250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 49 Long Ryders - Native Sons

 

In my first year at university it was much more common for people to come up to university accommodation with a record player than a television set. We had our heads screwed on in 1985. There was a communal TV set where you could go and catch I Claudius reruns or Citizen Kane if it was showing on one of the terrestrial channels. For the most part you didn't really bother because there was so much else going on.

There was a mature student in our block who had a colour set where you could go and watch a football match. The Home Internationals. The cup Final and such like. But from memory football wasn't a particular priority to us. There were more interesting things. More important things. Like being young,

 I got into an important relationship in my second term with a beautiful Chinese Malaysian girl. She had a Singaporean friend with a colour TV in his room on the ground floor on campus. When he was out he'd let us borrow his room .It was the World Cup in Mexico in the Summer term,. The Hand of God, Mundial. 

Min and I snuggled down  under the duvet and watched games. But we both far more interested in the snuggling than the outcome of the match. People forget. Life makes you forget. When you settle down to the 9 to 5 and start to chip away at your mortgage and the binge watch and the next ninety minutes takes over and somehow stretches out to actually mean more than The Bronte Sisters and Scorsese and Astral Weeks. 

What means more than these things. A legalised war on a field of grass? Not to me it doesn't. I can watch a match of football and enjoy it as much as the next person but essentially these days for me mostly it boils down to jumping up and down when your team scores. .  .

Back fiert tears again. In my home block one of the girls upstairs had a record player. She lent me her copies of  Hoodoo Gurus, Stoneage Romeos and Long Ryders Native Sons. Both debut albums, both slightly retro tecords  in different ways but entres. Signposts to all kinds of great music . Nuggets, CBGBs, Australian pioneers from Stoneage Romeos a; Buffalo Springsteen, Byrds and Gram from Native Sons.

I saw Long Ryders in my first year. They were supported by That Petrol Emotion who had come from the ashes of The Undertones and seemed a natural broadening of that palate. Both bands seemed like  primer courses. Different modules on a music appreciation degree 

The steps to follow; Get out of the venue get a bus into town. Go to a record shop. Find out where they came from . Form a band or write a book. Listening to Native Sons now is easeful bliss.Let the inner cynic in you go and relax.  It thinks Punk is a great thing. It thinks C & W is a great thing. It thinks the British Invasion was a great thing. It's forty years old and it's a pretty great thing too. Form that band. Write that book.