Once upon a time, back in 1979, an eight-year-old Pete was watching children’s TV; I believe the show was called “The Channel Niners”, quite possibly because it was shown on Channel Nine. As part of the show’s variety format, music videos – such as they were in those days – would sometimes appear; on this particular day, the following video was shown:
I was awestruck. Whilst music had always been present in the house – Dad had a particular penchant for playing Glenn Miller and German beer drinking songs on a Sunday morning – nothing had ever spoken to me. The big beats and jangly keys of ELO’s Don’t Bring Me Down connected with me: I sought out my brother, nine years my senior and presumably all-knowing, and asked him where I could find this song… and lo, he happened to have just bought Discovery, ELO’s 1979 disco-infused release.
And I loved it. As sickeningly twee as it sounds now, Shine A Little Love was jammed full of joy, and The Diary of Horace Wimp is still a masterclass in production. I found my brother’s shonky copy of A New World Record and devoured it, especially Rockaria!; the first music thing that I could ever call my own was the cassette copy of the Xanadu soundtrack that I got for Christmas in 1980… along with my own (mono) stereo.
Even at that tender age, my fledgling OCD tendencies kicked in and I started spending my pocket money buying every ELO album I could find; by the time Secret Messages was released in 1983, I had their entire back catalogue. The thing is, I didn’t really appreciate it… a lot of their earlier work left me cold, and it wasn’t until a musical renaissance in my late teens when I would figure out how wonderful those tracks really were.
I’d been listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 show on the radio for a couple of years at that point, and whilst the odd song would grab me, none really had the same impact as Don’t Bring Me Down. But then I discovered the UK music scene… and my second (and third, and fourth) great musical loves: early eighties synthpop.
In particular, Howard Jones.
Look Mama was the catalyst, the curiously complex rhythm programming sucking me in completely; Things Can Only Get Better sealed the deal, and delving back into his previous work allowed the discovery of the classic What Is Love?
Somewhere along the way I found Nik Kershaw’s Wouldn’t It Be Good, and that lead to an interest in more complex instrumentation than usually found in pure synth pop…
My mid-teens introduced me to Tears For Fears and Frankie Goes To Hollywood; the former’s Shout – a six minute “pop” song based around a fifteen second refrain – had me believing in the power of pop music, and the ability to create Big Things from small parts.
FGTH’s Two Tribes, on the other hand, showed a sense of humour and cartoonish politicking… and hinted at the impact of visuals on music.
But I was becoming a little… well, disheartened by the pop music that was in the charts. In the era of Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s dominance (though I still love a couple of their mass-produced tracks – despite their stock SAW sounds, E.G. Daily’s Mind Over Matter and Kylie Minogue’s What Do I Have To Do are still absolutely fantastic), pop was starting to feel… well, pointless. I was being attracted by harder sounds, weightier lyrics; whilst I still loved a good drumbeat, lyrical fluff was becoming off-putting… there’s only so much lovey-dovey content this man can take.
So I turned away from pop music. “Pop” became associated, in my mind, with “pablum”: media for the uneducated masses. Dumb music.
Instead, I started listening to rock. Then punk. Then metal, of all shades. I drifted through genres and sub-genres, searching for a new musical home. I finally found it in industrial music, attracted by the bold mechanical beats and almost pervasive lyrical despair.
And there I stayed for nearly twenty years…