A Guilty Pleasure

I was changing the CDs in the car the other day, they were the usual mixed bag. A 1970's various artists compilation, Robert Plant's latest offering, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Big Big Train, Pet Shop Boys and...Thompson Twins. The Thompson Twins are pretty much my guilty pleasure, I saw them three times in the 1980's, under varying circumstances. The first time was by accident. I had a ticket to see Peter Gabriel at Crystal Palace football ground and he was being supported by an African group whose name eludes me (if indeed I ever knew it), The Undertones and Thompson Twins. I knew a little of The Undertones but nothing of the Twins, so I bought Quick Step and Side Kick and enjoyed it more than I expected. When Into The Gap was released I bought the album and saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon. To show how eclectic my tastes were (and still are), the next week I was back at Hammersmith to see Marillion.

It's funny how music, like smells, is so evocative. Listen to a song that you haven't heard for a while and you get transported back to the time you most associate with it. Thompson Twins songs like Hold Me Now and Doctor! Doctor! take me back to Friday evenings in the summer when I worked in Barking, going to The Victoria for a beer or several. The whole Close To The Edge album by Yes transports me back to Sixth Form, Hey Jude by The Beatles always evokes memories of Romford FC's old ground at Brooklands and the Housemartins song, Happy Hour reminds me of a pub in Kidderminster on a very rainy canal boat holiday in 1986.

Thompson Twins supported Peter Gabriel at Crystal Palace and at Hammersmith were supported by a band I am convinced were Primal Scream, but who probably weren't, but I have no recollection of who supported them on the third occasion I saw them, at Wembley Arena in 1983. That's the thing about support acts, they are either instantly forgettable or sometimes they linger long in the memory because they are either completely hopeless or totally brilliant. The best support acts I have seen, and here I am talking about bands that were previously unknown to me, were Fischer Z and Londonbeat.

Photo: Chewtonia.com

I saw Fischer Z support Dire Straits at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. Vocalist John Watts bounced on stage and yelled, "I want to be a lemming in London tonight!" at which point  my spirits sank. What lunacy was this? I wondered. Then the band fired up, launched into their opening song, Lemmings, and I was hooked. As soon as was humanly possible I went out and bought their album, Word Salad and totally splendid it was too; I play it regularly to this day. For those of you unfamiliar with the band, and in a vain attempt to pigeon hole them, I would say that they are a blend of idiosyncratic pop, reggae and punk.

More straightforward to categorise are Londonbeat, a bit poppy, a bit of reggae and a bit of soul, probably best known for their song I've Been Thinking About You which was a Number 1 in the US and reached Number 2 in the UK. I saw them support Brian Ferry at Wembley and frankly they knocked the Roxy Music front man out of the park. Even my then wife June, who dragged me to the gig, admitted that Ferry, who short changed the audience with a short, lack lustre set, had been blown away by them. Again, on the strength of the band's performance I bought their album, In The Blood, at the earliest opportunity and it still gets a regular airing some 25 years later.

At the other extreme are the support acts that I would pay good money to guarantee never having to see again. Supporting the excellent Ian Dury & The Blockheads at the Hammersmith Odeon many years ago were poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, highly respected and critically acclaimed, but frankly not my cup of tea and Root Boy Slim and The Sex Change Band who were, and there is no other word for it, diabolical.[1]

Somewhere, a lifetime ago, I read that music critics are the very definition of pointlessness and there is a school of thought that a critic is "someone who has no discernible talent so tries to make someone else feel as useless as he/she is."[2] It's a point of view I'd be happy to go along with because in my experience most music critics have views on what is good and what is not that are diametrically opposed to my own. The New Musical Express (NME) called Thompson Twins "1984's most instantly kitsch mass program of monosodium glutamation of the brain". Aside from the fact that that sentence is actually just a random selection of words, one of which, glutamation, appears to have been the figment of the writer's imagination, the very fact that NME were criticising the band meant to me that they must be OK; doubtless the NME approved wholeheartedly of Root Boy Slim and his chums.

And that's because music is about opinion and taste. Yes, one can say that Egbert Plonk is a better guitarist than Sebastian de Villeneuve and you can probably quantify that can on the basis of ability and talent, but you cannot say that one band are better than another simply because you prefer them. On the basis that Steven Wilson has more musical talent in his little finger than all of One Direction put together, you could argue that Wilson is "better." Unless you are a teenage girl of course, for whom One Direction will undoubtedly trump Porcupine Tree or Wilson's solo output every day of the week, and why is that opinion any less valid just because I don't share it? It isn't.

There's a lot of po-faced tosh written about music masquerading as serious criticism and I make a point of taking the majority of it with a large pinch of salt. I have bought albums on the basis of great reviews and regretted it immediately the disc has started spinning, but equally I've bought albums that have been pilloried as a waste of vinyl or polycarbonate and aluminium[3] and immediately fallen in love with them. As is so often proven when I switch on the CD player in the car and am greeted with disapproval from Val, music is a matter of taste, so while prog and rock may make up most of my diet, I like my guilty pleasures too.

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[1] Root Boy Slim, aka Foster McKenzie III actually died in 1993, aged just 47, so it might appear tasteless to speak ill of the dead, but frankly the band were really, really bad. Mind you, that's just my opinion.

[2] Urban Dictionary dotcom.

[3] The components of a CD.