i had this bad habit. i picked it up years and years ago when i had this huge crush on the kid that my best friend had spent five years of senior school being in love with. his name was john martin and he was hugely into faith no more.
so one saturday, after years of reading smash hits and listening to simply red, i went into Our Price (yezzur this was back in the day) and bought two fnm albums just to impress him. and all of a sudden i loved this new music i’ve never heard before and had something to talk to the cute boy about.
then he asked me to the school prom.
a year later i go to college and lo and behold there are loads more boys for whom i could cram knowledge about the smiths, mega city four, the senseless things, tindersticks, g’n'r, gang starr, nwa, supergrass… this was the early to mid nineties and yeah the list is long, eclectic and very often not pleasing.
then i got my (17 year old’s) dream job working in a record shop with ‘the record store guy’ i’d fancied from the other side of the counter for three years.
this time i took it further, i bought a skateboard and learned to skate, i tried to hang out with crate diggers (they were having none of it), became a singles buyer, chatted with reps from the labels, used to go to the steering wheel on sunday nights and learned how to say Boris Duglosh’s name properly all because he was kind of cute, aloof and really cool and i so wanted to be his girlfriend. it never happened though.
so now i’m practically thirty and while my motivations have changed for seeking out stuff outside of the circles i usually move in I haven’t stopped wanted to know more. and if it just so happens that i can drop an effortless mancuso reference into a conversation, or place a sample at fifty feet in a way that makes a certain muso boy swoon then, sure i’m a little proud, but mostly its still all about the music.
and that’s sort of how i’ve happened across one of my favourite blogs. i was trawling the internet in one of my head-down- focus-got-to-find-this-tune-if-its-the-last-thing-i-ever-do headspaces, where it seemed like if i didn’t have at least one of theo parrish’s ugly edits by the end of the day i might die of a broken heart when another night on earth came to the rescue. amazingly before and since anoe has the most consistantly brilliant upage of tunes on this big wide internet of ours, almost without fail i both love everything posted and get a little more education. so big love back from london to jo’burg gentlemen and i hope you don’t mind if i post my most favourite haul from your crates.