Galactic Vinyl Memories #1

 In order to drive some additional traffic to my Alzheimer's UK Justgiving page, in the build-up to the Cardiff Half-Marathon, I thought I'd try posting here a lot more frequently. The trouble is, in the day to day life of the jobbing SF writer, there isn't much to report. However, I can prattle on about music until the cows come home, so why not make that a feature, not a bug?

Hence Galactic Vinyl Memories #1, the first in a loose series where I dig through my vinyl connection, offer up a few recollections, and attempt to establish some tenuous connections between entries.

Our dear friend Carol (see previous post) liked Al Green, and we like Al Green too. In fact, one of my wife's dogs would be triggered into an ecstacy of howling by the sound of Al Green's voice. I don't have any Al Green lps, though, but I do have some Talking Heads, who covered Take Me To The River on their 1978 record More Songs About Buildings and Food.

I don't have that, either, but I do have Little Creatures, their 1985 album:

Which I bought pretty much the week, if not the day, it came out. I was a huge fan by then, but I'd come to them by a roundabout and belated route. After failing my "A" levels, I'd been put back a year in school. The drawback of this was seeing all my mates go off to more exciting things while I was stuck in Pencoed, but the surprising benefit was ending up with a whole year's worth of new friends, in the sixth form class I got bumped back down into. One of them was a nice chap who liked Talking Heads. Knowing I was "into" King Crimson, especially the early 80s stuff, he made me a couple of Talking Heads recordings to listen to, suggesting I'd find a lot of common ground. The albums were Remain in Light (1980) and Speaking in Tongues (1983), two scorchers that I'd consider absolutely essential parts of any TH collection. Remain in Light was the one with the hit on, Once in a Lifetime, and it's where they really started leaning into the afrobeat influences, with brilliant polyrhythms all over the place. I dug that stuff and the KC/TH crossover connection is easily made. Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew had already made contributions to TH, so there's 50% of the DNA there already.

Little Creatures is a very good album, but it represents the point where TH started to sound less interesting to me, because the sound is more traditionally pop-rock and the production is very emphatic, in that mid-80s way. I found their later records progressively less appealling, although I still liked them well enough. It's worth having, but I wouldn't put it above the Holy Trinity of Fear of Music (1979) and the aforementioned Remain in Light/Speaking in Tongues, which are ESSENTIAL.

My vinyl copy is 39 years old and still sounds fresh. The sleeve is mostly pristine except for some very light cockling on the rear. I bought it in Bridgend, either from WH Smith's or Our Price. The cover art is by Howard Finster, who also did REM's second album.

Here's a link to my Justgiving page, and many thanks for the donations to date:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990