"I Prefer Their Old Stuff"

New Model Army – Family

[audio http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23533589/07%20Family.mp3]

This category has had me thinking for a while, the previous four days worth of 30DoM posts were all knocked up on Tuesday and I’ve just been publishing one each day, each time thinking that I really ought to choose a decent song for today’s post.

When I was in my teens and living at home, I knew the words to most of the records I listened to, it was inevitable when you’d buy at most one album every couple of months. The ritual of putting headphones on and listening to it downstairs (or playing at an enforced lower volume in my bedroom), while poring over the sleeve and, assuming the lyrics were printed thereon, singing along in my head, virtually guaranteed it!

But due to the ravages of time and, more likely, the amount of music I currently listen to, this very rarely happens. I will naturally remember choruses or lines here and there, but the times of knowing a song’s lyrics from start to finish is long gone.

I could therefore have chosen one of many tunes from my youth, but they’d either likely to be songs that everybody over 30 with ears knows the words to (eg. Bohemian Rhapsody), artists that have already had a song in this challenge (The Smiths), or just a little embarrassing (Marillion and others that I will not sully my blog by mentioning!), plus there’s already a Guilty Pleasure category coming up next week!

In the end I remembered “Thunder & Consolation” by New Model Army, released in 1989. In that year I was looking to move out of home and had an interview at Barclays offices in Knutsford, Cheshire. At the time I was working on shift at their computer centre in Gloucester so they provided me with a hire car to drive to the interview. I set off and realised I had forgotten to bring any tapes with me for the journey, so not wanting to listen to the radio all the way there and back I stopped at a motorway services to see what their dazzling range of music could offer me. Needless to say the answer was not much. At the time the only thing of New Model Army I’d heard was the single “Stupid Questions” that was doing quite well in the charts at the time and I spotted a cassette of the album that contained the said single, so bought it and continued my journey.

By the time I had driven to Cheshire, had my interview and driven back with this one cassette on almost constant repeat, I found I was unsurprisingly starting to know most of the words. In the coming months when I moved up north and spent four ‘fun’ months in a hotel before I bought my first house, this tape still got plenty of plays on the walkman.

I have just listened through this album for the first time in ages and the track that I still knew best was “Family”, I have therefore picked that as today’s tune.