So some music you’re predisposed to like. Your first look at this album cover, the first from Roxy Music, and if you were a teenager of the (predominantly) male variety, you just HAD to love it. There was no option. Because the picture was suddenly essential in your life. Lots of music covers featured pretty girls, stunning girls, lovely girls, slutty girls. But this one was different. Fragile. Vulnerable. She needed MY help. In so many ways. But then I heard the music. And it was game-changing. Life-affirming. Gravity defying. It was just so damned different. No choruses, no verses, no nuffink. Just amazing music that had its own time, its own pace and its own rules. Which were: no rules.

A bunch of overly-posey art-college tossers who you just wanted to punch. Until they started playing. And then it all changed. And you could forgive Bryan Ferry’s ridiculous clothes. Andy Mackay’s hairstyle, Brian Eno… for just being Brian Eno.

I still play this album, like, a lot. Only the first half really, if I’m honest, but that’s enough to show the width, height, length and breadth of the wonderful Roxy Music at their earliest, their most ‘raw’, their most uninhibited.

But if you want albums which have TWO brilliant sides, like, virtually every track a wonder, there was always David Bowie. Another art-school reject who just went his own way. Then went her own way. Then his own way again. And again, its the early albums that won me over. The Man Who Sold the World. Ziggy Stardust. Hunky Dory. Yes, Aladdin Sane is brilliant but I just like the early stuff, uncontaminated by the commercial pressures. I went to see Bowie in 1973 at the Romford Odeon. Just before he killed off Ziggy FOR-E-VERRRRR!!! And it blew my tiny little 17 year-old mind.

My brother hated all of that music, but by then I was more my own person and although he actually vomited when I brought my first Motown LP into the house, even he had to admit that Stevie Wonder was someone pretty special. Which he remained all the way until Ebony & Ivory came out. And ‘happy birthday’. But the early albums, once again, were magnificent. Every track brilliant and unique, every instrument played by the man himself.

And the brother just kept on buying Black Sabbath. Uriah Heap. Led Zeppelin. We converged on Cream because they were rock enough for him, jazz enough for me. But I drew the line at Deep Purple. The problem was, he was a guitarist too, and a pretty good one. So when I put something on the stereo that he didn’t like, he’d just plug his turntable into his Orange stage amp and blow the fucking house down. Our parents loved it when that happened…

Ahhh, nostalgia. Induced by a virus. Indirectly. So far. Tomorrow, for any young people reading this, I’ll supply a glossary for words like ‘stereo’, ‘LP’ and ‘album’. For the rest, you’ll remember the first time you actually heard real ‘stereo’, which for me was Sargent Pepper’s, on headphones through an amp my brother made. He was good at that shit, just not the best musical editor.

Happy Friday

A xxxx