after seeing Metallica at Glastonbury thought it might be pertinent to update this blog post with an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod". This short extract below was my take on heavy metal and specifically, AC/DC.
January 7th
AC/DC –Bad Boy Boogie-Let There be Rock (Australian Edition)
An apology.
I shouldn’t really like AC/DC, but I do.
If there is any music that I am too old to listen to, let alone enjoy it is this. Surely at 50 years old I should be getting into Classic FM or something relaxing on Radio 2-say, classic Dire Straits, Chris De Burgh, or, in a rockier, edgier moment, Queen.
Not AC/DC though. It’s not as if I have been into AC/DC since I was 14 and stayed with them ever since. It was only a couple of years ago, when in a moment of boredom, I downloaded the live “If You Want Blood…” album that I recognised slowly that sometimes it’s just good to have music to blast away, without any need for over-analysis.
So, here I go, contradicting myself - a couple of hundred words of how I got to AC/DC. I did have a very brief infatuation with heavy metal when I was I suppose about 13 years old. Until then it had it been pop and glam. I had graduated from the cheap mpf TOTP (remember them?) covers albums to Slade, Sweet and the mysticism of T- Rex. It was but a short step to what I considered a sophisticated move to buy the only two heavy rock albums I have ever owned, Deep Purple’s “Made In Japan” and “Deep Purple In Rock.” The former was played incessantly on my small single speaker record player. Shortly after this I graduated for a brief phase to prog rock (ELP, Genesis) as this was seen as more intelligent than heavy rock (of course.)
Thankfully, it would soon be 1976 and the Buzzcocks’ “Spiral Scratch would change my horizons totally.
Fast forward to 2009 and the downloading of the AC/DC live album. I can’t really remember why I did it except for a moment of boredom. It was so different to everything else I usually listened to-it wasn’t exactly Godspeed You! Black Emperor!-just straight ahead Rock. The music moves like a train although it helps if you don’t listen to closely to the lyrics. It’s something that maybe you only need to hear once every six months or ,but when you do its best to be driving and to have it as loud as humanely possible.
After downloading the rest of AC/DC’s discography, including the album this track is taken from, I considered that I had all the r.o.c.k.ROCK that I ever needed encapsulated neatly by one band.
No more Deep Purple or Whitesnake-AC/DC cover all my needs.
Get/see/read "Totally Shuffled" here
Kindle
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA
Paperback
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X
What "Totally Shuffled" is all about:
One track per day for 366 days on a broken
iPod.
366 tracks out of a possible 9553.
From the obvious (The Rolling Stones),
to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex).
From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to
the risible (Muse).
From field
recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees.
From Heavy Metal to Rap by
way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music
in between.
This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the
point of never wanting to hear any more music again.
Some songs I listened to I
loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and
others received a bit of critical kicking.
There’s memories of spending too
many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and
surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about.
But with 40
years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it. I may have fallen out of love with some of
the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.
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