I'm sure it will be the same for most of the people who read this blog that certain songs transport you back to another time as soon as you hear them and others remind you of places , your bedroom in your parents house, an old girlfriend's place or a favourite holiday destination.

Today's track along with a few others most notably Another Girl, Another Planet takes me back to Stiff' s bedroom which he shared with one of his older brothers. I can see the old record player, the cabinet that housed the records and the invisible but fully understood demarcation line which separated the room.

Many an hour was spent there rifling through W's records when he wasn't there. Then ensuring that the vinyl was put back in the inner sleeve the correct way and that sleeve correctly inserted into the outer sleeve, other wise we would be sussed out straight away. It was also where we heard all of the new releases by the likes of Elvis Costello for the first time and also Stuart Adamson's first single as Big Country after the Skids split.

But as I said above this record more than most remind me of there, which is strange as I'm not sure it was one that was played all that often.

Happy days.

The Jags - Back Of My Hand

37°2 le Matin

I bet I wasn't the only person who had this poster on his wall and was ever so slightly obsessed with Beatrice Dalle back in 1986/87.

I once made my good friend Trudi sit through Betty Blue, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Three Colours Red all in the one afternoon/evening. Can't quite remember what she did to deserve that but we remain friends to this day, amazingly.

Gabriel Yared - 37°2 le Matin

Hogmanay

Usually at the moment I am fretting over the menu for tonight's meal for ten but due to changes in circumstances of a few of our friends it was not really on the cards this year. Instead we will be going three doors and bringing in the new year there. It also mean that I can slip away after the Bells and get to my bed and not have to wait until the last guests get their taxi, usually around 4 am.

I've never really been a fan of Hogmanay. Not since I was eighteen and spent the night in the cells charged with assault on a person unknown and drunk and disorderly. Both charges dropped in the morning I hasten to add when the police were questioned by my parents on how I got to be drunk within ten minutes of leaving the house where I hadn't had a drink all night and the person whom I allegedly assaulted had made a statement at the time stating that I had done nothing . I was eventually charged and found guilty of breach of the peace for informing a policeman that I knew my rights and that he could not say "shut the fuck up sonny, or I'll put your head through that fucking window".Scottish justice, something to be proud of.

Anyway,  I'm not sure what tonight's soundtrack will be but I will most certainly play these three songs before I climb in to my scratcher.

All the best when it comes and let's hope 2012 is better than 2011.

Jimmy Radcliffe - Long After Tonight Is All Over

Tobi Legend - Time Will Pass You By

Dean Parrish - I'm On My Way

Raiding Your Mate's Dad's Cupboard

When I was at school I had a mate who's dad was a journalist on a national daily newspaper. In his time he had been the music critic for a couple of papers and knew a hell of a lot about music, one of his close friends had been Alex Harvey. But by this time he reviewed films, TV and the wrote the funniest TV listings ever.

When I used to go and see C I would marvel at the amount of vinyl that there was in the house and the state of the art separates system that S had. The records contained most of the best of music from the early blues of Leadbelly, through the jazz of Coltrane and Billy Holiday, the obligatory Stones, Beatles and members solo efforts but stopped somewhere around 1978/79, no punk what so ever. I think that the dawning of punk was when S's musical development ended.

One afternoon when I was visiting I asked C what all of the cardboard packages which were piled up on the kitchen table were, to which he replied "just records my dad gets sent by the record companies, he doesn't review them anymore but still gets sent loads". Then he showed me the cupboard on the half landing which was full of promo items of all kinds from Iron Maiden to Bob Dylan, albums & singles both 7 and 12". I nearly pished myself. I asked C if I could have a dig through the cupboard to which he said matter of factly "sure and if you see anything you like I will sell you it" Now being a 14 year old kid confronted with a treasure trove of vinyl all morality about buying C's dad's records, even if they had just been chucked in a cupboard went out of the window and on that first visit I purchased a couple of records, one of which was a pristine copy of Little Red Rooster by The Rolling Stones and a Dylan album.

I used to visit this magic cupboard every couple of weeks when I had saved up some money. 

C had embraced Thatcherism with open arms and was always on the look out for ways to make money. One of his schemes involved educating young teenage boys in the ways of the world during lunch time. Due to his parents' house's close proximity to the school and his collection of pornographic films he came up with a winning formula and charged anyone who wished to attend 50p for the privilege of watching couples copulate on screen while they ate their chips purchased from The Great Wall down thee road.

On one such occasion, while C was attending to his paying customers downstairs and I was digging through the latest load of promos all hell broke loose. I heard a women's voice screaming and looked out of the window to see teenage boys scattering out the back door. My only course of action was to walk downstairs as calm as possible say hello to J (C's mother) and get out and hoping not to be associated with the shenanigans which had been going on in the living room, which I duly did but the look on her face made me realise that my visits would be curtailed for some time to come.

About twelve years later at one of my soon to be mother in laws infamous 2nd of January parties  I met J as she and S were friends of the family. As we were talking she decided to regale the whole party with the story of when she caught Drew in her house watching porn at lunch time. I had to set her straight about it and when I told her that I was actually looking at the records in the cupboard to which L said " yeah, that will be right" and J retorted " I always knew you were a bit weird Drew".

Anyway, here is another single I liberated from the cupboard while the attention of my school fellows was elsewhere.

Orange Juice - Lean Period.

A Strange Town, Indeed

My views on the week long festivities that is Lanimer week are well known to those who need to know and to the rest of the world who don't know what Lanimers is they don't matter.

It used to be the case that I would do anything rather than stay in Lanark on the Thursday in question but these past three years have seen my take the time off of work due to Max being either an Egyptian, a painter or this year a mushroom in the procession and I have to admit that I have quite enjoyed the the floats and the Pipe and Brass bands, it's just what comes after and the whole undercurrent of the thing that annoys me.

Another thing which fills me with bemusement about the whole thing is the amount of people who return for the festivities.  Over the last few years I have seen people that I haven't seen since school and people who now live all over the world but who get this pull to come back to the Royal Burgh for the week. I don't really understand this not being from the town and not really having an affinity for the place, it is just where I live.

It is really strange but seeing all of these people who I once went to school with me, only emphasises whose who aren't there, not those who through choice stay away but the others, this may sound a little melodramatic but it is honestly how I feel.

In particular I think of a school mate who I was great friends with up until an incident when we were sixteen which saw a parting of the ways of three close friends and new allegiances formed. A few years later we sort of reconciled our differences but were never close again.

It's not due to the Lanimers that I think of John  but because of the time of the year. I can't remember if he did enjoyt he celebrations but I bet that he did being born and bred in the town.

So anyway, this one's for Span.

Big Country - In A Big Country

When Did That Happen?

A couple of weeks ago while we were driving to Livingston, Max asked me what the Five Sisters were. For those of you who don't know the Five Sisters (above) are shale bings on the site of The Westwood Oil Shale Works, near Bathgate. Bings used to be a familiar site all over central Scotland.

I then went on to tell Max that when I was his age, myself and my brother used to play on such a bing over the "bankin" in the village where we grew up and as I recounted some of our exploits I was suddenly aware of what I was saying and the manner in which I was telling him and found myself  stunned that I had morphed into my father and sounded just like he had when he used to tell us stories of his growing up in Airdrie during and just after the Second World War. For the rest of the journey I mulled this over in my head as I drove and felt old, rather sad and had a yearning for a bygone time.

Here is a track from Simon & Garfunkel who my mother used to play all the time when my brother and I were growing up and which reminds me of Honeywell Crescent where our next door neighbour was called Celia but we called her Cecilia.

Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends Theme

"Find one in every car, you'll see"

As a teenager there were 3 videos that were watched avidly by myself and a couple of mates, the Blues Brothers which had to be watched at B's house as his dad had procured a copy and a load of other not so good films  from a video shop that went bust, the reason we had to watch it at his house was due to the fact that it was on Betamax and he was the only one that had a Betamax machine. B's dad was into gadgets and also had plenty of money so he was the first to have all the latest shiny new technology such as a home computer, video games and the first place I ever saw a Bang & Olufsen hi-fi but I digress.

The other two films were Diner, which I have talked about before; from about 1984 until I realised that he was a twat round about 1989 when Wild Orchid was released I kind of idolised Mickey Rourke and eagerly watched for each film to be released that he was in which did include a couple of howlers, A Prayer For The Dying and 9 1/2 Weeks. And finally there was Alex Cox's Repo Man.

Repo Man was the story of a young disillusioned punk that gets a job hanging about with a bunch of social misfits, repossessing cars and tracking down the holy grail for Repo Men, the car which will end all their money worries, a Chevy Malibu which may or may not have rotting alien cadavers in the boot. It is a bizarre and incredibly funny film which gets better with every watch and has a couple of great performances from Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton not to mention the inept punk gang.

The Soundtrack to the film is also brilliant, it features the talents of 80s American punk bands most of whom I had never heard of before, such as the Plugz and The Circle Jerks. It is also memorable for containing the best track Iggy Pop produced during that decade,  the title track for the film and which included a rather vicious guitar riff courtesy of Steve Jones. The album is worth having if you can find it, my vinyl copy is absolutely buggered but I did manage to track down a cd a few years ago.

Here are a couple of tracks from the album.

Iggy Pop - Repo Man

The Plugz - Hombre Secreto

When Everything Stopped

In  a previous existence when I was an apprentice joiner after jacking in Uni the majority of my time was spent working on building sites. Building sites in the late 80s were not the nicest places in the world, in fact the working conditions were pretty awful, I hate to think what they were like in less enlightened times.

Anyway, I spent a large part of my apprenticeship working with two tradesmen in particular, John and Eddie. These guys were a good laugh and I spent many a happy hour either under the floors of houses or nailed to the roof, once ten storeys up, how I laughed. It was not all hilarity and fun, when we were on a price all John could see were £ signs and we worked our arses off in order that John would be able to retire at the age of 50.

However, no matter how hard we were working or how good the price of the job was we had to down tools at 11 am every week day and listen to the radio in silence for 15 minutes or so.

What I hear you ask was so important that it got in the way of these good capitalists and children of Thatcher making money?

Simon fucking Bates and Our Tune is the answer!

For those of you not familiar with this excellent piece of broadcasting thank your lucky stars. Our Tune was a national institution for 13 years it just felt like a hell of a lot longer. In this tasteless slot Bates would recount in his most earnest and sincere voice a story sent in by a listener over the theme tune to Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Most of these stories were tainted by disaster and tragedy and the tune that was requested was usually one of those heart wrenching, or most of the time gut wrenching pieces of schmaltz so beloved in the 70s and 80s' pish like Seasons In The Sun or True by Spandau Ballet and the like, you get the gist. Most of the time I just sniggered to myself but a couple of times I was incredulous at the personal stuff that some people wanted to share with the nation.

With John and Eddie it was different, it was a serious business, these two cynical, hard as nails guys lapped up this mawkish  rubbish and once I caught John wiping away the tears after hearing Zoom by Fat Larry's Band. So I had to find out why this particular piece of soul lite had reduced him to a blubbering wreck and was informed that it reminded him of a Fraulein that he had had a fling with when he was working in Germany, it had been their song, ffs!

My listening to Our Tune finished when I stopped working with John and Eddie but on thinking back when writing this I seem to remember that it was not just these two that downed tools at 11 am every day that most of the sites that I worked on went quiet at this time, I may just be misremembering but I am not too sure.

Here is a track that I always thought that I would hear on Our Tune but sadly never did because if it had appeared it would surely have been accompanied by a belter of a story.

Yvonne Fair - It Should Have Been Me

One Hundred Quid For A Slipmat And A T- Shirt !

I've decided that there is some deep psychological flaw that I suffer from, in layman's terms it is possibly called being a completest sadsack of a man but there will be some technical term for the affliction but I'm not sure that there is a cure.

A couple of months ago when I heard that there was going to be a 20th anniversary edition of Screamadelica,  straight away before I even knew what the release would consist of I said to myself I'm for some of that. When I did find out the contents I started to drool with anticipation, you didn't just get the lp on heavyweight vinyl but also a cd off all of the remixes, the Dixie Narco ep, an unreleased live concert from 1992, a book, and a dvd. But what sold it to me was the slipmatt emblazoned with the artwork which would also be on the replica tour t-shirt and all for the bargain price of one hundred pounds!

Now, any sane person, who owned the album on both vinyl and cd, all of the 12" singles and therefore all of the mixes and the Dixie Narco ep would not have entertained this as they would have reasoned that it was not necessary to own all of this stuff again and shell out a lot of money when skint just to own a slipmat and a t-shirt but not me I pre ordered the package before I could say rip-off bastards and it has been in and out of my shopping basket on a weekly basis ever since.

At the time of writing it is not in the shopping basket but there is still time. I really think that that slipmat will look lovely on my SL1200. This is my other problem, when I buy these limited edition things, they don't just sit in the cupboard they are opened and played  diminishing their value as a collectors item considerably. Take the ltd Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space blister pack, there really was no need to open all 12 of the discs and make sure that it was the correct tracks that were on them, especially as there was absolutely no remastering done. But out of curiosity I had to open them, play them just to make sure and make the package worth hee-haw.

At the moment sanity is prevailing but I'm really not sure for how long.

As an aside,  I had the t-shirt. Bought at the Barrowlands in October 1991 but had to be bin it in July ofthe following year. I will not go into the sordid details but it did involve a mate, my cousin, said t-shirt and the use of my parents bed.! The memory still rankles.

I'm off to the arse end of civilisation for a couple of days, Luton. So no activity here until probably Thursday.

Primal Scream - Loaded (Live 2010)

Where Do Kids Spend Their Pocket Money These Days?

I was just thinking yesterday, as I walked past the empty and rather dilapidated former Woolies, that I missed my Saturday visit with M and the tantrums that entailed when I refused to buy him the largest toy he could find in the store. I do not however miss the mad sugar rushes that used to ensue later on in the day when he loaded himself up on the crap that I capitulated on and bought much to the annoyance of his mother.

I also started wondering what all of the kids now did on a Saturday morning and how they spent their pocket money. Every weekend me and S would go up the street first thing and spend all of our pocket money on a single from either Woolies or Menzies

Woolies was always the best as it stocked the top 40 singles, whereas John Menzies only had the top 20. I remember one fraught Saturday, racing up to buy the UK Subs, Party In Paris on orange vinyl,  as on the Friday there had only been 2 copies in the store. When we got there  we found that one had been purchased.  Being the magnanimous sort, I let S buy it, if the truth be told I didn't really like the track. The UK Subs weren't my favourite band, I do however still like Warhead, which came on brown vinyl. I think that the rare UK Subs singles were the ones which were on black vinyl as I can't actually remember ever seeing any on black vinyl.

My earliest memory of Woolies was the one in Airdrie, where I remember getting plastic figures of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman, this was before I started to focus on small pieces of black plastic.

Here is one of the first singles I remember buying from Woolies.

SLF - At The Edge

and also Nanci Griffiths ode to Woolies

Nanci Griffiths - Love At The Five And Dime

The First Week Of The Summer Holidays.

Yesterday's post by the Vinyl Villain where he mentions the start of the school holidays got me reminiscing about my own summer holidays all those years ago.

When I was growing up I spent the first week of every summer holiday in a caravan with my mother and younger brother in North Berwick. I used to wonder why my father's mood would lighten as the last week of school approached, I now realise he was looking forward to his week of peace. As he didn't really drink, he was obviously looking forward to a week going from work straight to the golf course and not having to referee the battles between my brother and I.

We were not alone in this , there was always at least 4 or 5 other vans with my mother's friends and their kids.

This was where the problems stemmed from, my mother's friends like my mother were teachers and teachers when they get together have to organise things. Even holidays must be structured and have an itinerary. You would have thought that after organising and teaching children all year long they would like to lighten up, chill out have a kit-kat. Not this lot, if it wasn't rounders, it was long walks, crazy golf and if it was raining (and it did frequently) it was cards. Once in order to stop my brother and I from killing each other it was a walk in the pouring rain to Tantallon Castle, a ruin 3 miles from North Berwick, although it felt like twenty.

If I'm painting a rather bleak picture, I don't mean to as I had some of the best times of my life there I just didn't know it at the time.

As I grew older I started to resent going away for this week.

Could I not stay at home? I asked when I was 16, after all I was old enough to be on my own. No! stated my father, a little too quickly for my mother's liking I think. So once again I was on my way to Mrs Craig's caravan park.

Things started to look up from the moment we arrived. G had brought a friend with her. K was possibly the loveliest girl I had seen since the day before when I had last seen my girlfriend. I made any excuse I could to hang around G's caravan and connived of ways in which G and K could be incorporated in anything that was going on with us. As the week progressed we spent a lot of time together but nothing happened and at the end of the week I went home faithful to I but rather pissed off about it.

A couple of month's later, with that week in North Berwick a distant memory, my girlfriend introduced me to a new girl in her class. I was stunned when I saw that it was K, I think that she was a little surprised too. At that moment I was rather glad that that week had been fruitless.

One of the best things about North Berwick was it had a record shop. Not just a record shop but a record shop that stocked records other than the stuff in the charts. I got some great records there, the only problem being that I bought them all on the Saturday we arrived and could not play them until the following Sunday when we returned home.

Come Back by The Mighty Wah is one of the records that I got in that record shop. Here it is in its full ten and a half minute,12" overblown bombastic glory.


Oh, and the hill in the picture, that's Berwick Law, a hill that we had to climb every bloody year, one year carrying a diabetic poodle (for another day)! Still the view from the top was pretty impressive.

The Mighty Wah! - Come Back (The Story Of The Reds/The Devil In Miss Jones)

What Are We Gonna Do?

I don't know if it has anything to do with the looming significant milestone of a birthday but I have been listening to a lot of stuff from my spotty youth and comparing it to what I'm listening to these days and trying to find the similarities and influences. What got me from there to here if you like. A process that even up until a couple of months ago I would have been reluctant to do as I tend to see these kind of reflections kind of wanky and don't want to turn into a look back bore.

Nothing wrong with listening to tunes from a bygone era but comparing them to today's music is totally irrelevant as you don't get the same intensity from the rush of hormones that you did when you were a teenager.

Anyway, I was listening to this album at the weekend and the rush of mixed up emotions, the hair standing up on the back of my neck when the drums start, the melancholy and joy of the song are all still present and just as vivid as when I bought the single from Menzies in Airdrie and took it home to play it for the first time. I swear I could even smell the weird plasticky smell that the shop had.

For the record, in my opinion there isn't a recent band that holds up in comparison to Blondie at their best and this is a fine example of them at their best.

God I'm begining to sound like an old git.

Blondie - Union City Blue

and before they stop allowing us to look at such things, here's the video.