Life in sound #3 - The Day We Caught the Train

As well as being from the third album I can remember owning, this song reminds of budget holidays when I was knee-high to a pig and full of jellybeans.

When I say budget, I mean, collect 10 vouchers in the sun and a family of four can go on holiday for £10.

When I say holiday, I mean 4 days in a camp site run by the cast of the league of gentleman.

When I say camp site, I mean a Welsh field with a toilet in it.

Chiefly it brings up these three memories:

1. At an indoor swimming pool, some seven year old Spanish ruffian stole my inflatable rubber ring whilst I was showing some girls my dance moves by the towel racks (basic robot followed by some body popping). I chased him down (the girls had lost interest during a poorly executed cartwheel) and gave him a ruddy good lesson on English swearwords and British inflatable ownership law.


2. We went to cheddar on one of these holidays and we visited cheddar gorge. About half way through a tour, I got so scared by a mannequin that looked at me suggestively that I cried, climbed my dad like a tree and we all had to leave. In retrospect, I am not entirely it wasn't just Sir Jimmy dressed in a miners outfit with a Papier-mâché hat and ideas beyond his station.


3. One year we pulled into a jam packed welsh camp site and there was an empty pitch right in the premium first row near what they had rather optimistically dubbed a swimming pool in the brochure. We thought we had struck lucky and spent several hours putting up some sort of quasi  military fabric bunker my dad had borrowed from a family friend. The rest of the day was spent watching my father wage war against the gigantic ants nest we had invaded and triumph over the thriving mass of insects using fire, poison and (if I memory serves me correctly), his bare fists.

Life in sound #2 - Space, Me and you VS the world

In this series of posts, 'A life in sound', I will be documenting my life so far through an exploration of the music that defines me. Or something. Basically, I like these songs and some of them have memories stuck to the side like old gum.



The above is a song from the album "Spiders" by Space. As far as I remember this is the second album i owned on CD, saying that, my memory is about as reliable as car made of jam.

As you can see, space were an unusual looking bunch. The lead singer looks like he spends the majority of his time feeding change into a fruit machine and I am not entirely sure their keyboard player isn't a 14 year old boy.

I think that space were one of the first English bands I was exposed to who didn't rid themselves of their regional accents which... Wait, hang on; Do they have 'The Sherminator' playing guitar?

Interesting fact, In the year of 1996 when this was filmed, all music videos were required by law to be filmed in petrol stations after a massive but short lived sponsorship deal between 'Shell' and MTV.

All in all, Spiders is a great album; it is surreal, sad, extroverted, silly and altogether very very odd.

It reminds me of a time when I had to buy my CD's from woolworths at the same time as avoiding the sweet aisle pedo, Gary. I wonder how Gary is doing?

NABOO. That's it. The lead singer looks like Naboo.

Life in sound #1 - eels, beautiful freak

The following is a re-post* from a previous anonymous blog 'A life in sound', documenting my life through the music that defines me.

*Saying that, I have re-written it because I write better now and I am not trying to impress girls by acting super deep.*

* I am well deep though, ladies.




I start with this song (and the album of the same name) because it is one of my earliest musical memories.

Beautiful freak was released in 1996 which would have made me ten years old when I heard it. Up to this point I think my record collection consisted of "The Smurfs Smurf Christmas", "Mr Blobby's death cry" and "I guess this is the best of the Wurzels".

The jump between multi coloured character pop and the vapid output of overconfident farmers to the outpouring of a man destroyed isn't typical for a ten year old but initially I think I just liked the slightly unusual depressed jauntiness of the album.

At some point in the following years as my brain realised there was more to life than micro machines and plastic trumpets* and despite my largely care free childhood I started to hear the record in a different light.

Regardless of my own simple and happy childhood I could feel the pain of a man I had never met through his words and his art and my musical conciousness was born. This is in essence where this series of posts begins, as a ten year old version of myself looks down the barrel of his future and is content in knowing it will have a decent soundtrack.


*PhhhwwwwwUUuuuurrrrrrmmmmmmp!

Take That - The flood

"Although no one understood, we were holding back the flood,
Learning how to dance the rain.
We were holding back the flood,
They said we'd never dance again"

Now, wait a second, can we look at that first line please.

"Although no one understood, we were holding back the flood."

Something is wrong here, are we pronouncing flood as 'fluud' or understood as 'understud' to make this work as a rhyme?

Come on lads.

Lads?