CICCONE YOUTH: The Whitey Album (LP, Blast First BFFP 28, 1988)

I bought this album in around 1990 in, believe it or not, Birmingham’s HMV – this was back when record shops carried records and some of them carried records that went beyond the charts and into weirder territories. Back when living in Telford I would make many weekend trips to Birmingham, with one of two aims:

1. Buying records
2. Buying comics

My destinations would be very similar each time, as follows:

Records

• Swordfish: still there, I believe
• Tempest: also still in existence
• HMV/Virgin Megastore
• Second City Sounds: long gone, this was a great independent shop hidden away in a corner of town that shared a road with the strange combination of a School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (as far as I remember) and some seedy adult shops. They had a copy of the Sea Urchins’ ‘Pristine Christine’ on the wall which I coveted regularly
• A couple more shops whose name I forget – one down near a university building, outside which I saw Roy Wood walking past one day, and one way up past the square with that angled metal man sculpture
• Oasis: not the women’s clothes shop or the band, this was Birmingham’s answer to Affleck’s Palace, a multi-floor treasure trove of stalls and shops selling anything from clothes to organic food to records to junk

Comics

• Nostalgia and Comics: I loved this shop and spent countless hours diligently working my way through its shelves and storage boxes. Often I’d return with literally armfuls of comics
• A strange little second hand book/magazine shop that was in a semi-underground plaza in a location that I’ve entirely forgotten: their selection was hit and miss, not least because the comics often seemed to get mixed up with the more, er, adult titles

This is the original issue of The Whitey Album which has since been re-released. For a semi-joking side project it’s surprisingly good, and bears repeated listens, not least because of the endless cultural touchpoints that are dropped in throughout. In 1990 I didn’t get the reference to Neu!, or the subtle nod to John Cage’s ’4’33″‘. Now I do. I don’t know if that makes me better informed or less receptive to learning new things. Maybe both?

SONIC YOUTH: Evol (LP, Blast First BFFP4, 1986)

Aha, the first Sonic Youth record that I’ve written about on here. I’m sure that there will be many more.

Sonic Youth are the number one band for me – a mid-level obsession that has been in my life since the very early 1990s. A friend of the younger of my two sisters made me a couple of compilation tapes back in that time, after we’d spent time working together over a summer, packing earrings into ever-larger boxes. On one of these tapes, amongst the much-expected James/Inspiral Carpets/Stone Roses-type fare that was taking over the world at the time, was a strange track called ‘Mary Christ’ by a band I’d read the name of before, but never heard. My mind was blown. This sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before; so energetic, weird and yet listenable. Within a matter of days I was scouring every record shop in the Midlands, picking up every piece of vinyl I could find with the band’s name on it.

This continues still: Sonic Youth could release records of themselves chanting “This record is a rip-off: we are laughing at you” through a wall of laughter, and I’d be in line to buy them. (Some would say that some of the more recent SYR series of releases are not far from this, ho ho). I still obsess about them and I think I always will. On reflection, the 1980s is for me their peak period, and Evol comes a close second to Sister as my favourite album of theirs from this time. (Although, naturally, Daydream Nation is a close third, and Confusion Is Sex a close fourth, and so on…) Evol sums up their weird fascination with Hollywood star fetishisation (see ‘Starpower’, ‘Marilyn Moore’, ‘Madonna, Sean and Me’ – as ‘Expressway To Yr Skull’ is known on the rear sleeve here). This would then blossom into mainstream acceptance with the release of Goo a few years later.

Sonic Youth are the band that have for me gone beyond being something I merely like, and they have now been a constant companion for nigh-on twenty years. That might sound creepy and stalkerish but I’ll tell you this – I’m certainly not on my own feeling this way.