My life in music, part five...

SECOND-HAND SONGS

If you go into the centre of Tiverton and follow Fore Street to where it slopes downhill suddenly, past where the library used to be (and may still be for all I know), you come to a bridge over the River Exe, leading towards the site of Heathcoat's Factory and the Exeter road. On the right, as you come to the bridge, there was a shop which called itself the "Pram and Toy Shop."

During my years of exile, I used to frequent this shop quite a lot. Not, as you may imagine, to build up my pram collection, nor yet to fill my shelves with dolls and model trains, but because the gentleman behind the counter had a sideline in second-hand records (and let me bring them back if I didn't like them). In retrospect it occurs to me that punk was starting up around then, and maybe people were hastily ditching their prog albums so as not to lose street cred. No matter. I picked up a bunch of LPs that way, and became acquainted with Gong, Barclay James Harvest, and the Moody Blues, among others, thanks to that man and his shop.

Ah, the Moody Blues. I'm not sure they hadn't already lost Mike Pinder by the time I found them, and it took me a long time to catch up. They somehow didn't seem to be part of what was going on. I mean, over here was pop/rock music, going through its internal convulsions and changes, and over there were the Moodies, keeping on doing what they did, gods bless them, making album after album of just good, well-written, well-performed songs. Some may scorn them for not trimming their sails to the prevailing winds, or for not retiring when they turned thirty, or for being "safe" or "bland" or "self-indulgent." Not this Nyrond.

I HEARD IT ON MY RADIO

And then there was Alan Freeman, and Annie Nightingale, and Derek Jewell. That last name might not ring quite as many bells, but he ran a programme late on Friday nights on Radio Three (the BBC's classical channel) called Sounds Interesting and devoted to what he called "the world of popular music." In fact, what he talked about was mostly the world of prog rock, which was already waning in popularity by then, but I was happy to listen. Through these good angels I discovered more bands and albums, and it was I think Mr Freeman who brought to my attention an album entitled Aerie Faerie Nonsense. The band's name? The Enid. But more of them later.

THE PRAM AND TOY SHOP BOYS

It was also, I think, in these two years (though it may have been earlier) that my friend Nigel and I embarked on our own brief career in electronic music. Nigel had built a synthesiser, and I had worked out how to do multi-tracking with a reel-to-reel, and so we recorded a few short pieces. I'd also acquired a practice chanter, something like a recorder with a bassoon reed stuck in the middle, which at that time by blowing till my head exploded I could make produce a sort of mournful mooing noise. One of the last recordings we made was a version of "Greensleeves" with this as the solo instrument; unfortunately, it wouldn't go down quite low enough, so we speeded up the tape and I played an octave high to produce the missing note. This, it turned out, merely accentuated the bovine quality of the instrument, and I was somewhat disillusioned.

MORE DISCOVERIES

Anthony Phillips. Stackridge. Vangelis. Patrick Moraz. Jon Anderson (I'd been blown away by the music, the concept and the story of Olias Of Sunhillow, his first solo album, and he never disappointed me). Steve Howe. King Crimson. Gentle Giant. Kansas. Klaatu. Mandalaband. Jethro Tull (took me a while). Focus. Tangerine Dream. Gryphon. Peter Gabriel. Gordon Giltrap. I was deluged with music. I made compilations on cassette, when that became possible, by the simple expedient of having a blank tape ready and pouncing on the record button when something started that I liked the sound of.

Some kinds of music I still couldn't get into. Reggae, soul, blues and most forms of jazz meant little or nothing to me, though I could understand, without sharing it, my mother's fondness for trad jazz. Atonal music eludes me to this day. And punk rock I regarded, and still regard, as the closest thing to pure evil that I've ever encountered in this morally ambiguous world. It typified indifference and resentment and a sort of self-regarding contempt; none of them qualities for which I feel the human race is any the better, even when they have justifiable targets. The indifference, the resentment, the contempt of the punks were, by their own admission, directed at everything, deserving or otherwise, including their audiences, each other, and (in a way which somehow did not detract from their egotism) themselves. It was to me the very paradox of hell; and I rejected it utterly.

And in the end, so did the world. Punk, in its pure form, vanished far more completely than hippydom ever did; a few disaffected pockets remained for a while, and may still do, in the same way that some time-lost souls still dress as teddy boys, but those punk rockers who had musical talent began to exercise it, and those who did not now trade on their obnoxious image to advertise butter on television. It could even be argued, and has been, that punk was in its way a salutary corrective to a music industry grown complacent. Whether such a corrective was in fact necessary is open to debate.

But I believe there was a lasting effect, a weakening of some of the common bonds which united us as human beings and members of society and a reversal of whatever good the hippies had managed to achieve in the world at large, and I believe that this effect manifested itself most immediately in the election of Margaret Thatcher and remains active to this day in the effective nullification of socialism in this country. What its half-life may be, whether it will ever heal completely, I do not know.

And on that sobering note, on to part six.