Won't someone give me some fun...?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:49:38 GMT

1992, don't believe the hype...

I was 14, increasingly interested in what I would have loosely-termed "indie" music, but not yet at the stage where it was all-consuming. My favourite bands of the time were the in hindsight decidedly ropey fraggle rock acts of the day: Carter USM, Senseless Things, Kingmaker... I liked them, but I didn't love them.

My friend Henry and I poured over the NME and Melody Maker every week, reading everything and understanding little. We wore battered Doc Martens. We played guitar badly. We were waiting for something.

In May 1992 Suede released their debut single "The Drowners", and it was like nothing we'd ever heard before. Being in our musical infancy we didn't know Bowie, the Smiths or Roxy Music... we didn't understand the rock family tree that had resulted in those 12 inches of vinyl. It was like it had landed from another planet. The Family Cat didn't wear women's silk blouses, make up, wail about emotions we didn't understand or have guitar playing like that... It was brilliant: we were hooked.

"Metal Mickey" followed a few months later, and we learned to play the solos to both tracks mechanically and poorly. Henry bought a long-sleeved "The Drowners" t-shirt, which he wore every week for PE at school. He'd have probably got more stick if it hadn't been more often than not mistaken for "Swede". God knows how we didn't get beaten up or something. In a school like ours liking a band who flirted with gay themes would have been considered completely synonymous with being gay. I can only guess Suede were so completely off everyone else in our year's radar nobody knew enough about it to turn on us. The kid who liked the Rocky Horror Show wasn't so lucky.

Over the never few years I gradually fell out of love with Suede. They were never the same after Bernard Butler left, and as my horizons broadened I can across things I liked more. But they were my gateway band: those early singles turned a liking for music into a love of it.

If you can't say it in three minutes it's not worth saying...

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:05:22 GMT

I'd been trying to cack-handedly teach myself guitar for a few years, but when heard Billy Bragg, it moved the whole thing up a gear. Of course, as every teenage boy with hair longer than their collar knows, cranking out the clumsilly-fingered chords to your favourite songs in your bedroom just sounds shit when you can't sing and don't have a band to back you. As soon as I heard Billy I had the answer - you don't need to sing, and with a few tricks and licks you can fill out all the sound with just your Les Paul copy and a fourth-hand amplifier.

This was 1994, and the idea of downloading guitar tab off the internet was something I'd probably only seen in the Jetsons, so after painstakingly working out the chords to a couple of tracks, during a trip to Oxford I invested in the Victim of Geography songbook. A whole new world opened up, not least though the enclosed flex-disc on which Billy shared some of his secrets, explained the solos, walking your fingers between the chords, and how to achieve the percussive effects.

My guitar playing got better quickly, and, as teenage boys are prone to do, I drifted towards penning a few numbers in the style of Billy myself, even going so far as to subject some unfortunate audiences to a few short sets at 6th form gigs. To acknowledge my master, I opened with a high tempo thrash through "This Guitar Says Sorry". Christ, I was a cocky fucker.

Levi Stubbs Tears was always one of my favourites of Billy's, but being 15 and my musical knowledge going little further back than my old "Now" compilations, it was a few years before I really understood all about the healing power of Tamla Motown.

Calling the bluffs, talking so tough

Won't someone give me some fun...?

If you can't say it in three minutes it's not worth saying...