Aqualung – Jethro Tull

I’m not really sure about this one, to be honest, but it’s taken long enough for me to get around to writing anything for this category, so here goes. Can you really withstand six minutes plus of this?

“Sitting on a park bench….I don’t know the words, except park bench!” Jack Donaghey, 30 Rock

There’s something traditional about rebelling against the culture of your parents. Whilst this isn’t true in every aspect of my experience, it certainly hits the spot here. I was born in the eighties. It’s generally accepted to hate pretty much everything from the eighties now, whilst the seventies remains, it seems to me, culturally dominant (to be fair, in the nineties, the sixties held sway, so I’m sure this is a consistent time lag thing).

Mainstream nostalgia and notions of ‘golden ages’ of childhood all seem to hark back to the seventies. Things like ‘the future we were promised’ of jetpacks and so on, all seem to be couched in the brown/orange haze of the seventies. But this never rings true with me. Because I’m not from the seventies. So all those people claiming things were much better then, or trying to ‘connect’ with me through seventies iconography – no thank you.

One of the rough parts of going to watch football regularly, is seeing the makeup of the crowd – mostly late-middle-aged men, again, nostalgic for the ‘better times’ of hooliganism and so on. As a kid, my brother, my dad and I used to hitch a lift with one of my dad’s friends-through-work. And on more than one occasion, in their frankly ridiculous Bentley with shag-pile carpet, they’d force us to listen to Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album.

For me, it’s symbolic of indulgent, and frankly, boring, rock music. It has that false-folk-mystical lyrical style, which now seems creepy. It goes on and on, never progressing. To be fair, it’s probably wrong to say I hate the band, not being overly familiar with their work, but then this is more about that style. It means nothing to me, and it reeks of nostalgia, and an imposition of one generation’s culture on another. Give me some KLF or Coldcut any day.

Enjoy The Silence – Depeche Mode

I even love the video-exclusive intro..

This looks like I planned it, doesn’t it? Oops. Didn’t mean to have two songs from the same artist on consecutive entries. Ah well. Nowadays, I don’t really have a favourite band. There’s great songs, good albums, bands I have affection and/or personal attachment to, but a ‘favourite’, if you took just the last 5-10 years, that’s difficult. So my criteria for this is – band who have the most songs that I enjoy. And, since 1998, that has been Depeche Mode. I remember liking this particular song when it came out, but didn’t really pay attention to the band behind it – indeed, in my head, thanks to Now! That’s What I Call Music VHS tapes, Martin Gore and the slightly scary looking one from Heaven 17 (Wikipedia reliably informs me he’s called Glenn Gregory), were one and the same.

It was only with the release of The Singles 86>98, bought by my brother, that I fell in love with the band – there is no song on that compilation I don’t love. There’s a consistency of theme, of atmosphere, and yet a very different and evolving approach, which makes every song a delight. My love of electronic music, being a child of the 80s, probably helps, too. Then I started to explore the older stuff, and the albums, and again, it’s pretty much all gold. The videos are often works of art, too.

Yes, the 2000s have been less kind to the band – Exciter, the first release since I became a ‘fan’, was disappointing, but not a complete failure, and it’ll always be special to me – the thirty second preview clips were great for speculation. Playing the Angel and Sounds of the Universe were definite steps in the right direction, and yet it’s symptomatic of my waning ‘favourite band’ thing, that I’ve still not listened to the latest album, Delta Machine, in full.

Enjoy The Silence is wonderful, and the album, Violator, is a masterwork, oh, and Andy Fletcher is brilliant.

Agent Orange – Depeche Mode

YouTube link

When you’ve lived for most of your life in one place, it can be a pretty gut-wrenching experience to leave. Especially when you’ve spent most of your formative years in that house. And especially when it’s a decision you have next to no say in.

In August 1999, shortly after finishing the one GCSE I took a year early (IT, for what it’s worth – the version where most of the work was around learning Microsoft Publisher, but also, thankfully for my later life, Access), my family and I moved house. I was pretty down on the whole experience for a good couple of months, I seem to recall. I had just turned sixteen, which probably had something to do with it, too.

Not long afterwards, I can’t exactly remember when, but certainly within the year, I bought a minidisc player, and for the first time, began to experience really having a personal connection with music – I could listen to almost exactly what I wanted, when I wanted. Yes, I’d had a Walkman, but cassettes were always an imprecise way of taking your music around with you. At last, with minidiscs, you could precisely pinpoint, shuffle even, the songs you wanted to hear.

Which all leads up to the creation of a ‘chillout’ minidisc, the contents of which are still preserved as a playlist on my current iPod. It didn’t get much further than four or five tracks, but ‘music to fall asleep to’ clearly puts me back into the body of my teenage years, trying to get to sleep, listening to those four or five tracks in a very particular order (ironic, for all the talk of shuffle and select, earlier).

Agent Orange – it was only later I discovered the significance of the title, and the references to helicopters, explosions, gunfire, was the song that ended the playlist. By this time, I’d be right on the edges of consciousness. Headphones allowed me to bask in the stereo effects, and the slow, gentle rhythm drew me into sleep. The drums are a hinderance to falling asleep at first, but even they settle into a hypnotic pattern. The plaintive morse code, fading into the background at the end, as a last message before I shut down for the night.

It still works – and from time to time, if I really can’t sleep, I’ll use the tried and trusted technique once more.

Disco Down – Shed Seven

Rick Witter – Ian Brown crossed with Jermaine Clement

Like Brian from Spaced, “I don’t do clubs.”. Growing up, the only clubs that my friends ever talked about were the big mainstream ones – I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been ‘clubbing’ in that way. It really just never appealed. And so the indie disco part of my teenage years never happened for me, unless you count discovering bands at home through my much more music-savvy older brother.

Until 2009. Aged 26. There’s a weird feeling when you find something in the world out there where you feel like you belong – I remember walking around Television Centre on a tour as a kid, thinking “you know what, I could work here..“, and sitting in a booth in the cellar of The Albany pub at the top of Great Portland Street, on a cold night in 2009, I finally had that sense of belonging. Like there actually was a place where people went to listen, and dance, to good music.

It was a night called Play/Pause. It was run by fellow BBC folk, and it was friends from work who invited me, on a night where I’d probably otherwise have been doing not much at home. It was brilliant. On the third visit, I plucked up enough courage to ask whether I could have a trial as a DJ there. A year later, another amateur DJ and I are playing to literally a packed house – they weren’t letting anyone else in. One of the best nights ever.

Every so often I get the idea into my head to try and start it up again, but it’s not happened yet.

Anyway, this song, which passed me by upon release, and for years after, is the one that will forever remind me of those nights, the cramped conditions, the wallpaper peeling off the walls, the less than spotless toilets, the dodgy CD players, the rubber stamps on the hand, the water leaks that I’m sure should have caused an electrical fire at one point. The friends I made, and the music we danced to. Not many understood. But there, it was fantastic.

Breaking the Law – Judas Priest

Behold, the bank-breaking power of ROCK, in YouTube form

If I had a super-power, it appears it would be knowing the words to songs. Get me on the dancefloor or in any situation with a song I recognise, and more often than not, I’ll know most, if not all the words, and will be mouthing along with them, possibly at the expense of paying attention to conversation (sorry). So, yet another category that could have had almost any song.

In the end, I’ve plumped for this one, because I was getting a bit bored with the indie music choices, and, well, it’s so ridiculous. Not exactly a complex song with hard to remember lyrics. Indeed, the first time I heard it on the radio I thought it was a spoof (akin to Heads Down, No Nonsense, Mindless Boogie), but no, it’s real. The video is ridiculously cheesy, and I’m reminded of it every time I’m on the Westway flyover in London.

If you need cheering up with some ridiculously over the top rock music, stick this on – and if you want a laugh, watch the video, too.