My Life In Records

I steered into the noughties at the helm of an ailing record shop, and that's when I discovered the joys of Sparklehorse and the incredible Good Morning Spider album. When the shop sank in summer 2001, all my efforts went into making king creosote albums sound a little like all of the above.

I bought dozens of albums whilst the grant cheques kept coming, but once I'd left the academic life and set off busking around europe, I all but stopped buying albums. I made a few records with a skiffle band in the early nineties, but it was 1996 before I got properly interested in what was going on in the uk music scene. I even reviewed a few albums for a flagstaff arts magazine. I thoroughly enjoyed the Cocteau Twins Milk and Kisses and Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister.

The best investment I made at uni was to buy Talk Talk albums no matter how hard the music press tried to persuade me otherwise. I first heard Spirit Of Eden on my walkman as the stagecoach bus carried me northwards to Aberdeen, and it's probably my favourite ever record of all time.

By the end of high school I realised I was listening to a whole load of jangly guitar bands from ... Scottish! The Bluebells, Big Country, Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Simple Minds, H2O, but certainly NOT Nazareth. I played Lloyd Cole's ‘Rattlesnakes’ on my mini's tape deck as I sped around Fife impressing absolutely no one with my wide wheels and ripped exhaust.

Dexy's ‘Come On Eileen’ in the summer of '82 helped me out of those stifling shirts and tie pins and back into scruffy clobber. The album Too Rye Ay helped my long neglected accordion out of its case and back onto my shoulders for at last I'd heard something I liked being played on this instrument of Scottish torture.

The first two years of high school were grim, but at least I started to hear about some cooler music. The Jam's ‘Going Underground’ set me off along a road that took me to places like 2tone and ska.

It's no lie that I went to see the film Grease every single Friday over the school holidays in 1978, and once on a Saturday. In the dark of the cinema I'd sing "you're the one that I want" as loudly as I dared in the hope that Christine Band would hear me, and that her boyfriend Alan Crombie most certainly wouldn't. I think it ended up vice versa alas, and he shot me in the cheek with an air gun pellet for good measure about a month into the autumn term.

My dad used to run a record shop in 1974, and he employed a local lad Mike Reid, who was soon promoted to babysitter. He'd bring his girlfriend along to our house, and she liked Terry Jack's(?) "we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun", and because I liked her A LOT, I just had to like this song immensely. Yes she tucked me in.

From my 2nd day onwards at primary school I'd charge home every lunchtime past the flats at the bottom of Roundhill Road - these songs would blast out from the top floor verandah, usually as the soundtrack to some bare chested hippy giving it laldie. Great days the early seventies.

My life in records, eh? Well, my earliest memory of a musical moment was hearing Charlie Rich crooning "the most beautiful girl" on a car radio as the stunning Mrs Gibbs burst into tears in abject terror of the aviemore chairlift.