Head Space Daily Words...

So, Ive written about the first record I bought (HSD 23/03/13) and the first gig I saw (HSD 24/03/13,) now for my musical epiphany. I spent my GCSE year - 1988/89 - recovering from an altercation with a Peugeot 205. Around easter, a friend gave me a tape, on which he had recorded on one side The Stone Roses and on the other side Bummed by Happy Mondays. Looking back (wedding ring excepted, of course,) that is possibly the single most important item I have ever received. The first time I listened to that TDK 90 was on a Sony Walkman, as I was doing a paper round, delivering the local tittle tattle. The intro to I Wanna Be Adored grabbed me instantly with it's unnerving sonic textures before the bass hits. Sucked in. Hypnotised. In awe. And that's before the rest of the album had revealed itself to me. That's the power of music. It was a life changer. An attitude giver. An eye opener. Just the positive charge I needed in my life at that moment. The Made Of Stone t-shirt was bought, the fringe grown, 34" flares acquired from the Oasis Centre off Corporation Street in Birmingham and a youth culture bought into. For a few months at least there seemed to be a relatively small group of people into the Roses and the Manchester bands that were breaking at that point in time. Every Friday was a pilgrimage to the Black Horse on the Aston Univesity campus, with the occasional Saturday soiree to the Hummingbird. Towards the end of 1989, I became aware of dance music and then the Roses' Fool's Gold sealed it - a nigh on ten minute epic of funky drumming, meandering bass lines, psychedelic guitar riffs and a cool as vocal. An utterly joyous expression of musical brilliance. Even today, I can't sit still when I listen to it. That one track has led to a whole spaghetti junction of interchanging musical reference, which to this very day continues its twists, turns, crossroads, junctions and occasional dead ends. It's not a big love in for the Stone Roses though. It is not a perfect album - Don't Stop and Elizabeth My Dear are not great tracks, and when they lost the plot and didn't come out with a follow up LP until 1994, I never forgave them. It wasn't the same - the buzz had gone. If I saw them at Finsbury Park this summer, I know I would love it but there is still a part of me that would feel let down and that I am really watching a karaoke band who have made two albums in twenty three years. Ian Brown would probably wave two fingers at me and tell me to stick it where the sun don't shine, to which I would return the gesture, because that's the attitude that he and the Roses gave me. Go your own way, do your own thing, run your own course. In fact there are plenty of surly men and a good few surly women up and down the country who are around 40+ with a never back down attitude, due to Ian Brown and The Stone Roses and I salute you all...