Also a journal of my year in 1985 when I worked in a Swiss Hotel run by the Swiss Council of Churches in Locarno, Ticino. Then in the Autumn went to Univesrity at UEA in Norwich.
Music was already a fundamental aspect of my psychological make up in 1985. I was constructing my identity. 'Mein Gestatl'. I was nineteen, had just finished my A Levels but I was fundamentally still very innocent as my diaries from those days attest. I'd become an NME disciple during my college days. It was an incredible tool for determining your ideas opinions and direction back in those days
They told you the music to listen to, the records to buy, the films to see. The books to read. The opinions to have. The opinions I wanted and needed. But it took me a few months after I arrived in Switzerland to find a library in Locarno which stocked backdated copies of the NME and Melody Maker for me to pore over .
But I felt I was missing something fundamental to me even as I soaked up this fresh new experience and invested in and got to know the people I was working with. What was happening in the charts? . In the music press? Who were The Triffids and where were they coming from? What was the third R.E.M. album going to sound like.These were things that mattered to me.
Locarno was a dream town on the Northern shore of Lake Maggiore. Looking back I imagine heaven. I wandered up and down the main thoroughfare when my working day was done, past guys on street corners who tried to sell me dope. which didn't remotely interest me at the time.
I spent my time in newasgents leafing through Rolling Stone an inferior corporate stopgap for the lack of the NME which told me about Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA, Madonna and Prince. Also about the return of John Fogerty who I was interested in as I had recently discovered Creedence.
Lone Justice were much trumpeted within its pages. I didn't hear their music until I got back to the UK and it would take me a while to absorb and appreciate them as I wasn't ready for C&W any more than I was ready for Folk or Jazz at that age. I was immediately taken by Maria McKee but there were probably other factors at play rather than pure curiosity about the music.
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