May 1983 to be precise - a snapshot of my listening as a 19-year old, via an old letter that came into my possession again recently
Formative me... on the cusp of leaving behind the teenage years... discoveries and delights mostly indexed to critics I followed oh-so-closely.... but starting to scope out paths across the past all by myself: The Easybeats, reconceived as punk precursors; the strangeness of the Glitter-Leander sound....
4 comments:
There's an admirable sweep of sounds here. Where were you picking up on things like Teena Marie and Gwen McCrae? This sort of stuff had very limited exposure in the UK at the time you write. I don't imagine you were buying Blues & Soul! Nice to see you keeping the faith with the Pistols in '83!
Teena Marie would have been via my favorite critic Barney Hoskyns, who had very wide and often surprising taste.
Gwen Macrae and other things like Vicky D and Man Parrish would have been through David Stubbs, who was a deejay and bought imports of NYC electrofunk. I have all these cassettes named the Meltdown after this club night he did, full of dance 12 inches. I bought this stuff myself too: not imports though (not sure how he could afford it on a student grant), contemporary club tunes and a lot of disco records from a few years earlier, now going second-hand.
I was puzzled by the appearance SEX PISTOLS too - capitalized for their eminence! Probably I'd started to listen to them again for the first time in several years - the big initiatory excitement would have been eclipsed by the onrush of postpunk and new pop claiming my attention. 1983 was starting to feel like a lull in comparison, so a good point at which to rediscover. I had also around this time got into Sixties garage punk so maybe kind of reorientation around the perennial teenage thing of kicking out against one's surroundings was happening. I was seething with boredom and negativity at this time, for various reasons - high among them frustration with my own inertia and torpor.
I sometimes like to clear the cobwebs after a day at the keyboard with a blast of 'Bodies' or 'Holidays'.
Around the time you wrote the above, two or three volumes of Morgan Khan's Streetsounds comps had been released. They're tuff as you like, with cuts by the likes of Peech Boys and Gwen McCrae, but the sonics aren't good because they crammed in so much (definitely not good enough for playing out). So 12 inches it would have to be.
I remember seeing a Chris Hill (I think) playlist from '83, which featured Salsoul and Gold Mind cuts from Lolleatta Holloway and others. Must've been a bit odd dancing to such records at this time, sans chemicals most probably: the fag-end of jazz-funk 'n' soul, and the tunes only really came into sharper focus five or so years later, for reasons which are well documented.
I had a few of those Street Sounds comps, but a bit later on I think. In those days of insufficient funds in relation to one's desires, there was a lot of hard choices between the 7 inch versus 12 inch versus getting it on the single-artist LP or a compilation.
There was a lot of great postdisco / electrofunk music in between disco's peak and house music emerging. Labels like West End and Prelude. And then all the electro and edge-of-electro stuff as well, like the Man Parrish and "Dominatrix Sleep Tonight". Also the Shannon records - what would become freestyle. And stuff that was essentially Paradise Garage music - the Larry Levan mix of Weekend. But I don't remember Salsoul or things like that having much presence.
Re. your comment about sans chemicals - I should imagine some clubbers did speed, just to stay awake, rather than for the energy, because the tempos were not as fast as they would be in the house / rave era. Mind you, one thing back then is that clubs - legal ones, anyway - all closed by 2 AM. So staying awake all night was not an issue. What else was going around? Poppers was a thing, I expect.
I never saw any of this, of course - I am not sure I was even aware that nightclubbing and drugs went together. You thought about nightclubs and cocktails.
As a student or benefit-claimer, I couldn't even afford to get drunk in a club. Bar prices being what they were, I don't remember ever buying any form of beverage in a club or at a concer - not even soft drinks. Did I not get dehydrated?
My general sense of life back then is the obsession with liquids and hydration wasn't a thing. Someone from the past who took a time machine to today, along with mobile phones, probably the most befuddling thing would be seeing people walk around with giant coffees (even turning up a to a friend's house with a coffee in your hand), the bottled water thing, and just people walking around with those large metal canister things full of water, like they were trekking across the Sahara.
Post a Comment