Day 213. After long years in the monkey house I'm ready for the storm (1.8.13)

Don't you love it when you reconnect with something/rediscover something totally by accident.

My iPod is a Classic. Both my iPods are Classics. You don't get all the touch screeny stuff (but this iPad takes care of all that very nicely) but what you do get when you're scrolling through your menus is a nice shifting wash of your album covers in a little box at the side of the text.

Yesterday, as I was heading for lunch, I was deciding what to listen to. Normally it's an easy call; anything that hasn't been on in work. It's more difficult now though. We've come out of the whole hell of the beginning of the year as a proper record shop again and we're playing proper music. In addition to this we're in the midst of a 'Decades' promotion (Twitter #hmvdecades, go on, you know you want to)

Last week was the 50s, this week (strangely enough) the 60s. I'm on holiday for the 80s. Gutted. So we've been playing Revolver and Astral Weeks and Dusty In Memphis and The Stooges first album and Zep's debut and Beggars Banquet and The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and The Velvets' first and all kinds of absolute sodding genius and talking about music and remembering why we do this and enjoying ourselves.

So anyway, heading to Marksy's (lovely Coronation Chicken sandwich) my swirling screen of covers threw up the first Waterboys album and I went for it.

I discovered The Waterboys on Whistle Test. Totally unheralded, no prior knowledge of them, never heard a note. They played three songs, two early on in the show and one later (or possibly the other way round, I have it on disc somewhere transferred from an old VHS copy, I taped everything in the 80s) 'Three Day Man', 'I Will Not Follow' (surely a riposte to U2s then not so long ago 'I Will Follow') and the glorious 'A Girl Called Johnny' (an ode to Patti Smith as I later discovered)

It was all aggression and wailing sax and a perfect Keith Richards-alike haircut. It was how a rock band should sound, should look. I was hooked immediately. The album confirmed my conviction. The opener 'December' despite its title and subject matter will always sound to me like the height of summer. I spent an entire summer listening to it with it's twanging guitar intro, its shimmering, Spector-esque wall of sound background and the vocals which carried a hint of Neil Diamond (a good thing)

The songs made me go digging to find that 'Gala' was possibly named for Salvador Dali's wife and 'The Girl In The Swing' was taken from a book by Richard Adams, author of 'Watership Down'

I tracked down the book. It was good. Not as good as the song but still good; the song was epic.

More epic still was the closer, 'Savage Earth Heart'. "I want to see the savage come crashing through"  - a mission statement for Rock'n'Roll.

Their second album? Better still. 'A Pagan Place' was so bloody perfect that when they released their third album 'This Is The Sea' I avoided buying it because it surely couldn't match up to its predecessor. It did. It did and far, far more. It is, not to overstate the case, a stone cold goddamn classic; one of the greatest pieces of work of a pretty sodding decent decade.

I managed to miss them live time after time after time, finally catching them on the This Is The Sea tour when they were already morphing into their next incarnation. I obsessed over the live set from Glastonbury that I recorded from Radio 1 and the version of Fishermans Blues from The Tube a loooong time before they actually released it (it felt a long time, it was probably months, time was slower then)

They were on the edge of huge, they were supporting U2 in stadiums (although it clearly should have been the other way round)

They decided they didn't want it. There is a story, possibly apocryphal but hopefully 100% true, that the producer of Top of the Pops was so desperate for the band to appear on his show with 'The Whole of The Moon' that he personally visited lead singer Mike Scott in his hotel room. When Mike Scott answered the door and the producer realised that he had interrupted the singer in the middle of a jam with Bob Dylan said producer decided that his mission was possibly foolish.

Stardom rejected, the band decamped to Ireland, played guitars in pubs, wrote reels and jigs and ploughed their own furrow. And kept on doing so.

And all this train of thought made me realise that I hadn't quite got round to buying a ticket for their tour in December; the 'Fisherman's Blues' line up reunited for the first time in 25 years. At midnight last night I was online buying one of the few remaining tickets for their Liverpool Philharmonic show.

It will be glorious. It always is.

Two postscripts.

There was this lad that I worked with  when I was 20ish. I didn't like him. Partly because he was a bit of a ....well.....knobhead, really. A lad in no uncertain terms. And partly because there was this girl that I was deeply, desperately, hopelessly in thoroughly unrequited love with. She didnt feel that way about me. But apparently she did feel that way about him. Or so he told me. In far more detail than I wanted.

There was a party at his flat one night (was he married? I'm not overly sure) I walked in with one of my mates. 'A Girl Called Johnny' was playing. He went up in my estimations. Just a touch. He may have been a knobhead but it seemed that he had the same taste in music as me. And women.

And more positively -

David Peace who wrote the fantastic 'Damned United' has written a book called Red or Dead about Bill Shankly. I bought it today. A copy for me, a copy for my Dad. There is a picture at the front of  the book and another at the back; the front is a crowd gathered in what appears to be the early twenties on 'Red Sunday', it's a labour gathering of some kind.

The back cover photo is of The People's March For Jobs in Liverpool, May 1981 and right at the front on the right is my auntie's brother, Peter. The Peter who I took to see Simple Minds in 1984 who I apologised to because they'd lost it by that point who thanked me and our Keith for that gig by putting us on the guest list for U2 at Leeds on the Zoo TV tour because he'd ended up as one of the guys with the big papier mâché U2 heads on stage before the band because he'd joined a theatre troupe because he'd moved to Galway.

Where he moved in the same circles as the decamped Waterboys.

Everything is connected. Everything.