that the ‘five foolish virgins’ who did not bring surplus oil for their lamps, and were denied entrance to the ‘wedding’ as punishment for being ill-prepared, should have been treated better, for they may have been actual angels. Lowell Gorge died of a heart attack in 1979, and I can find no evidence that he ever expatiated upon the song’s subject.

'The Pink Room' is from the soundtrack to the David Lynch film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. According to the credits, this swampy, instrumental dirge was written by Lynch himself, rather than Angelo Badalamenti who composed the film’s score. I once listened to 'The Pink Room' in a static caravan on a campsite in the New Forest, with The Wilkinsons, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, surrounded by conifers and pines.

The Sexual Life of the Savages is a compilation of São Paulo post-punk that I requisitioned from my Cornish friend. I must have kept hold of it for a while because it made more of an impact on the anthology I put together over 2009/2010. In the meantime, I recorded 'Pânico' by Mercenárias, which sounds a bit like very early The Fall fronted by The Slits, only sung in Portuguese. I wouldn’t ordinarily have followed on from something like this with anything by Field Music, but 'Give It Lose It Take It' is one of their livelier numbers. 

New Forest

Like a lot of people, I’m not too bothered about New Year’s Eve. Ideally, I’d attend someone’s house party, preferably not mine, but for three years running I spent New Year’s Eve at the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was all down to the girl who used to live with my partner on the Isle of Dogs who’d met the proprietors on a beach in Southeast Asia, kept in touch, and extended a repeated invitation to see in New Year’s at their fashionable establishment. In 2004, rolling into 2005, there had been enough room to spray a celebratory bottle of champagne around without getting in anyone's way. By the time 2007 was imminent, there was barely enough room to raise a glass. I don’t remember much else about that night but I do remember enjoying Elton John’s 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' playing. Mr Wilkinson advised I buy the 1974 album Greatest Hits, which I subsequently did. Rather than go through the laborious process of recording 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' from vinyl onto our laptop, in real time, I picked up a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on CD from a charity shop for a couple of quid, introducing me to the delights of 'Bennie and the Jets' in the process. 'Bennie and the Jets' is a strange song in that it’s made to sound like it was recorded live, which makes me wonder whether it sounds much different when it is played live.

I wandered into Beyond Retro in Soho and found something I hadn’t bargained for: not an item of clothing but a sound. A lot of people would have asked what was playing, but I’m not one for talking to people unnecessarily so instead memorised key components of the song and looked them up on the internet when I got home. I didn’t have much to go on: it was sung in French, sounded like it was more than likely recorded in the 1960s, and exhibited a one-word chorus that exclaimed ‘Contact!’. It was French chanteuse Brigitte Bardot, with a little help from Serge Gainsbourg.

If not French psychedelic pop then what had I expected to find in Beyond Retro? Not sure but it won’t have been jeans, because fashion had finally caught up with itself. That is to say that the slimmer profile appropriated by purveyors of the post-punk and garage rock revival had begun to permeate the mainstream. Enter the Levi’s 504/514, a comparatively slim-fitting jean with a tapered leg offering a welcome alternative to the bootcut 507/517/527. The 504 would probably be considered fairly loose by today’s standards but in the mid-to-late 2000s was about as skinny as you could get. In 2007 I purchased a light blue pair of Levi 504s, which my partner ridiculed, and then a darker pair. In 2008, we flew to New York City and I picked up a black pair of corduroy 514s for a little more than $20, on sale in Urban Outfitters, which worked out at around £12. The 514s were slightly less tapered than the 504s and I had them altered to match.

Slimmer fitting knitwear was also now easier to come by. I’d been merrily buying my jumpers from Marks and Spencer since 2005 – specifically their Collezione range – and I was fine with that, but now I could find things in any high street store I’d be comfortable wearing: Fred Perry, Farah, Uniqlo, even Gap. Peacoats were all the rage too, whereas a few years earlier I’d been sifting through army surplus stock to find them. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Men’s mainstream fashion may finally have been shedding the boyish, post-Britpop baggy-isms that had preoccupied it for the last ten years but in its place was something almost schizophrenic. Whereas American groups such as Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Kings of Leon, were moving towards a leaner, more rugged sort of look, British groups like Hot Chip, Mystery Jets and Klaxons dressed like an explosion in American Apparel – tight jeans and baggy T-shirts in dayglo colours, with crazy hair. Ultimately, the boots, brogues and beards of our American cousins would win the war, but there was a very confused period in between where some of the worst offences of the 1980s threatened to take hold.

I got wind of 'Lucky Number' by Lene Lovich somehow – in another shop maybe. It was the brevity of the chorus that caught my ear: four dissonant chords sung in rapid succession and the ostinato that comes after. I found a copy of Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks on CD for £3 – the same album the chap who got me into Sarah Records had lent to me in 1994/95 – and so reacquainted myself with that. The guy who used to own a pager was now playing guitar in a ska/two-tone covers band. Among other things, they’d play 'On My Radio' by The Selector and 'Gangsters' by The Specials, and so I downloaded them (from iTunes). These four songs were all released in the year 1979.

NYC

The laptop I was working from was not my own: it was my partner's and a mere repository for my music which I would then transfer across to my newly acquired MP3 player. The problem with interfacing directly with a mobile device is that you have direct access to everything stored upon it. You don’t even need to make playlists: just ‘play all’ or select ‘shuffle’ and let the hits keep on coming. The shuffle function is particularly pernicious. You find yourself continuously skipping tracks until something shows up worthy of your immediate attention. Furthermore, there’s nothing random about the algorithm that drives the shuffle function. Certain groups will make remarkably frequent appearances, whereas others will be conspicuous by way of their absence.

So I stopped using the shuffle function and set about putting together a compilation. I’d have normally done this with a certain amount of pre-planning, but found it simpler to make it up as I went along: Add to > playlist, notionally entitled ‘2007’, to be renamed at a later date when I felt suitably inspired. I listened to my incomplete playlist as I was compiling it, changing the running order here and there and re-transferring it across to my MP3 player as and when I added new songs. The problem was this mutable approach did not foment the urgency required to finish it. By the time 'Pull up to the Bumper' by Grace Jones and 'Let’s Dance' by David Bowie had been appended to the running order, I’d reached what would under usual circumstances have been my limit – the 80 minutes of time available on a MiniDisc. I had no problem adding to this duration, but where would I draw the line? At what stage would I stop subsuming music gathered in 2008 to a compilation intended to reflect 2007?

As it was, I felt the playlist worked well, so I decided to defer the tracks I had left over until the year after. It was not to be. The recording of vinyl continued to be an issue: the stupid device I had bought necessitated I record in real time and use software to isolate the individual tracks that then had to be saved as individual files of questionable quality. iTunes wasn’t as comprehensive as I’d been led to believe either, so I couldn’t source as much material as I would have liked. It’s conceivable that the reason why I included 'Pull Up to the Bumper' and 'Let’s Dance' is a direct result of this – as filler.

I have identified a number of tracks that might have originally featured on Harmony in my Head in less troubled circumstances, or could have gone towards a playlist for 2008.

American singer Santigold's second single 'L.E.S. Artistes' had been getting airplay, culminating in an appearance on Jools Holland. Her album, Santogold, was voted 2008's 7th best by the NME, while Rolling Stone deemed 'L.E.S. Artistes' to be the second best single. (MGMT and Beyonce topped the magazines' respective polls.)

'Black Magic' is off of Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis, which I have on vinyl. I was disappointed with it, if I'm honest, but the artwork's good and the price of vinyl had yet to go through the roof.

'Prodigal Son' is taken from Beggars Banquet, the record that kicked off the Rolling Stones’ golden age. The guy who used to own a pager brought it to Exmoor with us in 2003, but it had been overshadowed by Their Satanic Majesties Request. This seems odd because I’m now of the opinion that Beggars Banquet is second only to Exile on Main Street in the Rolling Stones’ canon.

In 2008 I bought, in fairly quick succession, the Stevie Wonder albums Music of My Mind and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and was more satisfied with the latter. I recall being enamoured with 'Boogie On Reggae Woman', but nowadays I err towards 'Bird of Beauty'.

In September 2007, I went to see a David Bowie tribute band, at the Grey Horse in Kingston, called The Thin White Duke. The keyboard player resembled the actor Ian Smith, who played Harold Bishop in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. They were actually quite good and their rendition of 'Cracked Actor' motivated me to add Aladdin Sane to my collection.

Back in April 2007, I picked up a vinyl copy of Tom Tom Club by Tom Tom Club on a visit down to Plymouth (from Really Good Records?). It’s a cool record to have and a good album to put on if you have people around. The Tindersticks tune, meanwhile, was another offering from the lad lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, taken from the album of the same name – their best since Curtains and one I don't think they've bettered since.

There were other purchases, most notably records by Black Sheep, Main Source and Public Enemy (all that stuff's already covered in my 'Golden Age of Hip Hop' tetralogy). Maybe that’s why I never got around to creating a separate playlist for 2008. Not because I was unemployed, spent five weeks in Asia or couldn't be bothered, but as a result of rediscovering a taste for the music I listened to in my youth after wandering into a bar in Cologne playing old-school hip hop.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: SOMETIMES A PONY GETS DEPRESSED [2006]

1. These are the Ghosts – The Bees
2. Stagger Lee – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
3. You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds
4.     It’s All in My Mind – Teenage Fanclub
5. What Goes On – The Velvet Underground
6. Her Name is Melody – Adrian Pride
7. Come See About Me – The Supremes
8. Animal Farm – The Kinks
9. I Can’t Be Me – Eddie Hinton
10. Guilty – Barbra Streisand
11. Enough Said – Devo
12. Red Sails – David Bowie
13. Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed – Silver Jews
14. The Lower the Sun – Tom Vek
15. Outlines – Clor
16. When You Get Home – The Research
17. Andy’s Chest – Lou Reed
18. Time Will Show the Wiser – Fairport Convention
19. Baby Please Don’t Go – The Amboy Dukes
20. Sway – The Rolling Stones
21. Draw a Smile Upon an Egg – Comet Gain
22. The Partisan – Leonard Cohen

'These are the Ghosts' introduces the album Free the Bees, and so it does Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed, a ploy that will be recognisable to anyone familiar with my compilations. You can take it from this that I acquired Free the Bees in 2005, not 2006. This does not always follow but applies in this instance; in 2005 the song narrowly missed the cut.

The way The Bees presented themselves disappointed me. As a band, they were more overtly influenced by the 1960s than many of their contemporaries, wrote better tunes than many of their contemporaries. There was an opportunity begging. Instead they elected to collectively dress like Badly Drawn Boy, as a bevy of hard-drinking skaters. Not important, just a shame, and it didn’t stop me from playing Free the Bees relentlessly for a period of time.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and her husband. It’s a bit in late in the day to be coining new nicknames but her husband probably deserves a sobriquet of his own. After all, he did introduce me to Boozoo Bajou’s 'Night Over Manaus', which appears on 2000’s compilation The Ladies of Varades, as well as 'Happiness' by Teenage Fanclub, which I included on the following year’s The Boys of Summer, and he came on both the associated holidays – at which he would mysteriously disappear and then re-appear, earning him the epithet ‘Teleport Man’.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and Teleport Man. Teleport Man has been shouted at for taking photographs in Freetown Christiania by one of its free-spirited natives. It is February, so fairly cold, and we’ve been out for much of the day. Everything points towards stopping somewhere for a drink. The Eiffel Bar is nearby, a locals’ sort of place, dank but possessing character. There’s country rock playing in the background but my attempt to extract from the landlord the artist responsible leads nowhere.

Two days later and it’s just me and my partner. We would like a cup of coffee and find a café on Larsbjørnsstræde. Music is playing. I'm fairly sure it's Nick Cave but I don't know which record - something about a guy called Stagger Lee. The proprietor speaks English. It is Nick Cave (with the Bad Seeds) and the album playing is called Murder Ballads.

It’s March. We’ve hired a cottage near Abergwesyn in Wales to belatedly celebrate the 30th birthday of the friend who dropped in Debenhams. It snowed on the drive in and it’s more than a foot deep in places. The lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs is with us. Turns out he’s a big fan of Murder Ballads. He takes me to his car so we can listen to 'Stagger Lee' on his new car-stereo, at volume, late at night in the privacy afforded by Abergwesyn Valley.

It was the 1994 record Let Love In that first aroused my interest in Nick Cave but it was Murder Ballads that stepped it up. It’s literally an album of ballads concerning murder, and it betrays a humour in Cave’s work that had until now escaped me.

Wales

Having enjoyed the first two Flying Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe – I got around to buying Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I covered a bit of the back-story in my liner notes to Aka ‘Devil in Disguise’. I wrote thusly: '1968 was a period of transition for The Byrds. Having removed David Crosby from the fold, they were struggling to perform The Notorious Byrd Brothers in a live setting to a satisfactory standard. Enter Gram Parsons, initially on keys and then guitar. Gram had already cultivated a country-rock sound with his group The International Submarine Band, so it was a willing combination. By August, The Byrds had recorded and released their next album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, regarded by some as the first pure country-rock record.' I also remarked that Sweetheart of the Rodeo consists mostly of covers. 'You Don’t Miss Your Water' was a soul record released on Stax, written and recorded by William Bell. It also appeared as the final track on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, so it has good pedigree and the Byrds do a fine job on it.

I’m fairly sure it was me who used to play Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub back in the day, but my Cornish friend seems to have taken over the mantle. After enjoying Four Thousand Seven Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds - A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub in 2003, in 2005 he bought their new album, Man-Made, and in 2006 he let me borrow it. I normally prefer Raymond McGinley’s songs but 'It’s All in My Mind' is one of Norman Blake’s.

Back in Copenhagen, looking for somewhere to eat. It’s one of those evenings where you’re unsure of your appetite. After a few beers, proceeded by too much walking, we decide to take a chance on a place called Bang & Jensen. The gamble pays off: the food is good, the interior décor pleasing to the eye, the prices reasonable for a city with Copenhagen’s reputation, and they’re playing The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed. I know this because the CD case is propped up in front of the CD player. I am unfamiliar with tracks 9 and 10 – 'What Goes On' and 'Beginning to See the Light' – but they strike me as very much worth having. Within four days of my return to London, I will have bought both Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground.

My regard for the 1960s, and for psychedelic garage rock in particular, persisted. I procured Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 prior to buying My Mind Goes High: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, but it’s the latter that makes the first appearance on this playlist in the form of Adrian Pride. 'Her Name is Melody' alone justifies the purchase: a psychedelic raga with an exquisite vocal, it deserves to be more well known.

I’d probably watched Catholic Boys again, because I’d resolved to include 'Come See About Me' by The Supremes on my next compilation. I was able to do so after finding 20 Golden Greats, credited to Diana Ross & The Supremes, among the detritus of my parents’ record collection. 'Come See About Me' originally appeared on The Supremes’ LP Where Did Our Love Go, released 1964. Catholic Boys (aka Heaven Help Us) is set in Brooklyn, circa 1965. 'Come See About Me' serves as the backdrop to a scene where Mary Stuart Masterson’s soda shop is raided by the ‘brothers’ who teach across the road at St. Basils. Andrew McCarthy hangs back to help her clean up the mess, and romance ensues.

If I’d converted to MiniDisc a few years earlier than I eventually did, it’s possible that 'Death of a Clown' by the Kinks would have ended up on one of my compendiums. A borrowed greatest hits collection was knocking around our flat in Brentford for a while, but, as is typical of so many self-serving anthologies, it lacked the necessary context to sustain my interest. By the time I’d got back into the habit of making annual compilations the opportunity had passed. It took an advert for digital imaging products for me to think about the Kinks, featuring the song 'Picture Book'. I’d neither heard it nor heard of it, but the album it heralded from was available from my local high-street record store for a mere six pounds. Most Kinks’ greatest hit compendiums completely sidestep The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society – unless you count 'Days', which never appeared on the original record but gets tacked on whenever the album’s reissued – but I can identify at least five tunes from it that are up there among the group’s best. When it came to selecting material for my annual playlist, I found it almost impossible to choose between two of them: 'Animal Farm' and 'Starstruck'. Consider these interchangeable.

No Eyes and Teleport Man were living in Brighton and Hove. In 2005 my lady friend and I visited four times. I don’t know on which stay it was, but I identified a tune on a compilation they owned called Country Got Soul Volume Two as worth having: 'I Can’t be Me' by Eddie Hinton. Primarily a session musician, Eddie Hinton played on the records of Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Otis Redding. Muscle Shoals progenitor Jerry Wexler described Hinton as, 'a white boy who truly sang and played in the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated.'

I’d all but exhausted my parents’ record collection by this point. I made a final pass anyway and annexed their copy of 'Guilty' by Barbra Streisand, featuring Barry Gibb. I don’t buy into the concept of guilty pleasure (no pun intended) but this is the sort of thing people are alluding to when they make a claim for it. There’s nothing to be remotely embarrassed about. Even if there was, why not just concede to having philistine taste and be done with it? But 'Guilty' is not that. It is a flawless pop song, as good as anything contrived by the genre’s archetypes: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones. Time signatures are constantly changing, from 5/4 to 4/4 and back to 5/4 during the verse, and alternating between 3/4 and 4/4 in the midst of the chorus. There are some ingenious chord changes too. My favourite is the shift from Dm to Ebmaj7 and the way Barry Gibb vocally segues into it:

Dm        Am         Dm

You got a reason for livin'

Ebmaj7

You bat-tle on_with the love you're building on.

There’s nothing wilful about these unexpected deviations – the song’s mode is strophic: introduction, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental breakout, verse, bridge, chorus, refrain, fade – and each deflection serves to move the song towards its resolution (there aren’t the episodic digressions of, say, 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys). But it’s hard to call. Almost every line leads where you’d least expect it to, an exercise in suspense, patient with itself.

Secondhand vinyl can be surprisingly inexpensive. Rare pressings in mint condition, of the sort secondhand dealerships like to hang on their walls, might set you back a bit, but for anything else I wouldn’t expect to pay more than a cockle. Most of my David Bowie records cost around this, their popularity ensuring that supply continues to exceed demand. I think I paid the same for New Traditionalists by Devo, whereas Duty Now for the Future cost me a paltry £3. New Traditionalists is the better album and often overlooked. 'Through Being Cool', 'Soft Things', 'The Super Thing', 'Beautiful World', 'Enough Said'… there’s barely a bad song on there.

David Bowie had championed Devo in their earlier years, to the extent that he co-produced their first album alongside Brian Eno (although by all accounts it wasn’t the most satisfying of partnerships). Might it have been this that directed me back towards David Bowie? More likely it was my trip to Berlin in October 2004, although before completing Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ with Lodger I first bought Station to Station, the album he recorded in Los Angeles before absconding to Europe. Station to Station is clearly the better album but its songs possess an epic quality that would have felt out of place on this compilation. That being said, Lodger could be Bowie’s most underrated work. To complement the nature of the previous track – Devo’s 'Enough Said' – I wanted to follow up with something urgent and was torn between 'Red Sails' and 'Look Back in Anger'. Bowie’s slightly more tempered vocal on 'Red Sails' swung it.

I purchased the LP Tanglewood Numbers by Silver Jews almost on the strength of its front cover. That’s not quite true. I knew a little about them – the fact that it was David Berman’s band but that Stephen Malkmus and Robert Nastanovich of Pavement sometimes helped out. Apart from providing my compilation with its title, I take great pleasure from the lyrics to 'Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed'.

My Cornish friend had already introduced me to Tom Vek the previous summer and by the end of the year I owned a vinyl pressing of We Have Sound. This album hinted at a change in the musical landscape, relief from the dross that had pervaded throughout 2005: Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads, Bambyshambles – the fag-end of the garage rock revival. A new sound was emerging that incorporated synthesisers and would come to be known roughly as electro-pop. Whether Tom Vek fell exclusively within this genre is moot: he was making an interesting noise that incorporated abrasive guitars and keyboards, recorded in his parents’ garage.

Clor’s record was cut from if not the same cloth as Tom Vek’s then certainly a fabric exhibiting similar properties, perhaps of a more melodic denier. I first encountered them on MTV around the house of The Wilkinsons in Acton, and we then went to see them supporting Stephen Malkmus at the Koko in Camden. Clor split up not long after, which was a great shame.

The Research released their first album, Breaking Up, in early 2006, managed a second in late 2008 and then went the same way as Clor. Their electro-pop was looser and more shambolic than Tom Vek’s or Clor’s. Lead singer Russell 'The Disaster' Searle would hammer away at a keyboard while bassist Georgia Lashbrook churned out Wedding Present-esque grooves. My Cornish friend took me to see them play at Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush for my 31st birthday, so I guess I was engaging with the contemporary music scene to some degree.

Come April I was abroad again, this time in Budapest. On our last day there, killing time before the flight home, my lady friend and I went for coffee in a cafe called Katapult Kavazo. What should be playing but Transformer by Lou Reed. I've never really liked the song 'Walk on the Wild Side', and can’t abide 'Perfect Day', so it was never an album I'd ever bothered with. But I hadn’t heard 'Vicious' or 'Andy’s Chest' or 'Hangin’ Around' or 'I’m So Free', so it was well worth a fiver to add the CD to my burgeoning collection.

I have no idea what inspired me to buy the first Fairport Convention album. If I was expecting something along the lines of The Wicker Man soundtrack then I was to be disappointed; folk rock, as I have touched on before, is very different to country rock. At the time Fairport Convention’s debut was written, however, folk-rock was more ‘rock’ than it was ‘folk’, taking its lead from Bob Dylan, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane, as 'Time Will Show the Wiser' amply demonstrates.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 was released in 1972 and has been reissued on numerous occasions since. This assemblage of music has been offered up as the antecedent of punk. Dubious proto-punk credentials aside, it’s the perfect place to start for anybody interested in exploring the genre. The Amboy Dukes’ cover of 'Baby, Please Don’t Go' is a marked highlight, and at over double the length far better value than Them’s version.

What made me hark back to Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones and include 'Sway' on this compilation? I couldn’t say, but 'Sway' is assuredly one of my favourite Stones’ tunes, so there’s no harm in it being here. It might also be Mick Taylor's finest moment as a Rolling Stone, and he deserves the credit that Jagger denied him. The Comet Gain track is off of City Fallen Leaves, which I consider to be their best album. It would be some while before they released another.

Budapest

In the summer of 2005, the Former Cohabitant from Brighton was house-sitting for his parents and invited me and the friend who foundered in Debenhams to pay him a visit. I came early, and we made arrangements to hook up with our Cornish friend later that evening for a spirited pub crawl around Brighton’s Lanes. Back at the house, the former cohabitant had a few things he wanted to show me (footage from our trip to the States; works in progress), and while doing so played whatever had been last listened to on the CD player.

After overhearing them playing in my room, my mother once suggested that the Tindersticks sounded like Leonard Cohen. They don’t, but at some point Leonard started singing in a tone approximating that of Stuart Staples. What I was hearing now did not sound remotely like the voice of Stuart Staples. It was the song 'Who by Fire', taken from Cohen’s fourth album, 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony. I read somewhere that Ian McCulloch thought that Greatest Hits was Cohen’s best record, so I took him at his word and bought a copy from a second-hand record store, I don’t recall which.

On the inner sleeve there are liner notes recounting the back story to every song. For example, of 'Famous Blue Raincoat' Leonard Cohen has this to say:

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.

Taking an opportunity to invite the chap who got me into Sarah Records back to my flat, I played the record and directed his attention to this specific annotation. He understood. 'The Partisan' is a cover of an homage to the French Resistance in World War II, written by the French journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: COME ON LET'S GO [2002]

1.    Five Years – David Bowie

2.    Captain Easychord – Stereolab

3.    Jo Jo's Jacket – Stephen Malkmus

4.    Hard to Explain – The Strokes

5.    Idioteque – Radiohead

6.    Fell in Love with a Girl – The White Stripes

7.    Walking With Thee – Clinic

8.    The Modern Age – The Strokes

9.    Have You Seen Her Face – The Byrds

10.  Late Night – Syd Barrett

11.  Sunshine Superman – Donovan

12.  It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – The 13th Floor Elevators

13.  Too Real – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

14.  Powder Blue – Elbow

15.  Let it Run – Beachwood Sparks

16.  Come on Let’s Go – Broadcast

17.  Baby It’s the Best – Weird War

18.  Dancing Days – Led Zeppelin

19.  Can't You Hear Me Knocking – The Rolling Stones

20.  I Forgot – The Moldy Peaches

21.  Redfuchsiatamborine&gravel – David Candy

August 2001, in the beer garden of The Milford Arms. The Former Cohabitant from Brighton is regaling us with tales of his recent adventures in the Orient. He tells of Dionysian revelry on Thai beaches, of sharing rooms with rats and lizards and oversized insects, and the expediency of travelling light. It sounds exciting and terrifying in equal measure. The former cohabitant from Brighton is not the first of our friends to engage in activities of this kind. No Eyes has done a bit of it, as has the girl who used to live with my lady friend on the Isle of Dogs, and the brother of the guy who used to own a pager is constantly at it. Now, in our mid-twenties, there’s a sense that if any of the rest of us fancy travelling about the planet then we’d better get a move on.

Initially, I’m not very receptive to the idea but am gradually persuaded by my lady friend - as is the guy who passed out in Debenhams. The logistics of the whole operation are a mystery to me, and it’s something to get my head around. In the meantime I will need to rein in my spending. My lifestyle is by no means extravagant but I earn a mediocre wage and will require enough money to cover my airfare to wherever it is we end up going, living costs while away, and a reasonable amount of cash to tide me over on my return. Right now this doesn’t bear thinking about.

 My disposable income broadly goes towards four things: drinking in pubs, eating out, buying records, and holidays (I buy most of my clothes from charity shops). I am not prepared to forgo a social life for the next 12 months but am open to negotiation on the other points. I will sacrifice visiting curry houses and the procurement of full-priced vinyl and satisfy myself with the occasional fry-up and buying secondhand records of limited value. A third gite camp is regrettably out of the question, although I will scape enough together for a short weekend away in Amsterdam with the guy who fell over in Debenhams, my lady friend, the girl she lived with on the Isle of Dogs, the guy who used to own a pager, and Roz Childs.

Trip to Amsterdam

Come on Let’s Go is different to the compilations that immediately precede it: The Ladies of Varades and The Boys of Summer. Consider the chronology. My previous two compendiums were compiled with consecutive French holidays in mind – they were to be symbolic of them – and consequently adhere to an academic calendar. This means that Come on Let’s Go effectively begins in September 2001. Furthermore, it attempts to collate fragments of music deemed unsuitable for inclusion on the preceding playlist, for I hadn’t wanted to subject my fellow tourists to much indie music. As a result, there’s very little on Come on Let’s Go that was released in the year it purports to celebrate; only Weird War and Clinic fulfil this criterion.

There had already been signs that my enthusiasm for indie music was undergoing something of a revival. Perennial favourites Stereolab had pointed me in the direction of Broadcast, Make Up ensured I’d buy into whatever Weird War had to offer, and the ongoing renaissance of the band Delta awakened me to alternative-country bands like Beachwood Sparks and The Tyde. (One of my favourite musical memories is seeing Delta – in support of Beachwood Sparks at the 100 Club – paying homage to the then recently deceased George Harrison with a sublime rendition of what’s probably my favourite Beatles’ tune, 'If I Needed Someone'.) Finally, Radiohead were beginning to justify the praise lavished upon them with the release, in a very short space of time, of Kid A (October 2000) and Amnesiac (June 2001). The two albums resulted from the same recording sessions, in fact.

Many people are of the opinion that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is David Bowie’s finest work. I purchased a copy, for next to nothing, to find out. I had decided in advance that 'Five Years' would feature on Come on Let’s Go after seeing footage of Bowie and his band performing it on The Old Grey Whistle Test. I concluded that although Ziggy Stardust might be Bowie’s most consistent work, it wasn’t his strongest. 'Five Years' isn’t even my favourite song on the album – 'Moonage Daydream' is – but it does make for a good opening number, so I went with it.

Readers of my previous liner notes will have observed a preponderance of tracks by ‘the groop’ Stereolab. I think I was introduced to them by the guy who used to own many tapes, but I can’t be sure. I do know that my first Stereolab purchase was the 10” EP Ping Pong, bought in July 1994. I’m by no means a completist when it comes to such things, but I own most of their studio albums, as well as one EP, a mini-LP and a couple of compilations. Sound-Dust is Stereolab’s seventh album. I purchased it on vinyl, one of only 1,800 copies pressed. Where I place a Stereolab tune on any playlist will depend on the tempo of the tune I want to place. 'Captain Easychord' is quite an upbeat number, a perfect antidote to the funereal tenor of 'Five Years', and so it becomes the second track of the compilation.

Pavement’s dissolution was sudden, although their final album, Terror Twilight, felt laboured at times. Stephen Malkmus didn’t hang about getting himself back in the proverbial saddle. Just two years passed before he released Stephen Malkmus, the same amount of time that separated the last three Pavement albums. It wasn’t a radical departure from his former band’s sound, but Malkmus seemed reinvigorated. 'Jo Jo’s Jacket', wherein Malkmus imagines himself as Yul Brynner, was the fourth single from aforementioned album, which seems excessive even if it might be the best of the lot.

One cannot underestimate the impact The Strokes debut album Is This It had on the musical landscape, capturing the hearts and minds of indie kids everywhere. It wasn’t just about the tunes but also the band’s image. At the time, indie music was going through one of its sartorially safe phases. The difference between this and what The Strokes wore is rather subtle. Boot-cut jeans were eschewed in favour of straight-legged slacks, stout Nike trainers were swapped for svelte Converse All Stars, T-shirts became tight and open necked, shirts were bought second-hand and sometimes worn with a tie, leather jackets were pure vintage, hair was all over the place. Basically, they looked like Blondie. It was almost a return to the early-to-mid 1990s and the way Britpop was before Oasis came along and made it all baggy. Bands like Travis, Stereophonics and Coldplay must have been all at sea.

A year earlier and Radiohead might have been too. Fortunately for them they’d already managed to disassociate themselves from the dreariness of the post-Britpop scene and could therefore coexist alongside whatever the latest thing might be. They deserved to. 'Idioteque' is an example of indie music transcending indie music and just being music – their best tune since 'Airbag' – and I put together a Best of Radiohead playlist off the back of it.

The White Stripes released their third album, White Blood Cells, at almost precisely the same time as The Stokes did their first (summer, 2001). Hence, both groups were seen as the vanguard of the post-punk revival. The White Stripes were in actual fact as rooted in the blues as they were garage rock – it was their image and pared down sound that associated them – but it was obvious that both bands were offering an alternative to current trends.

I think I came by 'Walking With Thee' by Clinic after hearing it on the radio (this was pre-internet). Under normal circumstances I probably would have proceeded to buy Clinic’s album, but I was saving my pennies. I bought 'Walking With Thee' as a 7” single, so they got something out of me. It’s an abrasive little number and far more interesting than most of the music made by their peers (The Coral, The Zutons, etc.). The Strokes second contribution to my playlist, 'The Modern Age', was also purchased as a single, albeit on CD very cheaply.

Trip to Plymouth

When I plundered my dad’s record collection for Stones records in 2001 I’d also grabbed a couple of Byrds’ albums: Mr. Tambourine Man and Younger than Yesterday. Aside from the contemporary groups bothering my turntable, I was slowly entering my second ‘60s phase, the first having occurred in and around 1995 (comprising the Rolling Stones, Love, The Beatles, Small Faces, the Blow-Up soundtrack). While I’d leant previously towards the Mod-ish face of that decade I gravitated now towards its more psychedelic and rockier elements: golden-age era Stones, Jefferson Aeroplane, Syd Barrett, Donovan, The Monks, The 13th Floor Elevators. Despite David Crosby’s best efforts, which would eventually see him kicked out of the band, The Byrds probably fell somewhere in between (as did Love really). Ostensibly, Younger than Yesterday takes it lead from The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul and Revolver. There are touches, though, that are very much The Byrds’ own: the Tijuana brass on 'So You Want to be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star', the country and western inflections of 'Time Between', Roger McGuinn’s atonal guitar riffs throughout. I considered kicking off this compendium with 'So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star' but settled for the Chris Hillman penned 'Have You Seen Her Face'.

Syd Barrett presented another dilemma. I borrowed a copy of his debut solo album, The Madcap Laughs, from Hounslow Library, and my instinct was to represent it with the penultimate song, 'If It’s in You'. It’s a weirdly amusing ditty but Barrett’s strident vocal is indicative of his mental state. I’d recently watched The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story, a BBC documentary, and read his biography, Lost in the Woods, and formed the opinion that Syd wasn’t quite as ‘mad’ as is often made out. 'If It’s in You' suggests otherwise and so 'Late Night' made the cut.

Presumably Barrett wasn’t in town when Donn Pennebaker was shooting Bob Dylan’s peregrinations for the film Dont [sic] Look Back, but can you imagine? Instead, we get Donovan doing his best to impress with an acoustic performance of 'To Sing for You'. That’s no criticism or I wouldn’t have included 'Sunshine Superman' here (although lyrically it's all over the place). Coincidentally, Dylan responds with a rendition of 'It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue' which is the song that follows on this compilation, except this time it’s The 13th Floor Elevators doing the honours. Tommy Hall’s signature electric jug is conspicuous by way of its absence, but it’s no worse off for that.

'Too Real' (4 minutes and 55 seconds long) by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club calls to my mind maybe Spiritualized or Northern Soul era Verve, initiating a run of tunes that are fairly long, slow of pace and lugubrious in mood; I’ve built an anti climax as opposed to an anticlimax. I got quite into BRMC, as they were often known, and Peter Hayes in particular, who had good hair. 

Before they were semi-famous Elbow made pretty interesting music. I’d heard a particular song of theirs at a party, which turned out to be 'Any Day Now'. This was before they’d released their debut album, Asleep in the Back. I assumed that what I’d heard was their new single, 'Powder Blue', and so bought that and quickly realised it wasn’t. It would be many years later before I finally established the true identity of the song I heard at that party, but either track would have done in the circumstance.

 'Let it Run' by Beachwood Sparks lasts an epic 6 minutes 38 seconds, although its coda drags on for more than a minute and a half of that. By the time it’s over, at a mere 3 minutes and 17 seconds, the punchy 'Come on Let’s Go' comes as something of a relief. You’d think it might jar but the late Trish Keenan’s soft vocals connect satisfyingly with the gentle harmonies of Beachwood Sparks. [The acquisition of Broadcast's second long player, The Noise Made by People, came off the back of finding their compilation Work and Non Work in the library. If minidiscs had been longer in duration, I'd have probably also included something from that: 'The Books Lovers', say, or 'Lights Out'.]

The first Weird War album is not their best. I don’t think Ian Svenonius had fully defined his vision for his new band, or maybe I was just upset about finding out about Make Up too late to see them play live. According to the sleeve notes, 'By following the "Texas Instruments Calculator" theory of minimal circuitry and isolated components, Weird War has circumvented the transmission of responsible knowledge and the provocation to enact revision amid the delusion of representation.' How this relates to 'Baby It’s the Best' is anyone’s guess, but I liked their style.

Led Zeppelin: file alongside Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Acts of this ilk weren’t considered especially cool among the lo-fi loving indie aficionados of the late ‘80/early ‘90s (Syd Barrett-era Floyd excepted). Not that this would have bothered me much, it just meant I didn’t come across them. The guy who used to own a pager, on the other hand, had been exposed to Led Zeppelin from an early age and was aware there was much more to them than 'Stairway to Heaven', which is manna to the muso. It was Led Zeppelin III that I feasted on initially, courtesy of Hounslow Library. Thereafter I found a cheap copy of Houses of the Holy on vinyl, which to this day is my favourite Led Zeppelin album. I still can’t stand 'Stairway to Heaven' though.

In the latter of half of 2001 – too late to make an impression on The Boys of Summer – I purchased copies of the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed (a re-issue) and Sticky Fingers (an original copy). 'Gimme Shelter' originally featured here, but the song I really wanted to use was 'Can’t You Hear Me Knocking' off of Sticky Fingers. At over seven minutes long there wasn't room and so 'Gimme Shelter' got the nod. Since freeing myself from the temporal constraints imposed by MiniDisc, I've reverted to my original preference.

Opting for 'Gimme Shelter' left me with just under three minutes to play with, which was enough to accommodate any number of tracks from the eponymous debut album by anti-folk band The Moldy Peaches. The Moldy Peaches were associated with The Strokes and The White Stripes. It was all about the timing; their sound wasn’t remotely similar to either. My lady friend bought me their album for my birthday. If I’m honest, I wasn’t overly impressed, but 'I Forgot' holds a certain charm.

My mild disappointment with the Weird War album was ameliorated by the discovery of the record Play Power by Svenonius’s alter-ego David Candy. 'The best art attracts the best people, so I like to go see Supremacist artists like Kazimir Malevich or Vladimir Mayakovsky,' proclaims David Candy over the flamenco guitar of 'Redfuchsiatamborine&gravel'. Again, this track didn’t fit on my original compilation, but it was listened to more often than many of the tracks that did, so I’ve retrospectively tacked it on at the end. [I later discovered that the guy who played the guitar on this track - Matt Hulse - also directed the video for Broadcast's 'Come On Let's Go', which is an amazing coincidence.]

Trip to Brighton

There turned out to be many more curries, as well as afternoons spent drinking in the Portobello Star, evenings at the Dive Bar and the 100 Club, the occasional gig (The Darkness, Delta, The Dylan Rabbit, Arthur Lee), long weekends in Brighton and Plymouth and Nottinghamshire, camping trips, and excursions to various football grounds in support of Plymouth Argyle’s successful push for promotion into the Second Division. How I ever afforded my five months of travelling must be a testament to a healthier economy, a stronger pound and a more reasonable cost of living. I can barely conceive of it now but am glad I took the opportunity when it presented itself.

[Listen to here.]