Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

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Nikki Gradual
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Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Nikki Gradual » 20 Mar 2012, 14:18

What to do? Favourite songs, meaningful songs,watershed songs, life-changing songs, era-defining songs, or just flimsy songs with a memory attached? The latter I think. This isn’t intended to impress anyone, this isn’t my true desert island discs, the songs that I could listen to for eternity, but they do trigger some memories that I would like to carry with me forever, of phases or incidents or whole periods of my life. The chronology might get a bit fucked in places, for which apologies.

1.
I grew up in what was essentially a music-free household. Dad had no interest, my brother didn’t show any interest until peer pressure at school forced him to buy Abba’s Greatest Hits. It seems now that that was something I tried to correct almost as soon as I could walk. We had an old middle of the road music centre by which mum and dad stacked their entire vinyl collection, Nina & Frederick, Sound of Music, Kenny Ball & his Jazzmen and a couple of others of similar ilk. But that was it. I don’t remember ever seeing the record player used until I started using it.
The radio was another matter, that was on all day while housewife mum did her chores and screeched along to whatever Radio 1 pumped out. The first present I ever bought for my mum with my own money was a 7” of I Love You Love Me Love by Gary Glitter and after that I bought music for all my family for every birthday, Christmas and any other excuse.
It may not be cool or trendy, but the first present I received that I had actually asked for was Long Haired Lover from Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond. I was only 4 at the time. The first record I bought for myself was another near-novelty record, Muhammed Ali, Black Superman by Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band (B side: Bang the Drum) which came out a couple of years after the Jimmy Osmond single (B side Mother of Mine which was horrible). I used to play it non-stop and this more than any record cemented my relationship with music and vinyl.
OK, it’s a bit shit, but I haven’t heard it for years and I can still picture myself in that little corner by the bay window, the air always seemingly full of dust because of the light streaming through the glass and highlighting it, the Abigail’s Party floor-length camouflaged curtains and the corduroy sofa completing the picture. And me, never leaving the side of the Ultra radiogram because as soon as it finished I would restart it.
Despite my best efforts, I never really had much influence on my family’s appreciation of music (see endless posts passim with regard to dad and the 8 Track in his Audi 100) and didn’t manage to cultivate any enthusiasm for it among them, but I had more than enough interest for all of them.

For non-fight-fans, apologies, video contains brief elements of pugilism. For reggae fans, apologies for Brighton's pathetic effort at it.
Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa band – Muhammed Ali (Black Superman)




2.
It’s hard to imagine that any child waking up to music in the 1970s didn’t have a Status Quo phase. I certainly did. They were guaranteed chartbusters back then, with the odd voice of dissent admittedly, but so successful, so popular that the tirades of abuse they suffer now weren’t even considered. So it was that the first album I ever bought with my own money was a cassette of Rocking All over the World. When I pored over the inlay card. I had no idea who John Fogarty was, as far as I was concerned, the mighty Quo had simply come up with another cracking hit. I bought the cassette in Boots (it was probably the second best outlet for music then, after WH Smith) in Bracknell Town Centre.
I didn’t read music papers then, there was no need. You took it as read that the people who played the records on the radio were the Gods of the airwaves, that they were almost as talented and important as the people who actually made the music. They would of course be experts who dedicated their lives to listening, selecting, paring down and sharing for the good of the public. What an intensely noble profession, one I then dreamed of doing, without ever an inkling of playlists or the ability to even countenance the possibility that these straw men were merely uninterested parasites who wanted to be famous, minor celebrities as vacuous and talentless as today’s television presenters, with no interest in music. Of course, there were exceptions, one in particular who will emerge in my next selection.
Everyone was into The Beatles back then, the same way they supported Man Utd until they got relegated. I wasn’t into either. I do have fond memories of primary school singalongs to Yellow Submarine, but that’s as far as it goes. My fanatacism for another band, however, started about the same time and is still with me today. It doesn’t stretch to the levels of some people on BCB, because I find my own obsessions tedious when they become too intense, but it started off pretty ardently and has never really waned. Other trends and styles and, usually, musical affectations have come and gone, but this is one of two bands for whom my adoration will travel with me to the grave. Even discovering the Velvet Underground thanks to issue one of the History of Rock partwork – in which they were billed the greatest ever rock band – couldn’t topple this lot. They are so important, so taken for granted as the pinnacle of rock, that I barely mention them, just assuming that it is a fact to everyone else just as it is to me.
The moment I fell in love with them was on Radio 1 in early 1978. I was listening to a chart rundown as you did back then (back of the class, earpiece in, waiting for the lunch bell on a Tuesday?). Love is Like Oxygen by the Sweet I remember being in it, as was Althea and Donna’s Up Town Top Ranking (possibly number 1) and some poppit-disco dross from Baccara (could it have been Yes Sir I can Boogie, or the even worse tranny anthem Sorry I’m a Lady?). For some reason, I didn’t stop listening when the rundown stopped and, after the news, this was the first song I heard.
It was a massive epiphany for me, a Kraken-level awakening that redefined everything, made me look back as much as forwards.

Rolling Stones – Paint it Black




3. Lordy big school is an unforgiving place. I went in a diehard rock fan and within two weeks was a punk.
So many bands then mattered to me and are listened to still – The Partisans, GBH at the head of the list – but that era was best defined by another. The glue that held the entire post-punk hardcore scene together was the UK Subs. The Subs had a virtual residency at the 100 Club and school and parents allowing (they never did, but I went anyway), I was there as often as possible. I knew all the faces, I never got asked my age at the bar, I bought Charlie Harper a pint.
The first time I went was with the other “punk” at school, Sean. Inexplicably, the week before the gig, probably to prepare for it, Sean went and got a skinhead and a green bomber jacket. He really looked the part. Which turned out to be the shame because this was the Flood of Lies era – blimey I was 15 at best then – and during the era of Captain Scarlet being the latest in a long line of guitarists failing to fill Nicky Garratt’s shoes. Anyway, we politely queued our way up to the door only for me to go straight in and Sean to get turned away.
The doorman grunted: “Captain Scarlet says no skinheads.” Being the loyal friend I am, in I went while Sean went to the pub with the other skins who had been rejected by society’s rejects. It was great.
The other most memorable UK Subs at the 100 Club gig came not long after when I took my girlfriend Naomi along. By then I knew a few people on the scene so a Subs gig wasn’t such a solitary experience of being a shortarse in the middle of a pogoing mob, having grooves raked into your face by the studs on the back the mohicanned lad in front’s leather jacket.
I had also discovered that one old friend who I hadn’t see for a couple of years was a regular at these things, Steven. Steven’s family owned a department store in Windsor, but you wouldn’t have known it. I remember they had a Laser Disc player (that didn’t work), but otherwise there were no outward signs of wealth. That wasn’t important though because Steven did have a big brother called John and John had a car. And they lived close to me. Perfect.
Naomi was quite something. I picked her up second-hand when the object of her desire, a mate called Chris, decided she was a nutter, dumped her and I latched on to her. We saw each other for a bit, but she was never really very interested to be honest. She was fucking sexy though, looked much older and was the perfect arm candy for an aspiring little snot-nosed teen. Guess that’s why I wasn’t so bothered that she was clearly so much less keen than I was.
She was a vicar’s daughter from some shit-hole parish in the east end, from a dysfunctional family with huge, sad problems.
But boy was she a looker. Can I be that shallow? Twice in quick succession?
Not really, I’m a big softy really and was gutted that she just drifted through our dalliance so obviously viewing it as a stop-gap until something taller and better came along.
Never mind, I travelled across London to pick her up and we met Steven and John at The Tottenham just by the club. In we went.
OK, with hindsight, a UK Subs gig was an odd date to take a normal girl with TOTP tastes on, but rather than be intimidated or shy about it, she just seemed to find it, and me, rather amusing. In a purely condescending sort of way, you understand.
At least I got to use the fingerless UK Subs gloves she had made me.
We snogged a fair bit, me increasingly unnerved by her refusal to close her eyes. She said she just didn’t like to and that she was watching my face, but it always seemed rather more as if she was looking over my shoulder… just in case that something taller and better was walking past and she missed him because she was wasting her time kissing a stop-gap boyfriend like me.
I briefly nipped out of the gig to put her on the tube home and, after a few more songs and a storming encore with both Stranglehold and She’s Not There (not exactly regulars on the set-list) played at breakneck pace, we stumbled back to John’s car, a Mk1 dog-bone grille Ford Escort that I remember – probably erroneously – being in Alan Mann Racing colours of red and gold.
I’d had a few ciders that night so I couldn’t swear blind that the following is true, but I do have vague memories of the fact that John had drunk an awful lot more than me and that at some point on the M4 we were using the central reservation to keep the car in a straight line, resulting in a shower of sparks, severe bodywork damage and much misplaced laughter. We all lived.
That was a typical Subs gig back then. Years later, seeing Wire at the ICA, I recognised a couple of faces from the Subs scene. One of them had a flicker of recognition in his eyes, but it may have just been drugs. We didn’t speak.
My paper of choice back then was not the drippy NME but the hard-hitting Sounds. The downside was that Garry Bullshit bestrode it like a colossus, the upside was that it covered so much more of the music I was into. Then there was the radio: goodbye DLT, Edmonds (and producer Pricey-poo) and all the others and hello the only radio presenter I would ever care about from then on. It seems such a horrible cliché now to write about hiding under the bed covers with a transistor radio pressed to my ear (or one of those little beige earpieces, but they broke more often than I could afford to replace them), but that was exactly how it was.
Christ, Peel played some rubbish. I well remember going into Revolution Records in Windsor and asking Richard for He’s An Angry Bastard But I Like Him by Serious Drinking simply because Peel had played it and the teen rebel in me liked the title. I was always in Revolution Records back then, I would riffle through every single piece of vinyl in the secondhand racks at least twice a week and even now can remember some of the gems that I saw week after week and never bought (but would love to have now, such as The Egg Store Ilk by Richard Earl).
Guess the TVPs had it about right in part-time punks when Treacy sang: “Then they go to Rough Trade to buy Siouxsie & The Banshees, They heard John Peel play it just the other night, They’d like to buy the O’Levels single, or Read About Seymour, but they’re not pressed in red, so they buy The Lurkers instead.” That was me, that was.
But I wouldn’t be a part-time punk for long. After this came a less welcome phase, of dabbling with the anarcho-punks, disappearing for whole weekends, once or twice weeks, as I hung out in London squats and screamed along to Crass and Discharge and The Mob. I had a whale of a time, but I now pity my poor parents at what I put them through. I’ve got a 15-year-old nephew now and he seems so young, so immature. Mine was an extraordinarily reckless way for a 16 year old to live their life. I am surprised I even survived that period, but boy was it fun.
Charlie was and is the post-punk God though. I could have gone for CID, Warhead or the songs mentioned above, or Lady Esquire – despite the musicianship they had just shown on Endangered Species (seriously), live, back then, nothing got a reaction like that song – but Flood of Lies was the new LP (christ, they were already on F!) and one that is largely forgotten today. This was the single (complete with poor-man's cod Roy Lichtenstein cover) that went with it.

UK Subs - Another Typical City Involved in Another Typical Daydream




4.
Off on a tangent on this one because it covers more than one of the others timescale-wise. In my teens I had been packed off to a boys’ boarding school. It was only about 20 minutes from home, so I have to surmise that it was simply because my parents didn’t like me very much. It was a weird experience because I have many happy memories, and some of my firmest friends today remain people I met there 30 years ago, but I hated the institution and everything it stood for.
The thing is I made that animosity clear during my time there which didn’t make for an easy five years. I spent quite a lot of it suspended, excluded, and all the other words they came up with for not quite expelled and, seeing as this particular school in those days still used the cane and my housemaster was a former squash international who liked to take a run-up, I left with a huge chip on my shoulder and a corrugated arse. I am not one of those ashamed to be middle class, or ashamed of anything else that I am or represent, but I still have trouble “confessing” to my privileged education.
It was not all bad, though. In the lower sixth, I booked myself (without seeking parental permission) on to a school skiing trip. And “trip” was actually what they called it, holiday would have been far too grand a term.
While other, better boarding schools packed Tarquin or Tristram off to Val D’Isere or Tignes, my school had rather less lofty ambitions and we went to Bardonecchia in Italy. It was a bit of a shit-hole, there was something like a 75% chance of there being no snow (which didn’t really matter to us), but it was £110 all in. I paid for mine out of holiday earnings and looked forward to the non-stop orgiastic piss-up that the older boys guaranteed us it would be.
Spirits were high as our coach, after a tortuous, vomit-inducing trip from Milan (I think), pulled into the town, spirits were slightly less high when our coach drove straight through the town and out the other side, spirits hit the deck when it pulled in at an isolated hotel miles from the nearest bar, disco or any other place to have fun. We arrived at the hotel and spirits got in the lift and went down to the basement when we were informed that we weren’t even staying in the hotel, but a chalet block about 100 yards away. We trudged down there, muttering, trudged back up for dinner and then watched spirits get back in the lift and head for the centre of the earth as the hotel eaterie (definitely not a restaurant, we marked a bread roll with a cross on the first day and it was still there when we left a week later) was packed with a safari park of 10-year olds.
After dinner we moseyed down to the deserted bar and disco and sat around a huge table on our own drowning our sorrows in Asti Spumante. At some point in the evening Jamie needed to go back to our outpost Stalag and came charging back in screaming “Girls!” Naturally, we all stayed calm. Like fuck.
Turns out that the thoughtful hotel owner Enzo had decided that the best thing to do with his guest-list was to shove the 20 teenage boys and 20 teenage girls together, teacher and chaperone-free, in his chalet block.
Given our immaturity, the results were predictable and a week of frenzied bed-hopping, girlfriend swapping and virginity losing followed. Except for me on all counts. I had already lost my virginity, I didn’t do any bed-hopping and I didn’t do any girlfriend swapping. Quite to my surprise I met my first love.
For the first couple of days, I did a lot of flirting with Caroline Double-Barrelled, but as other people paired off, we didn’t. That was partially down to the fact that I was more interested in someone else, partially because the posh totty was way out of my league. Oh and I had thrown a glass of red wine over her arran sweater. It was agonising looking on wondering whether the real object of my desire would latch on to someone. She didn’t.
By Day 3 (or something) she was the only unattached girl (by then CD-B was busy having furious, noisy sex with my mate Harry in the bunk immediately above my head, the springs creaking and diving dangerously towards my head as they went at it) and I and one other were the only single boys. No bother, it was Paul, one of the biggest losers in our school. Except it was here that I learned that when you leave your cloistered, closed environment with its cliques, hierarchies and gangs, your standing at school counts for fuck all elsewhere (I guess the fear of this is why so many of public schoolboys go into the army where that ridiculous lack of meritocracy is steadfastly maintained).
So Paul and I both vied for Sharon’s affections and, oddly developed a friendship and mutual respect as a result. I won of course, he really was a frigging loser. The moment came when we were all clambering on to a coach after an evening in the town. The couples snuggled, the only spare seats were beside me or Paul, she sat beside me. We engaged in pleasant conversation for 15 or 20 seconds and then I ate her face off.
A beautiful holiday romance ensued that would turn into an 8-month long-distance relationship with someone who I can still clearly picture and remember fondly today.
Forgiving her the fashions of the time, Shannon was petite and pretty and had a mop of blonde curly hair and fat C&A salupets that made her look like Bibendum or a refugee from Falcon Crest if they pissed off to Aspen for a long weekend. But this UK-domiciled Canuck was gorgeous and intelligent and as the end of the holiday neared, it became inevitable that we would spend the night together, not under the romance of the stars, but under the groaning springs and groaning groans of Harry and CD-B.
Back then I had an Aiwa walkman-type thing that was wonderful except that it didn’t click to stop when it reached the end of a tape. Because I listened to it every night as I dozed off (not least to drown out the rutting from above), this meant that most mornings I woke up to a set of flat batteries and more expense.
At the time I was utterly obsessed with The Damned’s Black Album and every night that was what I listened to. Every night I just stayed awake long enough to hear that searing intro to Therapy and then I would fall asleep. For those that don’t know it, it’s not exactly complicated, but it rocks like hell and just keeps building in that uniquely two-note-Sensible-driven way until something very small and simple has become something huge and epic.
On the final night of the holiday, I waited in bed for the promised arrival of Sharon. Listening to The Damned as usual.
The next morning I woke up alone, with a pair of flat batteries on my walkman. After Therapy, I had as usual fallen asleep. She had come in (being a paranoid teen in love I confirmed this by interrogating everyone who might have seen her), but, having discussed in detail earlier in the day what we would get up to, she thought that the teen me was “just too damned cute” to wake up and buggered off to her bed. Harry had seen her and made things a whole lot better by telling me that he would have woken me up or said something to her, but he was too close to climax to stop what he was doing with CD-B.
The post-script is that Sharon and I went out for a long time (for a pair of kids back then) including the most mind-bogglingly phenomenal night of my life (but that’s another story) prior to meeting my wife. Inevitably we split up, but when Friends Reunited started up I can still remember the child-like frisson of excitement when I received a message from her.
It was nice, I replied that yes, I was the guy she thought, yes, I too remembered those days very fondly etc etc. This was the most scintillating electronic foreplay, leaving me to believe (fuelled by all the similar stories in the press at the time), that a rediscovering of first love story was inevitable. Then, stupidly, I asked about her relationships. Met soul mate, apparently, six or seven kids, totally in love. Poodle-haired bitch. On a quiet evening when I have had a few beers, I still stalk her on Facebook.
Thanks The Damned, I still love your tune, though. This is just one of the many memories that goes with it.

The Damned - Therapy




5.
Bit of a leap here and lot of history to cram into one song. I left University in 1989. I didn’t pass go and I didn’t collect £200, instead, like everyone on my course I went straight on to the dole queue. Except that I didn’t claim, I just did bits and bobs jobs. Probably my fault for opting for the course that then had the least compulsory hours in the UK (History & Politics at Warwick), probably my fault for having no idea what I wanted to do. Never did have, even as a kid I remember consciously learning to just say “fireman” when adults asked because I didn’t have the right, or indeed any, answer.
Uni was good, though. I met my best mate there and we shared a brilliant few years of proving precisely why tertiary education shouldn’t be squandered on the likes of us. Musically, it was a bland old time and we were far too pretentious to appreciate anything decent anyway. My phases of the day were blues, Harper, Ayers and early Floyd, with a healthy dose of the Pixies – a band I still adore today – thrown in.
Happy, carefree days, and utterly spunked up the wall opportunities.
So, when I left and it turned out that the country was fucked and there were no actual jobs for anyone, I just carried on living like I was a student, except rent-free in my parents’ house. On-off factory day-job, video shop and/or pub work in the evening. If not working in a pub, I would be on the other side of the bar. Eventually I paid off my debts and saved enough to go to Australia where I spent a further year living like a student and talking funny.
When I came back, the expected land of milk and honey was still utterly despondent and depressed, and there were still no jobs. So I just applied for everything that involved any element of writing or words and got rejected for everything. I had a terse response from Mark Ellen for one, chastising me for applying for a job I wasn’t qualified for. I was so fucked off with everything by this stage that he got an even more terse on back saying: “Then don’t put ‘no experience necessary’ in your advert then.”
It all changed one night when, buoyed by several pints of Directors and fed up with my brother boasting about some extremely loose acquaintance (and she was loose apparently) who was writing bits and pieces for the Sunday Times Magazine, I bet him a fiver I could do the same. So, when I got home, I typed out a horrible self-pitying piece of crap about my woe-is-me, nice well-educated middle class boy can’t get a job and has 107 rejection letters plastered on his wall life, bunged it in an envelope and sent it off.
When I sobered up I forgot all about it until I got the letter saying they wanted to publish it, were sending a ‘name’ photographer down to snap me, and would I accept a payment of £250? Would I? Fuck yes, not only did I decide that £250 for half an hour of post-pub typing was fucking good money, but then I started multiplying it up. Seven hour working day, five-day week, 48-week working year at £500 per hour = £840,000 a year. That was it, a career in journalism beckoned.
Unlike people who actually wanted to be hacks and had a plan of attack mapped out from the aged of 16, I was utterly unaware of the hierarchy of these things – which papers were better, weeklies vs dailies vs evening etc – I just photocopied the letter from the Sunday Times and sent it off to the three local papers nearest to my front door with a covering note that in effect said: “Look at me, I’m amazing, gizza job.” One of them, the Reading Evening Post, actually answered and called me in. Let’s not get deluded here, the Reading Evening Post was – and I am sure still is - a dreadful little rag. I didn’t know that, but neither did I know that I was on the verge of lucking my way in to an evening paper (most deadlines, harder news environment, making you much more employable) that was part of the Thomson Regional Newspapers empire. As far as I could see Thomson was shit, too, but actually it – and especially its training, which it gave free to all its little Tintins – was highly respected.
So I spent three days in the news room of the Reading Evening Post doing my level best not to get the job. Everything I wrote was spiked or unrecognisable if it made it to print, all my lovely three-syllable prose deconstructed to idiot speak. I just didn’t “get” it. Eventually, on day three I lost patience and accepting that I had already lost the job, decided to take the piss, filing a story about Princess Di visiting a local nursery school littered with childlike tabloid bollo such as “excited tots” and “role model to millions”. The newsdesk loved it, congratulated me on finally “getting” it and offered me a job.
£7000 a year. Hey? What about the fucking £840,000?
In my official acceptance letter to the editor Dave I wrote that I assumed that the £7000 was just a final “test” to see how committed I was and he would announce the real salary when I accepted. He laughed and framed it and put it on his wall, but never gave me any more money. The bastard.
The upshot of getting this job was that I was immediately packed off to Newcastle to learn how to be a hack. Frankly, I reckoned that once you have worked up the nerve to type the phrase “excited tots” with a straight face there is very little else that they can teach you, but they disagreed.
At Newcastle I was thrown in at the deep end with the rest of the new intake from The Scotsman and all the other flagship titles as far removed from the Reading local as can be imagined. It was an impressive course, really, taking us from nothing to savvy (or cocky at least) news reporters with a working knowledge of the law and 120wpm of shorthand in four months. There were 10 of us in all, I think, and I had nothing in common with nine of them. Sure we all drank together (heavily) and curried together, but that’s just what you do in Newcastle when you are lodging in the posh spots like Jesmond and Gosforth.
The tenth I had music and rugby in common with and he remains a great mate to this day. He is godfather to one of my children and I to one of his. He is now high up on a national newspaper, I am not. By the time I started flirting with the nationals, I was thoroughly disillusioned with news reporting and already look for a way out.
For four months, when we weren’t stuck with the others, we just hung out, played the Rolling Stones, argued about music and drank shitloads. Always the Stones. And soul. And blues. He introduced me to Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, in return I offered up the joys of Howard Tate and Garnet Mimms.
The most memorable occasion was our trip to Lindisfarne and Bamburgh. One of the landladies had a shack there (she called it a cottage) on a clifftop overlooking the sea, so the entire “class” went up for a long weekend. We called in at Lindisfarne and bought lots of mead to go with a bootful of lager, then headed to the shack, stumbling through the heather blanketed cliffs down the pub in the dark and, rather less proficiently, back up the cliff after the obligatory lock-in.
After just one night, the others had had enough of the real Northumbria and buggered off back to the smog, leaving just me and Greg on this deserted clifftop with their booze, a tape player and our tapes.
So, naturally, we spent an evening hitting golf balls into the sea (I still don’t know where the clubs came from), drinking, belting out our “tunes” at full blast to passing wildlife and forming a friendship that is still going today. Our playlist that night was the great trilogy - Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers – followed by everything else we had. Memory wise it is the sort of evening that would make a great buddy or road-trip movie, except that, of course, it wouldn’t. It would be a very bad movie of two obnoxious early 20-somethings drinking and being hooligans with a couple of golf clubs. The soundtrack would be fucking mega, though.
It wasn’t that it was the best night of my life by any means but it was symptomatic, somehow important as the culmination of one thing and the start of something else, like a sort of leaving do for what should have been an incredibly depressing passage of my life, but actually was probably the happiest and most carefree that I have ever been. But then my emotions have always been a bit topsy-turvy, guess that’s why some of the saddest songs have the happiest memories. Cue Howard and a little slice of soulful perfection…

Howard Tate - Ain’t Nobody Home



There is a postscript to this song. Some 15 years later, Howard Tate played his first and only ever gig in London at a burlesque cum tranny bar in Soho called Madame Jo-Jos. Greg and I were there, naturally, still mates after all those years. I went along with him, a work colleague and another mate. It was an amazing sight before it kicked off, like a Stiff reunion party. Jake Riviera was at the bar, charismatically holding court, louder and shoutier than anyone else. Nick Lowe was seemingly consciously on the fringes, looking slightly grubby. The rest of the crew seemed to be there, too.
It was great to see Howard, too, even though he was all preachy nowadays, he still put on one hell of a show, wandering through the crowd belting out his hits. And all the time, four foot in front of him, stumbling backwards was some nob filming him on a phone (how you doing Cheifwhat?). During the whole show, sat solitarily in the darkest corner of the club was a frail old man, looking on intently, with a “father’s” pride in his eyes. I recognised him instantly as my hero, the person I wanted to write a book about: Jerry Ragovoy. Rather than accost him I showed him some respect. Maybe I said “hello Mr Ragavoy”, but I certainly didn’t do much more than that. Do I regret not harassing him, getting his number and insisting on interviewing him? Of course I do. Do I regret giving him some space to enjoy the show with an anonymous dignity? Not in the slightest. Rest in peace Jerry and rest in peace Howard, too.


6.
The first time I took my wife to dinner, I knew I was going to marry her within about 15 seconds. She reckons it was the push-up bra, but I like to think that it was a lot more than that.
It wasn’t as if we had only just met, after all. In fact we had been passing acquaintances through three disparate groups of mutual friends for the best part of the decade, most of which time she had been in a long-term relationship with a bloke she would have married like a shot if he had ever asked, but he didn’t.
When they split for good, she went out with a friend of mine for a bit and dumped him pretty callously, so I was naturally wary.
The inevitability of “us” had been building for a while, though. She flirted with me at one friend’s birthday party. This was notable because girls don’t generally flirt with me. And if they do it has to be pretty fucking obvious. They could dance around naked in front of me holding a sign saying “You, me, sex, now” and I’d still be turning to whoever was nearest and asking whether they thought I had a chance.
So we arranged a date and, inexplicably, I stood her up.
Fine, until I bumped into her a year later at a Sonic Youth gig, and largely out of guilt asked her on another date… and stood her up again. I still don't know why I did it, because I did like her. Maybe I was just scared, but let’s face it the signs weren’t there.
Then a friend stepped in and told me what a shit I was being (quite rightly), that she was a nice girl and I owed it to her to take her to dinner. Nothing else, never see her again, but I owed here that. Fair enough, so I asked her, she turned up and I instantly fell in love. Guess I should have been paying more attention for the previous decade and I could have saved a lot of time and unnecessary heartache.
I love that initial flush of a relationship when your brain contrives someone to be your soulmate, that you have everything in common – “you like food? I like food, too!!!!!” – before time turns that circle of mutuality into a Venn diagram with an ever-shrinking centre.
With my wife, it was like that, but supercharged (and though it is now a Venn diagram like everyone else'e, it still has a good sized centre).
Sure, there was a fair amount of obvious crossover that even an end of the pier psychic could have guessed at, but how many girls do you wine and dine who throw The Sound into the conversation?
And then Wire, well Colin Newman solo to be precise.
Wire is a band, that perhaps surprisingly, I haven’t mentioned so far, but they were the one that I was referring to with the Stones way back, the other ever-present. My love of Wire goes back to I Am The Fly on Top of the Pops when I barely into double figures age-wise. After that initial impact, it subsided a bit (the rest wasn’t the same, but now I know that it was I am The Fly that didn’t fit, it should have been a Magazine song really).
A few years later I came back to them and threw myself into them like I had no band ever, except the Stones. The first three albums, and then everything else, even the widely panned Manscape. Then the pre and post projects. I am not a completist about anything because all the stuff I like it would be impossible to ever complete, but Wire and solo offshoots is as close as I will ever get.
And there I was with this girl I was falling head over heels for asking me if I had ever heard of a couple of songs she had failed to find for years.
First up: “Have you ever heard of the Sound? I think that might not be the band name because my really into music friends say it doesn’t exist.”
Boy did I bore for England on that one. Suffice to say, I knew the band, had nearly all their stuff and especially the song she was looking for (Total Recall).
Obviously a glutton for punishment, she wasn’t deterred: “As you know that, I don’t suppose you have ever heard of someone called Colin Newman.”
About three hours later I stopped talking. There were plenty of other connections, too, of course (could you have imagined that Spizz was really big on the French indie scene?), but if there was one song that brought us together, that changed my life when I had pretty much given up on anything this momentous ever happening, it was this:
Colin Newman: Feigned Hearing.
But I couldn't find that on Youtube so we'll have to settle for this instead:

Wire - Mannequin




7.
Guess we’ve all got to grow up sometime and, though I like to tell myself that I am still a rebel, it’s truer to say that I am realising that I never was. Sure, I caused some agro, expressed a hundredweight of middle class angst in some distressing and unpleasant ways, but it was all small beer compared to what other people were doing, what other people were going through at that time.
I still have attitude, but I’ve always bowed to the highest authorities (anyone who has the power to put me in jail) and for the past seven years or so, I have had a new authority.
Anyway, eventually, after six years and two kids, we got married. We had some nice music in the tumbledown Pyrenean church, but none of it the stuff I had always promised I would have.
Vaya con Dios by Doris Troy was on my certainties list, but she found out what that meant and vetoed it. An Eye for Optical Theory by Michael Nyman was another, but as soon as she heard the bassoon (?) she started laughing.
So instead, we had a bunch of Corsican death dirges.
Insight: Corsicans sing songs in proportion to what they love most. Go there, sit on a balcony and listen to the anguished whining floating through the still night air and the order of those priorities becomes clear: 1) my mother, 2) mother Corsica herself, 3) God, 4) fishing, 5) my knife, 6) my dog, 7) that sausage I had for dinner last week, 8) my wife.
Thing is, if I had known that our guests would have to sit through half an hour of that overwrought woe-is-me nonsense, I would have stuck to my guns and insisted a bit more on the one piece of music that always moves me. Like I said a few thousand words back, sometimes sad songs are happy to me and this one really fits that bill. It is calm and measured and sparing and simple. Two instruments, seemingly holding a conversation about massive momentous, soul-sapping things. To me it is like waves gently breaking on a beach and I just let it wash over me.

This is the only one of my choices where the version matters. Tasmin Little all the way.
Arvo Part – Spiegel im Spiegel




8. Blame Corporate Whore for the fact that I only really have seven choices. Or thank him! He sent me a note saying “You’re up” on Saturday (he had been let down by a couple of people, apparently, so called on Gradual the chopped liver) and after much negotiation, I managed to stretch the deadline until Monday.
Maybe it was a good thing, though, because after reading back through all that po-faced, self-indulgent, self-edifying, narcissistic tosh, it feels good to have the opportunity to not launch into some lengthy diatribe, but just to try and balance it up a bit. You see, it may not have come across, but I do like fun, and I can be fun (rarely). So, even though these last songs are hardly “fun”, they are ones that will always bring a smile to my face, and always get me dancing (if I am sufficiently pissed). There are a million other songs I just find irresistible of course, but, in no particular order, here are just a few of them off the top of my head:
10. Roy Harper - 12 Hours of Sunset (included last minute, thankfully, because I couldn't get the link to Lorraine Ellison to work)


9. Alright – Supergrass
[youtube]qUE4oDunYkc&ob=av2n[/youtube]

8. Dionne Warwick - Walk on By

or the Stranglers


7. Sugar Pie Desanto - Soulful dress


6. PIL - Public Image Limited


5. Patto - Time to die


4. Kevin Ayers - Butterfly Dance


3. Sandy Denny - Who know where the time goes?


2. Pink Floyd - Biding my time


1. Germfree Adolescents – X-Ray Spex
I chose this as number one because everyone always bangs on about Teenage Kicks, this for me far better sums up the attitude: young, snotty, but not too snotty, it was as anti-punk as you could get. Plus, there is something wonderfully haunting in the voice, something relentlessly upbeat in the song. It's XTC, but good. Down but up, happy but sad, that's me all over.

X-Ray Spex – Germfree Adolescents



Book: When We Were Very Young, AA Milne.

Luxury: On the assumption that I can’t have Skype to stay in touch with my wife and kids, whether it is a laptop or some ink to go on the quill I will fashion out of a dodo feather, all I want is the means to write. I don’t claim to be any good at it, but it is the one thing that I could immerse myself in eternally, entirely losing track of time, strife and all the other troubles in my life and the world. And I do it compulsively. Hence, if I am to spend eternity on a desert island, it is not only the sole activity that would make my life bearable, but also it is the one thing that the very fact of denied it by being stuck on an island, would drive me bonkers.
"He's thrown a kettle over a pub; what have you done?"

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Thesiger » 20 Mar 2012, 14:29

I'm just pouring a cup of cocoa and settling into a comfy chair to relish this one, James. Looks a real roman fleuve.
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Moleskin » 20 Mar 2012, 14:46

Fantastic!
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Jug Band Music
my own music

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Thesiger » 20 Mar 2012, 14:47

A terrific piece of writing (marred only by the musical selections)! You ought to try it professionally.

Nikki Gradual wrote: I had no idea who John Fogarty was...


Who he?
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Limpin' Jez McKenzie » 20 Mar 2012, 15:12

Thesiger wrote:A terrific piece of writing (marred only by the musical selections)! You ought to try it professionally.


Indeed


Nikki Gradual wrote: The chronology might get a bit fucked in places, for which apologies
I kept thinking "swim as far as you can, swim as far as you can".

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Rory Bellows » 20 Mar 2012, 15:22

Brilliant, James

Extra points for the detailed UK Subs anecdotes (I'm thinking about trying to book the Subs for 50th next year ;) )
Krusty : "But you gotta come back Mel, we're a team!"
Mel : "No, Krusty. You always treated me rather shabbily. On our last show, you poured liquid nitrogen down my pants and cracked my buttocks with a hammer."

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby C » 20 Mar 2012, 17:58

A robust read lad

A robust read!

Good to see Patto included

No Audience...?




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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Nikki Gradual » 20 Mar 2012, 22:26

Rory Bellows wrote:Brilliant, James

Extra points for the detailed UK Subs anecdotes (I'm thinking about trying to book the Subs for 50th next year ;) )


I'll be getting an invite then?
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Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Rory Bellows » 20 Mar 2012, 23:10

Nikki Gradual wrote:
Rory Bellows wrote:Brilliant, James

Extra points for the detailed UK Subs anecdotes (I'm thinking about trying to book the Subs for 50th next year ;) )


I'll be getting an invite then?


Of course
Krusty : "But you gotta come back Mel, we're a team!"

Mel : "No, Krusty. You always treated me rather shabbily. On our last show, you poured liquid nitrogen down my pants and cracked my buttocks with a hammer."

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby trans-chigley express » 21 Mar 2012, 01:13

A great read. A pity you couldn't find Feigned Hearing, I love Newman's Commercial Suicide album and I admire your wife's good taste. The Damned's Therapy was a great pick too.

I'm still having my Quo phase. :oops:

Bungo the Mungo

Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Bungo the Mungo » 21 Mar 2012, 11:22

I'll leave this one for the weekend. Looks good!

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Footy » 21 Mar 2012, 11:53

Sir John Coan wrote:I'll leave this one for the weekend. Looks good!



Yes it looks like a goodie. I'll have to leave it for a bit later, too, as it will need a bit more time than I have right now.
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Corporate whore » 21 Mar 2012, 17:22

Bump

I am having to read this in sections, great so far!
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Minnie the Minx » 21 Mar 2012, 19:47

I enjoyed this so much, honey!
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Corporate whore » 22 Mar 2012, 00:15

Fantastic writing James,

Can we have a few more chapters to make up for you choosing too many songs?
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby kath » 24 Mar 2012, 21:58

indeeeed, a splendid read. i got sucked in fast, that weird combination i'm so addicted to, equal doses of (a) a different, almost alien world, one with boarding schools and london squats; and (b) the instantly relatable... the importance of those radio gods, teen escapades and, of course, the rolling fucquin stones.

but my favorite thing: yer sense of humor. it has a habit of sneaking up on me from behind, somehow, throughout the whole damn thing. it's just warm and witty and self-knowing. i love that kinda crap, i dew. mwhaha. from eating sharon's face off to yer venn diagram to all that stuff with yer wife. what a great story: yer standing her up twice only to fall instantly in love with her the third time. some of yer descriptions of that first flush, of spending hours talking about shared music... lorddddd, that is SO kathish/reapish, it takes me back. (we're comin up on lucky 13 years. i'm just gonna keep getting sappier for the next few days.)

perhaps i should get to the music. yer jimmy osmond was my carole king's tapestry. heh. of yer clips: i dug the uk subs, the damned, howard tate, wire. i really love that arvo thingie. beautiful. lessee... big faves with roy harper, that wonderful floyd track, my fave supergrass (had it on my cup list last year). however, that muhammed ali track is a foul, foul thing. it must be said.

luvly milne choice. *sniffle* my luxury is the same as yers.

by the way, i'm one of those people who fucqued up and had to miss the deadline, thus puttin the rush on you. it could be worse, though. i could play you rush. in fact, i could start with my own 2-cd comp of rush essentials, and... and...

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Billybob Dylan » 24 Mar 2012, 22:12

An excellent read, James.
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby copehead » 30 Mar 2012, 17:57

beautifully written.

Thompson's money didn't go to waste

I loved this

having grooves raked into your face by the studs on the back the mohicanned lad in front’s leather jacket.


That sparked a thousand early 80s memories.
Dancing in the streets of Hyannis

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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Corporate whore » 10 Apr 2012, 22:23

Bump for Carol.
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Re: Desert Island Discs - Nikki Gradual, 20 March 2012

Postby Neil Jung » 10 May 2012, 22:46

James,

That was a really great read. Thanks for taking the time to write it and share it.

Mike
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