D' Ye Ken

John Peel has died of a heart attack whilst on holiday in Cuzco, Peru.

He was one of the few if my real heroes I've never managed to meet in person. Not only did he have a truly great radio voice and a wonderfully dry and sane sense of humour, he opened the way for just about everything I care about in music. Without him the music wouldn't have been made because there couldn't have been the cross fertilisation of reggae, punk, rock, blues, folk and African music that made punk explode into a huge range of marvellous new musics.

I suppose a lot of us owe him a debt that can never be quantified let alone repaid. He taught me that once you understand the rudiments of the blues you can figure out a way to get into pretty much any form of music that's been produced by musicians who care.

Gone, but I hope never forgotten.

The Hardy Boys

Tom that is. I'm now wallowing in Eligible Bachelors, my favourite Monochrome Set album.

I never actually saw them live. I've done a show with Tom playing guitar in the band, but that's as close as it gets. I knew people who knew them all through the 80s, nobody ever dragged me to a gig, I regret this.

Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles

I'm currently listening to I Was A Mod Before You Was A Mod and wondering what's the current state of Dan Treacy. It's very dated in a way, but very pure, and above all it's dated in a parallel universe rather than this one.

He's a hell of a songwriter is Dan. Aside from giving glimses into a wonderfully skewed vision of the world, there's some moments of real poetry amidst the music hall style semi-doggerel. The fun, humour, and sheer "sanity" always stayed in my mind, but it's only when I'm listening that I remember quite how absorbing a TV Personalities gig used to be.

One day somebody is going to discover the TVP's back catalogue and rework them to be slick, modern and poppy, and we're all going to wonder why Pulp made it big instead. OK, I know, I've seen both Dan and Jarvis Cocker from a few feet away and when you get to the bottom line a lot of success is a matter of selling what you've got. Still, I'd really like to spend an evening at a gig marvelling at the wonders of Planet Treacy.

High Land, Hard Rain

So what was it about that album? It's one that sticks in my mind as defining a time. I guess because it's the one that showed that you can do indie soul and that you don;t have to hide the fact that you can play in order to keep some edge to the music. Maybe it's just that the songs were so great.

Aztec Camera had been around a couple of years. I adored Just Like Gold but over the next few years didn't have the dosh to buy records, so I missed the build up I suppose. Suddenly there was a whole album, and it was even BETTER. Oblivious seened to say it all, so did The Boy Wonders, Walk Out To Winter was pop genius, and just as you get ready for the let down it's The Bugle Sounds Again and We Could Send Letters revisited. We're halfway through the album and it've been bliss all the way.

I still do a version of Down The Dip. It's one of the songs I used to busk, and made good money with (sorry Roddy I suppose I owe royalties). Though my favourite is the second last track, Back On Board.

Maybe that's a lot of what I love about the album. It had great love sings that weren't sentimental or dumb, and I was in love and trying very hard not to be sentimental and dumb. Whatever. It's the album that had the song that named the blog, so it gets the first post.

"So here we go, digging through those dustbins, giving things new names."

But down by the ballroom

I recognized that flaming fountain in those kindered caring eyes.

Paul Research from the Scars puts it very well. We're all older than we ever thought we'd be, and we keep getting fed nostalgia shows on TV that show a decade that doesn't seem anything like the 80s at all. So I'm going to indulge in shameless nostalgia for the decade that apparently never was. I hope that others of my age will find it brings back memories and will be generous enough to remind me of things forgotten. I hope that "you young people" may find some of the old obscure music we reminisce about is actually not that bad.

I guess I started the decade enjoying the last vetiges of the punk revolution and the pub rock booze up, and drifted naturally into the Living Room/Communication Club scene that later became the foundation of Creation Records. However I was also listening to a lot of African stuff, a lot of reggae and ska, and never quite stopped being tied down to blues, rhythm and blues, and English folk. I had the good fortune to have a show on IC Radio where I was allowed to play fast and loose with the playlist (as well as managing to force artists like the Teardrop Explodes, Aztec Camera and Altered Images onto it by sheer repetition, above all I was allowed to have guests and do interviews. I guess the highlight was teaching the late lamented Epic Soundtracks how to do a radio show.

In 1980 I was in a punk R&B band called the Vegetables, along with Mark Wilson who was last heard of at the BBC Radiophonics Workshop, and Martin Bayliss who later joined the marvellous Cannibals with Mike Spencer. We were pretty lousy (apart from Martin who was already a classy bass guitarist and Mark who could honk a sax to great effect) but nobody could ever say we didn't sweat.

After that fell apart I was dragged into Futile Hurling which qas aomewhat different. It was sort of an Imperial College supergroup, except that I'd been kicked out and Jerry was never actually there, and that we weren't super as such. However we did get to do some fairly serious gigs and I'm still proud of what little we managed to record. It meant that the brass section started indoctrinating me with the religion that is jazz, and when The McGee picked up on us it meant we all got to take the making of music almost seriously. I gather it was one of the best tines in my life, though I'm afraid I was a tad to out of it to remember very much apart from the gigs and recording sessions.

Jerry went solo as The Legend and released the first plastic on creation, Dave and Paul become two of Helen McCookerybooks's Horns, and I went off to audition for Twelve Cubic Feet who we'd been supporting not long before. I dragged my former college radio trainee along to an audition for a new vocalist and we both got the gig. At times we were GOOD. We had Dave Morgan, possibly the finest dance drummer I know of and a dream to be in a rhythm section with, we had Paul Rosen writing some freat songs, fabbo guitar from Dave Evans, rather classy vocals from Fred Durell and Franky, and we had a Casiotone on an ironing boartd, and what could be cooler than that? Well for a starters having a demo produced by Joe Foster.

Stiff Records were impressesd and offered us a contract. What happened mext won't be history until I've had a coffee, a ciggy, wittered on about some old obscure forgotten bands for a while, made a few phone calls, eaten something, watched telly, fallen asleep, woken up, had a bath, several coffees and a brakfast, and eventually started feeling guilty that I was going to write up the latter half of teh decade and didn't get around to it.

Until then it's the autumn of 1984.