I’m a huge Erasure fan, for which I am grateful to my ex. The band’s first real success was with Sometimes in 1985, the year after I left school, but at the time my leanings were more rock than pop. I definitely danced to their stuff at student parties but I didn’t have any of it in my music collection.
I met D in 1990. He was a huge fan of the band and had pretty much everything they had released to and I soon became as big a fan as him – maybe a bigger one. We bought everything Andy and Vince released and saw them in concert several times, starting with their outdoor gig at Milton Keynes in 1990. We also saw them twice in one week in 1992 at the Hammersmith Odeon after D. won tickets on Capital Radio after we’d already been!
I’ve chosen Stop! from the Crackers International EP (released for Christmas 1988) as it was a big part of my path to fandom. Bizarrely I didn’t know the EP at all until D introduced me to it despite it’s success at the time of its release.
Ah. Ibiza. I first visited the White Island in my early 20s with my parents when they rented a finca somewhere near San Rafael for a week in late October. This was the first of three or four such holidays together, always in the same property. We found Ibiza to be a beautiful place with great beaches. We particularly enjoyed the relatively-undeveloped north of the island, where many tourists never go.
At that time of year, the clubbing season has just finished so all of the clubs and bars are shut until the next spring. We visited San Antonio one day and found it to be a pleasant-looking place where almost everything was closed – a far cry from its reputation for vomit-filled streets during the summer season.
Fast forward a few years to the mid-90s. I was in my late twenties and enjoying a misspent second youth of regular clubbing in London as well as from time to time in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco… Four of us, two couples who partied together every weekend, decided to head to Ibiza for a week in September. This was a natural progression given the explosion of dance music in the 90s, the fact that Ibiza was already a well-known slightly upmarket gay holiday destination and that the four of us were earning decent enough salaries to think we could afford it!
Package-holiday club kids stay in San Antonio but for gay tourists, Ibiza town is where it’s at and so that’s where we stayed. A typical day for us on the island would be get up around 11 or midday and to head to the Playa Es Cavallet beach for the afternoon. After that, it would be back to the apartments for a long nap before heading out for an early evening drink followed by dinner in the old town. After that, we’d either go back to the apartments to get ready for a visit to a megaclub (once or twice in a week) or continue our evening in the old town, bar-hopping our way up to the ramparts to finish the night at the now-closed Anfora Disco with its annoyingly repetitive playlist and very dark backroom. When that closed there was always the possibility of some cruising on the ramparts until the sun came up. Generally, we were still up at sunrise every morning.
We did Ibiza five times, I think. Our last visit in 1999 was the most epic. By then there were five of us and on this occasion, we stayed for 10 nights rather than the usual seven. I learned that 10 disco sunrises were at the limit of what my body could take..This trip was something of a turning point as within a few months both couples in our group would be on the way to splitting up and cracks were already showing but despite this, we had some great moments. It was also the scene of what I consider to be one of my best nights out ever, guest-listed at El Divino to hear Carl Cox. I’ll write more about that another time.
Ibiza is perhaps the only place where I’ve ever felt truly on holiday, free for a while from everyday cares but at the same time knowing that all good things have to come to an end and that soon we’d have to head back home. I always remember looking back at the beach at the end of our last afternoon there each time, thinking what a beautiful place it was and wondering when we’d be back there.
There are many things I didn’t do in Ibiza. I never went to Bora Bora as the one time it was planned, I didn’t manage to drag my arse out of bed. I only went to Space once, and left before it got going; having gone there straight from another club, paid the entry and bought a drink I started to crash on the terrace with my head in the lap of some random young man with whom I’d danced earlier in the night. Or was his head in my lap? Anyway, I decided my other half had had the right idea in heading home and I followed suit. And we never went to Café Del Mar because, well, it’s in San Antonio.
I’d really like to visit Ibiza again one day although I rather doubt we’d go clubbing. In 2007, when it looked like the far right might get elected here in France, we only half-jokingly considered where we’d move to if the worst happened. Berlin and Ibiza were the likeliest candidates – even though I know that living full-time on the island is a very different proposition from visiting for a week or two.
When I started thinking about this post several months ago, the featured track was going to be Home by Matt Nash which sums up how I feel about Ibiza. However, the video is just too corny unless Bunny Girls and “exclusive” beach clubs are your thing (the Blue Marlin didn’t exist when we went to Ibiza but we wouldn’t have gone there if it did). Personally, I’m surprised that Bunny Girls are still a thing at all.
Café Del Mar by Energy 52 came out in 1993 and was a floor-filler for the rest of that decade and beyond. It looks like I didn’t actually add it to my collection until 1998 because the CD I have includes that years Nalin & Kane remix which I loved. Another version on that CD is Hybrid’s Time Traveller Remix; listening to this recently I found that I now like breakbeat much more than I did before and I recommend checking it out.
Looking up the track this week I learned that the melody is from a piece by Belgian composer Wim Mertens, of whom we’ve become great fans in the last few years!
Now then… this poor little blog has been moribund for nearly a year (and what a strange year it has been). More about that later but in the meantime here’s another musical throwback. No, not back to 1879 when it was written but to my first weeks at university in 1985 (rereading my post for Throwback #4 brought this to mind).
I lived in a hall of residence for my first year. My neighbour B was also a fresher but he was a few years older than the rest of us, having already worked in the private banking sector before starting his studies in Petroleum Engineering. He was something of a character; aloof, worldly-wise and slightly intimidating. As a result I found him rather hot, but I considered his musical taste to be abysmal.
One afternoon I had enough of yet another hellish punk thrash album and reached for a favourite LP of organ classics (from Ripon Cathedral, I think) and soon Widor’s famous Toccata was drowning out the cacophony on the other side of the wall.
When it finished six minutes later, there was silence from next door. Then I heard a door open followed by a knock on mine. Oh-oh I thought… and sure enough there was B when I opened the door. I got the impression he wasn’t happy but before I could stammer anything, he exclaimed “What the fuck was that? It was fantastic.”
I can’t say we became friends after that incident and in fact we saw less and less of each other as he got involved in the uni’s musical scene and we kept very different hours, but there did seem to be a certain mutual respect which wasn’t there before.
Here’s Hector Olivera’s interpretation of the piece. I’ve deliberately chosen to feature a version on a digital organ – an Allen, arguably the finest – to show what the technology can do. Purists might shudder but in my opinion there’s a clarity in this rendition that’s sometimes missing from pipe organ versions. Today a mid-range digital organ will surpass many smaller pipe organs and is a far more accessible proposition, thereby helping keeping the king of instruments alive.
In 1986, at the end of my first year of university (AKA the three most miserable years of my life), I was 20 and still a virgin. Looking on the brighter side, I had enough of my grant left over to buy my first CD player (strictly speaking I didn’t get a local authority grant as my parents were too well-off, so it was they who funded me, but students of the period always talked about their grant regardless of where the money came from: this was in the heady days before Student Loans).
IIRC I bought my Philips CD150 at what we jokingly called “the local corner shop”, Harrods. I can’t remember the price but I think it was somewhere between £100 and £150; to put this in context, the weekly rent for my room in a hall of residence in South Kensington at that time was, I think, £27. Unlike some of my more audiophile fellow students I had a music centre but luckily it had an Aux input so I was ready to go.
As for pretty much everyone else around me at the time, the first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits of which I already had a much-played vinyl copy. The album came out in May 1985 a few months before I left home to go to uni and was pretty much the signature LP of that first year.
Money for Nothing was the most successful track on the album (and indeed the band’s most successful ever) and its computer animation video was groundbreaking at the time.
Ah. 1991. The debut single from Utah Saints. This was early on in my clubbing days (I was 25) as I was a late starter. This blew me away when I first heard it and I became a huge fan of the band (to the annoyance of my mates who were less taken than me, IIRC). I remember dancing like a loon to this in Heaven.
Something Good was a bigger commercial success (and is a great track) but this has to be it for me. You want the best and you got the best…
Last week’s first Throwback was a very early musical milestone for me but this one is much more recent, although the track itself is from 2007.
For reasons which are a mystery, I’d never heard of Gabriel & Dresden until the start of last month, when we were in Paris for my birthday. We were chatting with Guy, the owner of one of our favourite dens of iniquity, at the end of the evening when a track came on which made the three of us pause and look up at the speaker as if to say WTF? Guy checked the stream and it was this. I had chosen another tune for this week but listening to this duo’s new album, Remedy, this week – it’s rather good – led me to this choice.
This is the first of a possibly never-ending series of musical Thursday Throwbacks. It was going to be another tune that’s very dear to me – that will now come later – but finally I decided to feature the first single I ever bought. Released in 1981, so I was 15. Bought in Ipswich and, if IIRC, from a record shop in the dismal Carr Precinct shopping centre. I have no idea of the name of the shop but Google tells me it was called Disc-o-round. As far as I know I still have this record as all of my vinyl singles and LPs are in a box somewhere in the house. However I don’t still have anything to play it on!
