INTRODUCTION
There was a time when I used to have brilliant conversations about music and the thrill of it. People would tell me how they heard this or that song and how their head was sent spinning in hospital waiting rooms, graveyards, airports and in the pubs and bars of every town I’ve ever visited. I’ve always got time for such talks. It reminds me of how subjective music taste is and how endless is its capacity to help and enhance every type of person. Except these days those talks have almost completely disappeared.
That’s one of the many things you notice as you stumble deeper and deeper into middle age as I have. It’s a transitional period with incredibly visible milestones; divorce, kids leaving home, the death of parents, grandchildren, redundancy etc etc etc. What gets added to people’s lives can feel loud and inescapable, but often what drifts away is less visible. For the last few years, I have witnessed the inescapable disappearance of music from my friend’s lives. Even those whose longstanding friendship was born from our shared love of songs and albums have simply let it go, or let it fade so far into the background that it can no longer be heard.
The capacity to be amazed, overwhelmed or sucker-punched by a song remains a constant presence and joy in my life. It’s something I’ve experienced a million times but when it hits it still feels new. I find it easy to maintain that love, my boundless curiosity, knowledge and passion seemingly never-ending. Inspired as always by the DIY philosophy of ‘76 punk, I write about music as an enthusiastic amateur knowing full well that it would be unreasonable to expect others to maintain the same level of interest. Besides, not everyone reaches middle age and gives up on music, the success of BBC Radio 6 proof enough of that.
Nevertheless, it’s a strange and alienating experience to have a fundamental part of your friendship with someone disappear. One similarly aged and child free friend who admits to a dwindling passion for music simply says he prefers listening to podcasts. Another insists it’s hard to muster that same level of excitement about anything anymore, while a former music obsessive I’ve known since the early eighties happily admits that these days he only listen’s to Bruce Springsteen. And only on vinyl at that?
On occasion it has even occurred to me that maybe my friends are right and that my gargantuan, lifelong investment in music has been a horrendous, even witless mistake of epic proportions. After all, there’s no denying that keeping up with new music can feel exhausting and somewhat futile, so much so that from time to time I get numb too, especially when I’m listening to albums which can often feel like going through the motions purely for the sake of it. The sheer volume of songs on Spotify alone (over 100 million and counting) makes it easy to feel like we’re trapped within a huge, content spewing factory working overtime to keep up with the production line. Stepping away from that madness makes a lot of sense.
Trying to remain dedicated to music as you get older can be a lonely pursuit. Something you once associated with camaraderie, shared experience and collective memories suddenly becomes a one way exchange. While the thrill of falling for a song never dims, it’s hugely dispiriting to know that you have no-one else to share it with as more and more of your peers outgrow the one thing you never thought was possible to outgrow. And yet that’s where my inspiration to write these Soundtracks For The Decades came from, partly to remind my friends exactly what it is their missing out on, but also to prove to myself that I really do love music as much now as I did in my youth. Not that writing them wasn’t fraught with problems.
For starters, so much brilliant music has emerged over the past five and half decades or so that compiling a definitive list of 560 essential songs proved virtually impossible, complying with my own rule of ten songs per year from 1970 to 2025 difficult in the extreme considering how many great songs had to be left out. In many ways choosing 560 albums may have been easier, albeit that so many of the more significant artists of the past worked outside that format. In pop, soul, glam, reggae, funk, krautrock, disco, roots, dub, punk, post punk, industrial, electronica, new wave, electro, goth, acid house, techno, hip hop, baggy, rave, trip hop, EDM, Britpop and most other types of music I can think of, singles were the main focus with many of the more influential and genre defining songs failing to appear on albums at all.
This approach forced me to be a little more selective and subjective, the majority of artists represented by one or two songs with only the truly exceptional featuring more. But ultimately this project was about a lot more than simple song selection. Organised in chronological order, each of the six soundtracks represents a decade with a loose narrative of how music itself progressed over that distinct, ten year period creatively, sonically, culturally and technologically. It’s my attempt to contextualise how the musical landscape of the times informed its artists, and to bring into perspective the influences that shaped the songs here, and how they in turn shaped those that followed.
Encompassing 56 years which for some is an entire lifetime, these Soundtracks For The Decades tell the story of how I got from Lee Marvin’s ‘Wanderin’ Star’ to Baxter Dury’s ‘Return Of The Sharp Heads’. Yet while I believe it’s important to know where music has come from to understand where it is now and where it could be heading next, this is really no more than a framework to hang my ideas off. And of course, it goes without saying that you won’t necessarily agree with the inclusion of all the songs here or everything I’ve written about them. But they’re a start if nothing else, and I live in hope that if I can inspire just one person to listen to one of them, then I’ve achieved what I set out to.
Here’s hoping you’re that one!