Half Man Half Biscuit Live - They Built Their Village on A Trad. Arr. Tune!

One way or another I've been lucky enough to see a lot of the acts whose music I admire(d) in the flesh. A few notable exceptions: Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin, The Clash for a start and all those (The Doors, Hendrix etc.) who simply pre-date my being let out onto the streets. For a while it was looking like Half Man Half Biscuit, who have been around for most of the last 27 years, might number amongst those exceptions. They did come to Gloucester once, but small children and financial embarrassment conspired to keep me away, and as they barely play half a dozen dates a year, there seemed every chance that our paths would fail to cross. Most recently they were within relative spitting distance, near Wolverhampton, but my recent hip replacement thwarted me. Not very rock'n'roll, that. Still, happily a few months back they announced a booking at the Oxford O2 barn on the Cowley Road in Oxford and the tickets were booked pronto.

The O2 Academy in Oxford is just round the corner from the terrace (37 Randolph Street - no blue plaque as yet) in which I lived my last year at university, a period about which I nurse mixed feelings and indeed any visit to the Dreaming Spires has to be well justified for me to countenance it. Fortunately, once inside you could be in any malodorous dump full of sweaty overweight middle-aged ne'er-do-wells, so what's to grumble about, really?!

My trusty companion and I missed all but the last song performed by the first support act Ragged Claw, who were barely out of short trousers (gymslip in the case of the singer), but they had chosen to cover a HMHB song (She's In Broadstairs) which showed some business acumen, I thought.

Sadly, we were in time for the whole of a mercifully short set by Sonnenberg, a trio comprising a German on guitar and vocals, a scouser on tablas and an Irishman. The consensus amongst those known to me was that they were tedious, but they have their second album out this month which is more than I can claim, so we'll just say that they weren't really my cup of tea, and wish them luck.

My expectations for HMHB were a bit confused. I own every recording they've made, I think. Certainly everything currently available. Their major selling point is lyrics which catalogue what it has been to be British for the last quarter century, with particular emphasis on the ways of the music industry and the social minutiae that bug many of us but are normally ignored by songwriters in favour of a broad-brush approach to romance and/or politics. The first of their records I bought was the vinyl single Dickie Davies Eyes, the title of which referred to a contemporary sports presenter while parodying Betty Davies Eyes by Kim Carnes. The lyric mentions the Lord of the Rings, Michael Moorcock & Roger Dean, all of whom played a part in my adolescence and I was hooked by the shared familiarity, even if my view was less cynical! The next single, Trumpton Riots, spoofed the right-on socio-political commentary that punk had introduced a few years earlier, while again using nostalgic references that are identifiably British. The "B" Side, All I Want For Xmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit, records the recognisable "joy" of playing Scalextric and Subbuteo at your mate's house when young with pin-point accuracy.

Since then a steady if infrequent stream of albums has recorded similar slivers of life with equal precision and consistent wit. There are moments which would qualify as poetic,although I'm not sure that their author, Nigel Blackwell, would warm to being described as a poet. Nevertheless, for example, National Shite Day from 2008's CSI:Ambleside explains how the annoyance of the crowded town centre is briefly offset by considering the worse plight of those living under Mugabe and the children of Calcutta before the horror of Primark FM returns the narrator to his own situation. "Overhead a rainbow appears - in black and white." Here is an ordinary bloke recording what it's like to be an ordinary bloke for posterity and doing it very well, I'd say.

But, while the lyrics are full of  treasure, on record the music has taken a back seat. That's not to say that they're incapable of writing a catchy tune (despite one of their songs being called Look Dad, No Tunes!), but it's those words, normally intoned in a gruff world-weary scouse that are the main point. Consequently some of the albums, particularly the early ones that were probably done on a negligible budget, suffer from weak sound quality, the music sometimes little more than a background to a spoken - sometimes shouted - rant. I had been assured by a veteran of the Wolverhampton gig that the band were really tight, but the questions remained. Could they really play their instruments and would the words be audible? I had visions of a shambolic if entertaining background noise with a vigorous tirade over the top. So, happily and not for the first time, I was wrong...

They launched into a  version of Sealclubbing from the debut Back in the DHSS album which at once indicated that the live sound was to be more musical than the record had led me to expect. It was uncomfortably loud once or twice, with some initial feedback problems, but after the settling-down period that's a feature of almost all gigs, the mix was good enough to allow at least most of the words to get through, although it probably helped to be familiar with the material. Musically more than competent and able to remember (nearly) all the words without recourse to the autocue now beloved by many a megastar, they breezed their way through a selection of nearly thirty songs, many of them accompanied by a raucous singalong from the c.500 predominantly male audience. One peculiarity was the (over)enthusiastic moshing by a substantial element, several of whom I estimate to have been the wrong side of sixty years old. So it's not just me trying not to grow up, then.

Several of my favourites were included in addition to the aforementioned Dukla Prague and National Shite Day. Running Order Squabble Fest and For What Is Chatteris? stood out, although they missed the seasonal opportunity for Asparagus Next Left.

24 Hour Garage People is a tale that allows some improvisation which it duly received, and along the way Blackwell clearly appreciated the erroneous suggestion from the audience that he was in some way associated with the vast Oxford bookstore of that name. As with any veteran band, it is clearly impossible to fit in every song that you want to hear, so there was no time for Them's The Vagaries, Four Skinny Indie Kids or Irk The Purists but inspection of the setlists on the website indicates that they do shuffle the deck a bit between appearances, a fact confirmed by m'learned friend TB.

HMHB have a devoted following of which I am one, so this is not the most dispassionate review you might find, but to the converted they offer an excellent live rock performance, elevated beyond the mundane by lyrics recognised by folk more eminent than I as socially significant - and very funny. I can't make it to Leeds next week, but September in Bath is looking a distinct possibility. In the meantime, if you haven't sampled the charms of HMHB, get on with it!

We Are Not Worthy... Robert Plant Live

The world has little reason to be jealous of Gloucester as a rule. Del Amitri's "Nothing Ever Happens" wasn't written about the city, but it could have been. Actually, things do happen, like the filming of a Doctor Who episode, the Queen making an occasional visit or, in a few weeks time, the transit of the Olympic flame through the streets, but these are exceptional and barely noticed outside the city. Every now and then, though, our relative obscurity is rewarded, as a performer who would feel comfortable in front of an audience into five figures elects to use the Guildhall (maximum capacity 400 well-packed people) to showcase new material, groom a new band or just get back into the swing of things after a sabbatical. Radiohead, Muse and Queen's Roger Taylor have done this and back in 2009 an apparently nervous Lily Allen gave her first public performance of material from her second album in advance of the "official" launch at a trendy London venue a few days later.

So, on Tuesday May 8th 2012 it was the turn of former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant to try out his new combo, The Sensational Space Shifters.

Well, I'm not sure how or even whether any space was shifted, but sensation there was.

This was my third significant encounter with Plant ( http://lostinbarnwood.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/percy-pulls-it-off.html will take you to my account of the previous one), but this was destined to be special simply by virtue of the venue. I never got to see Led Zeppelin in the flesh and my only real opportunity to do so would have been in the vast natural amphitheatre at Knebworth where "in the flesh" would most likely have meant "on a grainy video screen". At the Guildhall, though, I was barely five rows of squashed humanity back and could see the whites of his eyes. Zeppelin, as a supergroup from day one, having been conceived as the New Yardbirds, would never have needed to play a hall this small, and their notorious management would not, I suspect, have wanted them to. Consequently those ne'er-do-wells flogging surplus tickets on the web were able to ask treble or more the £35 face value.

This was not a Led Zeppelin gig, however. Plant is said to be the main obstruction to a partial reformation of what would undoubtedly be a money-spinner par excellence, and from the start you could see his point. The quiet opening to what developed into a fairly heavy rock song had sophistication which LZ in their pomp would not have achieved nor, to be fair, attempted. For a start there are twice as many musicians involved, and they are not all orthodox rockers. From Plant's previous outing with the Band of Joy, American Patty Griffin remains for selected songs including one of her own, while previous collaborator Justin Adams plays guitar, often joined on an African bowed instrument by Juldeh Camara, the other half of his JuJu duo who supported on the Band of Joy tour. Unfortunately I'm not sure of the names of the other musicians, but it was no surprise to find that a further guitarist, bass player and drummer were all more than competent and the keyboard player, a veteran of Massive Attack and Portishead's live manifestations added subtle but impressive embellishments.

On a small stage already half full with their equipment, eight musicians don't have a lot of room to throw themselves around and if you were looking for something to grumble about then I suppose the necessary lack of  physicality might be one, but realistically this was a show for the ears more than the eyes. Plant is 63 years old, and has been showing off  his voice in public for 48 years or so, so you might expect the voice to be ageing with him, becoming a bit more gruff and gravelly. You would be wrong. Close your eyes (the exterior has aged more honestly) and his voice would persuade you that it is still 1969. He doesn't do as much of the protracted howling and screaming as he used to, although it's there when he needs it, but the tone remains delicate and remarkably youthful to these ears. No better case in point than his first encore of Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren, which he recorded ten years ago for the Dreamland album.

He also revisited Hey Joe from that record, but the arrangement had been tweaked somewhat. It would be an exaggeration to say that this band was all about arrangements, as there was new material (at least I think it was new), but Plant's acceptance that  people have come to hear some Led Zeppelin is tempered by a constructive effort to reward that wish on his own terms. Closest to the originals were probably the renditions of Four Sticks and the second encore, Gallows Pole, while Black Dog had been completely re-worked and Whole Lotta Love smoothed out a bit before being merged into other material. So as with the Band of Joy, while you can walk away thinking "I've seen and heard THE Robert Plant "doing" Led Zeppelin and it's true, it's only true up to a point!

What you have seen though, is a one-of-a-kind musical ensemble which on this showing is having fun, playing as a band rather than a bunch of hired hands and making a noise that is pretty much unique. The melting pot approach of spicing "straightforward" blues rock with Griffin's American country, JuJu's Africa and a bit of judicious electronica could be a recipe for an over-egged pudding, a stew with a bit of everything stirred into an unappetising mess. Clearly, though, Plant has been at this game for long enough that he knows how to cook up something special. To some extent this is achieved by stripping out different elements for different songs - probably only half the set featured all eight band members together. He referred to rehearsals in Bath, and it would be fascinating to know how that process worked. The impression is that protracted jamming has occurred from which the public are now being given glimpses of  "the good bits". Anyway, however he's done it, The Sensational Space Shifters' sound seemed quite natural rather than contrived, perhaps a reflection of a genuine band approach.

They played for just under two hours and left (to catch Newsnight according to their leader) an entirely contented audience who will take some pride in boring their mates with "I was there" stories for years to come. As the chap behind me was heard to observe "Probably one of those gigs where more people claim to have attended than the venue could ever hold".

A couple of other things to mention; support group The Toy Hearts - a two-daughters-and-their-dad trio with hired hand double-bass player, whose light bluegrass and country blues were a gentle enough way to start the proceedings, while holding the audience's attention. Having seen an artist of Morrisey's stature grumble that the crowd watching him at Glastonbury were really only waiting for U2, how much more nerve racking must it be to open a show where most of the audience didn't even realise there was going to be a support and really really wanted to see the headliner?!

A mention too for the audience. In the last few years I've noticed a deterioration in the behaviour of rock crowds, specifically respect for the performance and their fellow punters. It is telling from the video of the encore that everyone was there to listen, aware that this was a one-off opportunity, perhaps, but for whatever reason able to contain any temptation to woop and bark in the middle of a quiet song. Oh that this proves to be a trend, but I doubt it...

Would You Like To Ride My Paper Plane? A History Part 5

Ah, the Mighty Quo! As I mentioned before, it was pretty much de rigeur during the mid-seventies, and probably beyond that, for teenage boys to get hooked into the wonderful world of rock by the "heads down, no nonsense, mindless boogie" that characterised the sound of Status Quo, and still does, bless them. Those who grumble that they only play three chords (per song, in fairness - they do play in different keys) are missing the point. Indeed, if you need the point explaining I am tempted to wonder what you're doing reading a music blog. The Quo sound is profoundly unsophisticated, but therein lies the charm of unpretentious simplicity which runs through the most enduring rock (and roll, if you must) music, from the fifties onwards.

To my constant irritation, I never learned to play even the crudest guitar chord, but you don't need Grade 8 anything to hear that Status Quo use minimal technical prowess to move their listeners, spine first, into a happier state. The chugging boogie music, broken by occasional, (sometimes mis-judged) ballads contains the same ingredients as 50's R'N'R through to Punk, much of which is just Quo at 78 r.p.m.

I brought myself up for a while on the three albums Piledriver, Hello & Quo, plus many of the subsequent singles. I also owned a cassette of "Golden Hour of Status Quo", a compilation of their sixties material like "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and "Ice In The Sun", brilliantly parodied in the Spinal Tap movie.

Later on, like many, I "grew out of " Status Quo. Once you had the three albums and as long as they released the best tracks from later ones as singles, there seemed little point in following them closely and I was being seduced by the more complicated sound of Progressive Rock and then the ferocity of Punk. Furthermore, the first of several live albums confirmed the suspicion that a Quo gig would be little different to listening to the studio recordings at high volume. So I didn't get to see them until they opened the Live Aid concert at Wembley in July 1985. They played a cover version (Rockin' All Over The World), which was appropriate for the occasion but not one of my favourites. Later, though, just a few chords of Caroline had me transported back from being 25 years old to 14 in an instant and I suppose that illustrates one reason for my addiction to music. As a time-machine it's a lot more reliable than a TARDIS, and while the memories it evokes may not always be good, they can be rendered more accurate in an instant by the application of an appropriate soundtrack than by simply "trying to remember".

In their four decades plus, the group have seen several line-up changes, occasional acrimony, substance abuse issues, in fact all the ingredients of a "normal" career band. These are all detailed extensively elsewhere. They still release new albums and the main protagonists (Francis Rossi & Rick Parfitt) are usually entertaining chat-show participants. Several years ago they took offence at being deemed too old for BBC Radio 1. Radio 1's loss, I'd say. They tour annually and I did see their set at Glastonbury festival in 2009 from the front row. I doubt it was very different to a performance recorded thirty years earlier. Still, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Take A Chance With Me - A History Part 4

Some of my contemporaries at secondary school were a lot more savvy about music than me, but once I got hooked on Top Of The Pops late in 1972 I was at least able to join the conversations, even if I was largely ignorant of what I was talking about. Plus ca change!

12-13 year olds, even those from relatively affluent background like those you'd have found at The King's School Chester then (more so now - it became independent soon after I left), didn't have a lot of disposable income to spend on records, so the significance of radio and its playlist restrictions, T.V. and its tiny coverage by today's standards was huge. Some boys had older siblings who did have significant record collections, though, and older boys would carry round their L.P.s in transparent covers that displayed their allegiances as clearly as football scarves. Consequently I was aware of the popularity of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer long before I ever heard any of their work. It was the golden age of the gate-fold sleeve too, so the few boys who pursued art to "A" level at a school where drier subjects were the norm paid regular homage to album cover artists, most notably Roger Dean (he of Yes, Uriah Heep and Greenslade adornments to name a few). Their work was given prominence on the art room wall and while I was and remain artistically inept, art was one of the lessons I'd look forward to, not least to see what the "big boys" had been up to.

I bought a single -  "Sylvia" by Dutch band Focus - in early 1973 and that May I bought their double album "Focus 3" with some birthday money. I was hugely disappointed by it. Expecting similar work to "Sylvia" and their other chart single "Hocus Pocus" from the previous "Moving Waves" L.P. i.e. tuneful upbeat instrumentals, what I got was about 75% tedious jazz-rock noodling of  very dubious merit and only a handful of proper tunes, two of which I already had on my single. I should have tried to return the album the next day. It wasn't cheap and I barely listened to most of it more than twice. I didn't. This was mostly because I didn't think they'd take it back (they probably would have, I now realise) and at thirteen I lacked the confidence to argue my case face to face with some dragon at W.H.Smiths. So, the first lesson is: if you don't know what you're buying, be prepared for disappointment. This fits my adopted global philosphy that a pessimist will enjoy only positive surprises while the optimist bounces from let-down to let-down.

Second lesson, though, was: if you have lemons, make lemonade. Focus 3, whilst something of a disaster, was also a disaster which not everybody (indeed hardly anyone), had heard. Given the perpetual state of financial embarrassment enjoyed then as now by teenagers, the convention at school was to lend your album to someone who would lend one of theirs in exchange.If you enjoyed the loan copy it would usually fit onto one side of a C90 cassette and thus by lending an album to half a dozen people your record money "bought" seven, albeit six of them illicit. So after the 1973 summer holidays Focus 3 set off on a circulation that brought in samplings of  Status Quo, Slade, King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer for my own collection.

Title for this entry Track 7 from "Avalon" by Roxy Music 1982. Not Abba - that's Take A Chance On Me!

Dedicated Follower Of Fashion? A History Part 3

The Beatles were already on the brink of going their separate ways by the time I caught up with them. My parents would grudgingly allow that they (especially that nice Paul McCartney) could write some decent tunes, but they assured me that ever since Brian Epstein's demise they had been corrupted by dark forces (i.e. drugs) and headed in the direction of the Rolling Stones, who my mother considered "dirty". As in unwashed, I think, but my father tutted at the cover of "Sticky Fingers" so perhaps it went deeper than that.
Point is, The Beatles, and pre-Pepper Beatles at that, were hardly the epitome of cool or where it was at, come 1971. I listened to the radio a bit. Ed "Stewpot" Stewart on Junior Choice at the weekends for the most part, if I'm honest. I watched the Saturday night variety shows hosted by Cilla, Lulu, Rolf et al, who would occasionally present credible musicians alongside the sanitised banality of The Young Generation, a dance troupe who proved how "down with the kids" the Beeb really was. But really I was clueless about what else there was beyond the Fab Four and I think I stayed quite naive until the summer of 1972.

During the summer holidays at the end of my first year of senior school I caught viral pneumonia. We were on a family trip to London when I developed a bad enough fever to experience hallucinations. Back then people smoked on tube trains, in restaurants, indeed virtually everywhere, so a respiratory condition was particularly challenging. By the time I was tucked up at home in Cheshire my lungs were becoming seriously gunked up and the G.P. took some persuading (on his visit to our home - another blast from the past) not to send me to hospital. Instead, along with antibiotics, I had to lie on my tummy three times a day while my mother rubbed and knocked my back so that I could cough out the accumulated unpleasantness. Probably the sickest I've ever been, and for a little while. Duly enfeebled, I started listening to Wonderful Radio One, the adjective being theirs, not mine. I realise now that the procession of disc jockeys, some long gone but some -Tony Blackburn & JohnnieWalker - still going, were seriously restricted in what they could play by the station playlist, but at the time I was quite underwhelmed by the constant repetition of tunes, some of which I found irritating on first listening. Lynsey de Paul's "Sugar Me" being a case in point!

Still, it wasn't all that grim! Hawkwind's only chart hit, "Silver Machine" went quite well with my drugged up state, and Alice Cooper's "School's Out" held sway throughout August. I developed a deep loathing of "Sylvia's Mother" by Dr Hook & The Medicine Show, while the novelty of Hot Butter's synth instrumental "Popcorn" soon wore off. The less said about Donny Osmond's relationship with his puppy, the better.

The best part of a month listening to chart radio in 1972, for all its irritations, did broaden my musical horizons and began to drag me into the decade in question. I have never lost my fondness for The Beatles, although I would now choose Abbey Road or the white album over A Hard Day's Night, but from the summer of 1972 I started to notice what was happening NOW, at least as far as I had access to it. A major contributing factor to my desertion of the church choir of which I had been a mostly enthusiastic member for four years was that choir practice was scheduled on Thursday evenings and clashed with Top Of The Pops. As teenagerdom approached it became increasingly obvious that The Devil Does, indeed, Have All The Best Tunes

A Hard Day's Night - A History Part 2

I told Barnaby, who sat next to me at school, that I'd seen The Beatles film "A Hard Day's Night" on television over the Xmas holidays.I thought it was funny (it is) but mostly I'd loved the music which even in 1970 was able to give me a nostalgic frisson for bygone days. My parents were old before their time, but I was ten wishing I could be four again! I remembered the singles, Can't Buy Me Love and A Hard Day's Night from when I was four, I suppose, and some of the other tunes played in the film pre-date that.

Anyway, Barnaby let slip that his big sister Nancy had the soundtrack album (actually, side 2 contains six songs omitted from the movie). So I pestered until he (presumably) smuggled it out of the house for me to listen to and record, via microphone, onto a cassette. File sharing, you'd call it today. Lo-fi, but it worked as long as nobody was in the room. Somehow Nancy discovered what had happened and demanded its immediate return, but not before my bootleg copy was completed (minus "I'll Cry Instead" - my least favourite track - so it made it one side of a C60).

Over the next few months I must have worn that tape thin. It was the only pop music recording I had, albeit six years out of date already, and I played it over and over again. With hindsight, it is far from The Beatles' best effort, but it is pretty much instantly accessible and when I see celebrity interviews in which the subject gives their dewy-eyed recollection of their first encounter with Elvis, Little Richard or whoever, I think back to A Hard Day's Night.

Later on that year the BBC screened "Help!". At home I begged to be allowed to sit up past bedtime to watch it. This was not an infrequent campaigning issue as my parents normally enforced bedtime rigidly and earlier than most of my friends seemed to experience. Somehow, though, a pester period that ran from the publication of the relevant issue of the Radio Times until the film was shown proved to be just long enough to wear them down. My father grumbled intermittently about what a load of rubbish it was, but otherwise I got to see it all the way through and decided that my next record purchase would be "Help!". I had to wait until Xmas, but then, £2.15 clutched in my sweaty paw, I made my way to Rushworth and Dreaper's Chester branch and sought out the disc of vinyl I'd craved, and at that point an addiction was born...

From The Beginning - A History Part 1

It has been a rite of passage for most teenagers since the Second World War to "get into" music, and I was no different. Yet, while for some music is little more than a fashion accessory that helps brand them in the same way as a hairstyle or the cut of their jeans, for a significant minority, the interest becomes a more permanent and pervasive obsession, and I would have to place myself in that group.

My parents didn't "get" pop music for the most part, nor its big brother rock. They owned a nice teak radiogram (a sixties precursor of the music centre), whose tiny integrated speakers made it impossible to generate a genuine stereo effect. Most of their records, however, pre-dated their marriage in 1959, and additions to the collection were rare and often inexplicable. No Beatles albums until one of the British Army's military bands produced an L.P. of cover versions. An album of Joan Baez "because she had a nice voice", which barely left its sleeve. Soundtracks to "Gigi" and "High Society". A bit of Glenn Miller, and some ten-inch mambo records which might be of some interest to a collector now, had they not been binned years ago. Chris Barber because my father played trombone at school. And a selection of Classical music so conservative I ignored the whole genre until I was twenty. There was also a Readers Digest box-set of abridged Shakespeare tragedies (Hamlet in 50 minutes-ish), a BBC dramatisation of A Christmas Carol and a selection of Bob Newhart monologues (which I now own on CD).

Nostalgia makes me miss one album that used to be brought out for each of my first eight Christmases or so. It was Carols played by Swiss/German/Austrian? musical boxes in that unique twinkly timbre. I have searched the past few years in the run up to Xmas for something similar on Amazon etc, but to no avail as yet. And, as nostalgia ain't what it used to be, I expect I'd be disappointed if I did manage to hear it again.

Although they didn't care for it, pop music was nevertheless heard in the house, at least early in the day, as The Light Programme, which became Radio 2, provided the background to my mother's chores, or more accurately, the efforts of The Lady What Did, of whom there were a succession. The first "cleaning lady" I remember was Joyce who, knowing that I liked it, bought me Helmut Zacharias' "Tokyo Melody" (the BBC theme for the Tokyo Olympics) on vinyl 45 (what else?) for Christmas 1964. My first record and one I managed to replace a couple of years ago via eBay. It went missing (I believe) courtesy of one of my school contemporaries when I was growing up in Cheshire. That the replacement turned up in nearby North Wales suggested it might be the original seeking out its rightful owner, but just a coincidence I suppose.

Birthdays and especially Christmas saw a slow drip of additions to my collection in the form of the "humorous" novelty records of the time: Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris and so on. The first one I bought (with a Xmas record token) was The Scaffold's Lily The Pink. My first twelve-inch investment was a Walt Disney narration (with all the songs) of  Lady And The Tramp, which I had somehow managed to miss at the cinema, followed by a West End recording of  Lionel Bart's "Oliver!"in mono, because the stereo film soundtrack was a lot more expensive.

Then in 1970 the lad I sat next to at school lent me his big sister's copy of The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" L.P., (without her knowledge) and that, a bit belatedly, was that...

Title to this entry courtesy of track 4 on Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1972 album "Trilogy".