My Life in Music, Part 2

My disillusionment with Pop/Rock lasted some time but in the late 90's I became aware of Indy music and decided it was time to try listening again. I was bought Shine 3 as a Christmas present. The tracks that stood out for me then were Marvellous by the Lightning Seeds, What do I do Now? by Sleeper and Angel Interceptor by Ash. Shortly after that I got Shine 1 and heard Green Day for the first time. It was probably the best Green Day track I could have heard for my first taste of modern punk, Welcome to Paradise. It was fresh, energetic and, most of all, punky. I loved it.

At roughly the same time, we got a Playstation 1 and bought Tony Hawk 2 for our son, Harry. This game had a great soundtrack including You by Bad Religion - again modern and punky. Every time I went into a games shop, I would hear this track. A Sega Dreamcast game would be on and the song started with a "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah..." I loved it and asked my son what the song was. I told him it was on the Crazy Taxi soundtrack and sang a bit of it. He told me it was by The Offspring, a West Coast punk band. He then borrowed the CD Ixnay on the Hombre from one of his friends for me. I made a tape of the CD and listened to it endlessly. My favourite tracks were Gone Away and Amazed.

My children were by now developing their own tastes in music. My son was tending further and further towards Metal and Prog and my older daughter was listening to Nu-Metal: Linkin Park, Slipknot, Rammstein, Limp Bizkit. I found myself liking songs like Wait and Bleed by Slipknot, Sonne by Rammstein, One Step Closer by Linkin Park and preferably as loud as my eardrums could take.

I had started going to gigs again. First off, it was Bob Dylan at the Sheffield Arena in 2000. I can remember waiting for him to come on stage but thinking that the longer it took for him to come on, the longer it would be before the gig ended and I really did not want it to end. He was fantastic even though he was nearly 60. My feet were freezing because we were sat in the Arena itself but I loved the gig. There was a good mix of people there too, from their late teens to late middle age.

In early 2003, I took my two daughters and two of their friends to see Inme. I tagged along because I was worried about the two girls, who were 14 and 12. I did not expect to like the band. I had heard a few of their songs, including Underdose, and had not been impressed. Inme were fantastic live and I had a great time. They managed to make so much noise for a 3-piece and the noise was good. I didn't even mind being the oldest person there. I felt alive again.

In 2004, went to see Yes at the MEN Arena with my husband, son and his friend. This was a similar experience to seeing Bob Dylan, although I did not know as many songs. Again, I really enjoyed myself but I realised that I far preferred the smaller venues.

I was now finally listening to Rock music again and I particularly liked The Foo Fighters. I first saw them on Kerrang! Television. It was the video for Big Me. Melody and humour in one video. I liked it. A little later, I saw The One from the Orange County soundtrack on the same TV Station. This time I was hooked. I think it was the tear falling down Dave Grohl's face at the end of the video that did it for me. I bought the single version of One By One because it had The One on it. It also had a great version of Danny Says by the Ramones. That Christmas I got All My Life by the Foo Fighters and Nirvana's Greatest Hits. I had already heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are but most of the rest of the tracks on the CD were completely new for me. It was like hearing a child playing really well in a school concert. These bands were the heirs to the music I had liked as a Teenager and they were worthy heirs indeed.

I continued to listen to what I considered to be modern music: At the Drive In, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and one of my favourites Alice in Chains. I also started listening to The Ramones and other bands from the past.


On 14 December 2005, I saw the Foo Fighters at the MEN Arena. I went with my older daughter, Charlie, her friend Emma and my friend and colleague, Natalie. I had rung the ticket line as soon as the tickets went on sale and had finally managed to get through 25 minutes later. All the standing tickets had gone and we were going to be right at the top of the 2nd tier of seats. I didn't mind, I was going to see my heroes live. The gig was fantastic, even though it was like watching Foo Fighter shaped ants performing miles away. A defining moment of the gig was when they went into The One and Charlie and I looked at each other and screamed. It was a miniature bonding session for the two of us. I spent over £100 in the merchandise shop too. I really do like the Foos.

In late 2005, I rediscovered Punk. We finally went online at home and suddenly a whole world was out there for me. I discovered that my old friends, The Straps, had reformed and were gigging again, mainly in London and the South East. The Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers were still playing and I got tickets to see both bands. First it was The Buzzcocks at Manchester Academy. They were supported by Gear, who I thought were great. After that, it was Stiff Little Fingers at 53 Degrees in Preston, supported by Goldblade. I have written about Goldblade since but that gig was the beginning of my love affair with the band.

In August, I went to Wasted in Blackpool and saw bands I hadn't seen in years, including The UK Subs and finally, after many years, The Straps. Seeing the Straps on the Friday night was a really special moment for me, especially when Jock came out to the audience and shook hands with various members of the audience, including me. I saw bands I hadn't heard of too: Outl4w, a young 4 piece from around here, who are fabulous, Viva Las Vegas, who do punk Elvis Covers, Argy Bargy, Deadline and bands I had heard of but had not seen: 999, The Damned, The Cockney Rejects. I saw TV Smith play Gary Gilmore's Eyes on the acoustic stage (yes, they had an acoustic stage at Wasted). I met old friends, like Dave from the Straps, and new ones. It was a great time and a life-changing experience for me. I felt like my life had gone full circle.

After Wasted, I started going to gigs again. I have seen Goldblade 5 times now, which isn't bad for a space of 14 months. I have seen The Rejects again and Deadline, The Damned, Anti Nowhere League (who I missed at Wasted because they clashed with The Cockney Rejects), the Buzzcocks again and most recently, Goldblade and Anti Nowhere League in Amsterdam. I am going to Rebellion in Blackpool in August and hopefully Anti Nowhere League in Manchester in October.

This was the end of my original blog about my life in music but, as I said before, things have moved on. Last September, I went to see Kate Rusby, a folk singer, with my husband. She was very good indeed but I was in my second honeymoon period with punk and so it did not really register that strongly. In April this year, though, I joined a Border Morris Team. I have since soaked up folk music and tradition. Suddenly, my interest in Kate Rusby and old favourites like Steeleye Span has grown again. I haven't lost interest in punk at all - I keep saying I'm going to form a Punk Morris team - and I know it would work, the music would adapt so well to Morris dancing (it would have to be Border Morris, I couldn't imagine punks waving hankies around). Punk and Morris, that's me at the moment.

So that's my life in music. There is plenty I have left out, including Lindisfarne, Supertramp, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Dave Edmunds, Robert Palmer and many others. I frequently finish my blogs with a video and this one will be no exception. There is one video and one alone that I can possibly put on this blog and it is The One by The Foo Fighters. Enjoy.

My Life in Music, Part 1

A while ago, I posted a blog on one of my MySpace Profiles. It was an early effort but I was proud of it at the time. My original idea here, was to re-post it on this blog but then I thought better of it. My life has moved on in the intervening time and there is more music that is meaningful to me. I might even be able to do some cleverer stuff with this blog, for instance videos, so I decided to start from scratch, well scratch-ish.

So back to my earliest memories. I have really vague memories of a song called Arabella or Anabella but I have never been able to trace it, so it may be a figment of my childish imagination. I also seem to remember a song, which might have been sung by Frank Sinatra and had something to do with changing the world but again, I have been unable to trace it, despite feverish Google searches. If there is anybody out there who knows what I am on about, please put me out of my misery. I need to know what these songs are

The first songs I remember that I can positively identify are Blackberry Way by the Move and Daydream Believer by the Monkees. Daydream Believer was released in 1967, when I was four and Blackberry Way in 1968, when I was five. We owned 7" singles of both of them and I sang along to them from an early age. Our vinyl Blackberry Way was warped, which led to a rather strange warbling sound during the chorus. It would sound like Roy Wood was singing "Goodbye Blackberry Wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay", with the pitch wavering during the word "Way". For years I thought that that was how it was supposed to sound and even now my CD version sounds all wrong. Ah the delights of vinyl.

My father had a reel to reel tape recorder and he recorded a tape of practically all the Beatles songs. I was not particularly technophobic and the machine held no fears for me, so I would often play the tape for my own delectation and delight. I learnt most of the Beatles songs by heart and learnt to sing in harmony from singing along. I tended to prefer the earlier songs when I was younger and would favour that part of the tape. Now, this is embarrassing for me but I'm feeling a bit confessional at the moment. I used to have two dolls, cheap versions of Sindy or Barbie. I cut the hair on one and turned her into a boy (an early gender reassignment experiment for me). I used to enact I Saw Her Standing There with the two dolls (now, that wasn't so painful after all, was it? Well, actually, it was). Here are the lyrics. You will have to just imagine a young (7 or 8 year old) Punky Rennie with the two dolls. Just to help, he had short brown hair and she had blond hair and her head would come off very easily indeed.

Well, she was just 17,
You know what I mean,
And the way she looked was way beyond compare.
So how could I dance with another (ooh)
And I saw her standin' there.

Well she looked at me, and I, I could see
That before too long I'd fall in love with her.
She wouldn't dance with another (whooh)
And I saw her standin' there.

Chorus:Well, my heart went "boom"
When I crossed that room,
And I held her hand in mine...

Whoah, we danced through the night,
And we held each other tight,
And before too long I fell in love with her.
Now I'll never dance with another (whooh)
Since I saw her standing there

Guitar Solo

Chorus

Repeat last verse

Move on a few years and we come to Glam Rock. I would be between 7 and 12 or 13 when it was in its heyday. I did like Gary Glitter (few people will admit to that nowadays) and I loved Wizzard, The Sweet, Slade, Mud and Suzi Quatro. At the time, I did not like The Rubettes but I think I was too young to spot their tongues in their cheeks. I think the appeal of glam rock was that you could dance to it (even somebody as clumsy as me) and they were, or at least appeared to be, young and cool. My Mum was a very sensible woman, who bought me sensible shoes from Clarks, with heels no higher than ½ inch. I used to admire the likes of Brian Connolly, Gary Glitter and Dave Hill in their huge platforms and weird and wonderful clothes. Also men wearing make-up - that was brilliant.

When I was 10, I got to go to a Quaker Summer School in Sibford. I was the youngest one there. Most of the kids were 12 and above (I think 12 to 14 but I'm not sure now). One lad of 14 came over to talk to me on one of my first days there. He told me his name was Simon Tilley but I could call him Timon Silly, which amused me greatly. He asked me what sort of music I was into. At that point I could have said The Bay City Rollers but my two older sisters had spent about a week brainwashing me a couple of weeks earlier and I wanted to impress, so I said ELP. He was highly impressed. A 10 year old who likes Prog Rock - amazing. I actually knew very little ELP at all at the time and I don't know much now, either. The band did not interest me at all. The bands I do like, though, due to early sororal influence are Jethro Tull (specifically Aqualung), Procol Harum (specifically Exotic Birds and Fruit) and early Genesis.

The two songs that really remind me of that Summer School are Lay Down by the Strawbs and Life on Mars by David Bowie. I met a 12 year old boy at the Summer School and I got on very well with him. He wasn't bad looking too and we spent most of the week hanging around together, holding hands, me trying to persuade him to kiss me and him telling me we were too young. In the evening, there would be a disco and we would go and waltz around the dance floor madly to whatever song was playing at the time. The two songs above got played loads of times and they stuck with me for life. Bursting at the Seams by the Strawbs was the first proper album I ever bought and I got it not long after I had returned home from Sibford. A few years ago, I bought it on CD and I still listen to it from time to time and feel very proud of my 10 year old self for having such good taste in music. I never had a recording of Life on Mars for years but every now and again, I would hear it on radio or in a shop. It would take me back years. I eventually got a CD of David Bowie's greatest hits and then I felt it necessary to ration myself. I didn't want the song to lose its power and it hasn't done.

After Prog and Glam Rock and the Strawbs, it seems a very short jump indeed to my enduring musical love - Punk. My parents sent me to boarding school when I was 11. An unlikely place to find a punk. I remember the seminal moment for me when I realised it was my destiny to be a punk. Mum and Dad were taking me back to school after a half term break. I had found an old nappy pin while I was at home and for some reason, I had pinned it onto a woolly hat of my Mum's. I was wearing the hat and pin in the car when we were driving back to school and a car overtook us. In the car were 3 or 4 punks. They looked very sharp and spiky and they noticed me and suddenly the back window of the car they were in was full of grinning faces and pointing fingers - they had seen me and were evidently amused. It was my Road to Damascus moment and I decided then and there that I would be a punk.

My first Punk record was My Way by Sid Vicious. I was a bit of a late starter with Punk and missed the early years. I can't say in what order I bought my other records but I slowly built up a small but interesting collection of 7" singles, including Hybrid Kids EP, Where's Captain Kirk by Spizz Energy, I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher by the Not Sensibles, Simon Templar by Splodgenessabounds, Girl on the Run by Honey Bane and various others.

I started going to gigs when I was 16. My first gig was John Cooper Clarke at the Marquee in Wardour Street. I later saw the UK Subs at the Music Machine supported by my great friends, The Straps, and an early precursor of New Romanticism, Martian Dance, who I hated. I saw Stiff Little Fingers, The Boys, Splodgenessabounds 3 times and The Straps another 2 times.

I used to go down the Kings Road most Saturdays and meet up with other punks there. I also used to stalk Jock, the lead singer of The Straps, an enterprise which was made easy for me because he worked at Boy - a punk boutique on the Kings Road. I got stopped by the police with a group of punks I was with one day. The boys were frisked by a couple of policemen and the girls were asked to turn out their pockets by a policewoman. I asked if I could go over and be frisked with the boys but she said no. A girl I was with had two wristwatches on. The policewoman seemed to think she had stolen one. She could not understand why she would wear two. One was broken anyway. It made perfect sense to me. If you were a punk, you wore weird combinations. I frequently wore:

Pink Leopardskin Trousers
A short Royal Stewart tartan kilt,
T-shirt
Woolly Stripy Jumper if it was cold
Leather biker jacket with Siouxsie Sioux' face tippexed on the back, UK Subs tippexed on the sleeves and loads of badges, including, I'm proud to say, a Morris team badge.
Hankie tied round my neck, western style
Black Beret

My hair would be either black, bleached or something in between. One day and for one day only, it was green.

For some reason, I became disillusioned with punk. I briefly flirted with the idea of being a skinhead and then I'm not sure what. I started going out with a Teddy Boy, though, and got my first taste of Rock'n'Roll.

I'd heard songs by Elvis Presley and could recognise Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers and Bill Haley and his Comets. Pete introduced me to stuff I hadn't heard before, like Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, The Cascades, Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Connie Booth and loads of others. We used to go to The Hampton Court Palace in The Elephant and Castle. Upstairs they would play music and people would dance - jive, bop, stroll. Downstairs, there was a pool table and the main part of the pub. Pete would take me upstairs and I'd join in the dancing as best I could. Downstairs, we'd play pool and inevitably, I would lose and get mad. One time, after I had lost a match, I threw my pool cue away from me in disgust. It hit a Hells Angel. He was a gentleman and handed it back to me and suggested that I hide it because I had broken it. It wasn't mine, you see, but the pub's.

Afterwards, I went to University and split with Pete. I now come to the most shameful part of my life, musically. I got into music that was, frankly, trendy. It was 1980's, self-concious, pretentious shite. Everybody wore cropped jeans, plimsolls and long baggy coats, including me. I must have looked an absolute prat. The music was mainly electronic. We used to go to a night club in Birmingham called the Powerhouse. You didn't have to wear smart clothes there and they played trendy music and also other post punk and some pre-punk music there. I danced to The Passenger by Iggy Pop there and Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo. Those were the better tunes. The shameful stuff is Matt Fretton, Blancmange, Wham (yes, Wham!!!) I shudder to even think of it. The trendies used to do a dance, where they would shuffle their feet slowly, all the time looking at the floor. I called it the dog-shit shuffle because they looked like they were checking their shoes. At the end of the night, they would play New York, New York by Frank Sinatra. I would always dance with my then boyfriend's good mate, Dave. The boyfriend is now, incidentally, my husband.

Sometime during the 80s I stopped liking Pop Music. The last record I remember liking was Rush Hour by Jane Wiedlin. Anything after that does not register. I started listening to Classical Music more and to Opera for the first time. For a while, I was a big fan. I preferred lighter stuff, like Bizet and Puccini. My first tastes of Opera were from the French film, Diva (featuring the skinhead who does not like anything "J'aime pas les ascenseurs" etc) which featured Ebben Ne Andro Lontana and from a Spitting Image version of the Pearl Fishers Duet.

I think I should stop here now. I had a look for a video of the Pearl Fishers Duet on YouTube but I found this offering by Jussi Bjorling instead. It is not a video, just a still photograph but his voice is so good that I decided to go with the photograph accompanied by some of the most beautiful music I know instead. Close your eyes and enjoy.