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Contributed by Sitting in the way way back The seventeen year old version of myself had only one thing on his mind - Camden Town, NW1. The idea of streets lined with flares and girls in excellent sunglasses (owners, also, of excellent Moogs) was pressed permanently into my inky fingers from air-freighted copies of Melody Maker and the writings of Taylor Parkes and Everett True. This tape from late high school finds me on my way out of grunge, past an early flirtation with more challenging Americana (existing here mostly on side B, and in my cupboard now in the form of a tattered Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain tee), running headlong into the Britpop beast. The presence of Sugar and the Throwing Muses is perhaps a better indicator of where my grown-up musical heart was heading, though I was not yet grown-up enough to understand Husker Du. Trying to understand my younger self here, I see mostly a need to thrash around and find what sounds right for my head. That can explain the Therapy? on there, maybe - I can't think of a better reason. For Exile in Guyville, I still stand by Liz Phair, though everything since has been bad in senses that are almost unholy. Though many of my hundreds of tapes are more immaculately decorated and designed than this one (I believe I was trying to teach myself desktop publishing on my Amiga 4000 at the time, and was excited about right alignment), it provides a perfect, if possibly schizophrenic, illustration of the formative me. The Britpop thing, oddly, wore out when I went to London and realised that the Camden pubs were just as rubbish as our own, and though the clothes were better, the people in the bands I'd known through dotted newsprint images were just kids, like the ones in the bands in my town. I remember Miki from Lush sitting next to me on the tube, struggling with her shopping, and Richard Ashcroft choosing cheese next to me in Sainsbury's. Working later in Tower Records, I would see people from bands like Echobelly, Shed Sheven and The Frank and Fucking Walters come in and check the racks for their own music, to see how many copies were moving. I imagined if they found none, they'd be on the phone to their worst manager in the world, shouting and threatening to fire them. And if that didn't work, maybe they could just leave a CV at the front counter? Two tracks here are set aside for The Manic Street Preachers. Though I can't pin an exact date, I'm pretty sure this tape was made at around the time Richey disappeared. At about this time I would walk the corridors of Hollywood Senior High in a shirt depicting Jesus in his crown of thorns, shouting "Everyone is Guilty" across my back. The Holy Bible still stands as a bleak, monumental masterpiece, one of the most important albums released in my formative decade. I remember sitting in North Perth Pot Black, telling my friends that though they had found his car at a suicide bridge, we'd be hearing from Richey soon enough. From that album I took ways of dealing with adolescent pain, and an understanding of the murkiness of the politics of the 20th century that no textbook had yet managed to give me. Grenada! Haiti! Poland! Nicaragua! Though many of the bands on this tape have passed into deserved obscurity, and Louise Wener from Sleeper is thankfully confined to the retirement village for idiots who should never have been allowed to become famous, the songs on The Holy Bible still resonate with the same unworldly anger they had for me that very first time they tore my speakers apart. Who else could ever have turned the line Tipper Gore was a friend of mine" into such a bone-chilling refrain? |
