Jade's Music Blog

It's the 1980's and I'm on a strict diet of the Style Council,Billy Bragg,The Smiths and The Stranglers with Prefab Sprout,Kate Bush,the Blue Nile and Lloyd Cole as side dishes.
The punk wars have been fought and lost,Springsteen has yet to come and save my mortal soul and the The Waterboys are still making the big music (high on bluster low on grace).
My first girlfriend the very wonderful Melanie Roberts has a brother called Martin.Martin has the best record collection of anyone I've ever seen (still true to this day).He has everything.Hundreds and hundreds of peices of vinyl of bands I have never heard of.All manner of exotic band names.
This is before Q magazine or cable TV or anything so I can only imagine he got his tips from the once mighty (and then brilliantly written) NME.
Martin however is incredibly precious about his collection and I'm allowed nowhere near it.Or thats what he thought.When he went out to work I went in to plunder.At first I busied myself with the artists I knew because Martin would have every rare B side,every 12 inch picture Disc,every banana yellow Dickies 7 inch single you could muster.
After some time I began to be atrracted by the other delights this wall to wall collection might throw up.I was particularly taken by a front cover in blue of four silhouettes standing on a beach.It is an utterly magnificent photograph and I wanted to like the album held within immediatly I clapped eyes on the awe inspiring sleeve.That is a feeling no modern record can give you can it?
The album is called Heaven up here and its by Echo and the Bunnymen.I've heard the name and I know its a local group but I'd never investigated,put off probably by some spurious 'Psychadelic' tag I'd probably read about.
I was a straight forward rock and roll Clash and Jam kid.I didn't want anything poncey thank you very much.I hated synths and drum machines and the New Romantics such as Duran duran which came to represent the eighties (not my fucking eighties I might point out!).
This however was different.As the opening two songs unfolded I felt like I was entering an undiscoverd underground,it was very unusual music to my young ears.Infact it still sounds unusual to me today.
Now,when you're a kid music is a badge by which you live and die.
You have to believe in it with all your worth because if it's yours and it belongs to you then you are gonna go out there and tell every fucker who will listen about this brilliant new band you've discovered and about how everything else is shit and how YOU are the coolest fucker in the world for discovering them.That moment came for me as track three unfolded in front of my dis believing ears on Melanie's pre war record player.
'Over the wall' has thee most foreboding intro of any rock and roll record.You know within 15 seconds you are going to listen to an utter materpeice.It's that good.AND its all drum machines with synths,I was going to have to adjust my teenage twatishness about such things very quickly.
Over the wall absolutly nails atmosphere, it is brilliantly produced,nothing about it could be improved. Tension clings to it,fear stalks its verses and joy vaults from its chorus.Guitars are played like you've never heard them before and Mac puts in a vocal to hang your very life upon.I fucking well love it.
Of course it's an Echo and the Bunnymen song so I have no idea what it means (tortoise shells anyone?) but to my 1980's just getting politicized teenage psyche it could only mean one thing.It was about the Wall,thee Wall,there was only one wall.The Berlin wall.
Nuclear annihilation was never very far away from everyones thoughts in the 80's.It was a very real concept,always in the conversation,always in the back of your mind and when the TV programme 'Threads' went out it invaded all of our dreams as well.So to me the tension brilliantly portrayed in this song takes me back to those times when the Cold war was real and the Russians were most definaltly coming.
It's joyous hope of two lovers escaping over the wall and being forever on the run lent the song impossible romanticism,yearning and sorrow.Or maybe Im just reading too much into it LOL.
Anyway,the Bunnymen went on to become huge and of course thats when I stopped listening and went searching for other new bands to champion.Always hated it when my bands got big.What a fool I was.I have promised Damien Dempsey faithfully that I wont desert him when he gets his time comes, I've grown up now :-).

Amsterdam play Glastonbury on June 29 and a national tour in the Autumn. For information, see www.amsterdam-music.com