questionnaire

For Jim Irvin's You're Not On The List podcast - which I did back in March with David Stubbs as co-guest - there was a 'warm-up' / fact-finding questionnaire that Jim asked us to fill in: 

Most recent album you’ve got excited about.

Really excited would be Dry Cleaning, New Long Leg.  

More recent than that and more moderately excited, the Burial Anti-Dawn is-it-an-album-or-EP.

 Record that significantly shifted your musical taste.

There have been so many, often in rapid succession, or clustered in the same sort of youthful period. 

At the start, Ian Dury's New Boots and Panties! was an initiation moment in lots of directions (punk, funk, lyrics-as-poetry). 

But some major later openings-up of whole new areas would be the first two Pebbles compilations (Sixties garage punk) King Tubby’s Special (for dub and roots reggae) and Joey Beltram “Energy Flash” (for techno and rave).

Blind spot. Artist, classic album or album from an otherwise trustworthy source that you just don’t get. 

I once made a whole list of these kind of artists for a planned blogpost called ‘see it don’t feel it’. My mind is blank though apart from too obvious things like Eric Clapton or too minor (The Adverts, The Germs, The Dream Syndicate).  

In terms of an album by a great and beloved artist that never clicked with me, it would be the White Album. Also Music from Big Pink.

Record or artist you used to dislike but now enjoy. OR Record you love that took a long time to understand.

Sublime  - I’m not sure I disliked so much as preemptively  dismissed the idea that white reggae from SoCal could have anything going for it. But tunes like “What I Got” and “Doin’ Time” sound just right on the radio driving around LA and Brad Nowell  was a really great singer.

If you had to live with only one album, which would you choose and why?

Maybe Miles Davis In A Silent Way, just because it’s both stimulating and soothing -  and it seems inexhaustible.

 

What’s “obviously” the greatest record ever made?

In rock terms, the first side of Fun House. 

Outside that it gets too complicated, it’s like different contests at the Olympics -  the aims, the mode of achieving them, etc – are too divergent. You’d have to narrow it down.