Richard Adams (The Declining Winter, ex – Hood ) - Favourite records

 

Talk Talk ‘Laughing Stock’

 

I’d heard Talk Talk’s previous album ’Spirit of Eden’ when my dad bought it on release. It sat on the lounge stereo one night while my mum was watching ‘Howard’s Way’ and I decided to take a listen. I didn’t understand what was happening (it seemed like sorta….nothing) but what I heard i liked and I thought

(even then at a young age) that between the ambience their pop nous of before remained intact. Their follow-up ’Laughing Stock’ though was a different entity indeed in that I couldn’t even hear songs. I’d borrowed it from Newcastle City Library back in the day when you could borrow tapes for something like a pound a week

as long as you promised to return them. I took it out twice as I couldn’t make head nor tail of it the first time. Anyway after about a thousand listens I loved it but I still wasn’t sure why. It was so fractured and ‘New Grass’ with its prettiness was my favourite track and still is.

 

REM  ‘Murmur’

 

My dad used to play lots of Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison while I was ensconced in my room listening to Depeche Mode. The first time our musical minds met was with REM.  I knew something good was going on when I heard the chorus of ‘Laughing’ one bleak Sunday and it sprang out of the stereo

with the kind of haze that was beyond dad’s other bands (e.g. Cactus World News, Hambi and the Dance). Anyway when I got to 16 I rediscovered it and thought it was the best album I’d ever heard (probably still do). All my favourite tracks are the ones that may never get mentioned such as  ‘Pilgrimage’ ‘9-9’ or ‘West of the Fields’. There was something so mysterious about it  - I was at that point equally obsessed with the Yorkshire Dales and Moors and the two went hand in hand somehow.

 

 

The Smiths ‘The Smiths’

 

Another one discovered via my dad. I liked American guitar music (The Byrds, REM etc) but the British bands kind of left me cold at this stage. The only album that really cut through was The Smiths debut throughout which Johnny Marr played guitar parts that seemed the reflect in a kind of rainy way the glistening summery guitar I was hearing from across the pond. The fact that Morrissey now all but disowns this album shows that he really is now completely off the wavelength in terms of what is good and what is not. The album survives because it retains the same mood throughout and so long as you are ok with windswept and rainy English moors,  brick-built suburban Manchester terraced houses and the alcohol-fuelled world you’d need to inhabit in order to live in them means that this is the soundtrack to the most romantic of times we all probably never had. 

 

 

 

 

Burial ‘Untrue’

When this first came out I was the first to mock it. Could he… y’know… leave at least 1 second before adding in yet another ‘soulful’ sample? I thought it was overdone, over cluttered and overworked. The happy news is that not for the first time in my life I was completely and utterly wrong. ‘Untrue’ is a masterpiece  - a perfect blend of late night rainy atmospherics and haunting vocal samples and the sort of record you only want to hear on the night bus. This doesn’t have to be an inner city London night bus … instead imagine the X58 ‘Amazon’ bus serving Shiney Row and Fencey Houses and the massive Amazon depot in County Durham. Imagine finishing your 24 shift packing things up for lazy people, getting the bus back to Felling, rain lashing against the windows and hearing this?

 

 

 

 

Rolling Blackouts, Coastal Fever  ‘Hope Downs’

 

Its hard I suppose for more recent albums to compete with the records you’ve grown up with. All those old ones have the benefit of childhood or adolescent memories that somehow remain stronger than whatever you were doing in your forties.  Yet the fairly recent ‘Hopes Down’ is an album where I remember exactly what I was doing the first time I heard it, what I was doing that summer and what I was doing in the times I later reminisced about that being a particularly great part of my latter day life. I once drove with all the windows of the Honda Civic from having played football at Headingley in Leeds back to my home in Saltaire. The sound of ‘An Air Conditioned Man‘ filled my ears, the air and everything around it. The album didn’t give up. It was all good. I was happy that summer. I’d reacquainted with an old romantic partner who, when i played that particular opening track,  was not impressed. Dear reader… I sided with Rolling Blackouts. 

 

 

 

 

Prefab Sprout ‘Steve McQueen’

 

So my grandparents lived in Sunniside, a small village at the upper end of Tyne and Wear, UK. If you know your Prefab Sprout trivia then you’ll know that Prefab Sprout leader Paddy McAloon’s bus passes through Sunniside on its way into Newcastle for his weekly trip to Marks and Spencer and HMV. Therefore, a lot of Prefab Sorout’s music is very dear to me. Its sound seems to come from the same countryside in which my grandparents lived. When I hear ‘Steve McQueen’ i hear Newcastle’s Eldon Square Bus station and the X30 bus that sails its way out of the city, firstly to the suburbs of Sunniside (via Lobley Hill of course) then out to the wilds of County Durham where Prefab Sprout first made their name. It is magnificent music but for me, never has a particular sound been so caught up in a geographical area and childhood memories.