Do you remember your first favourite band or artist? The first time you fell in love with a musical act? And probably
first time you ever fell in love with music too? Do you remember how it felt? My story may be familiar to yours as I’m sure there are millions of people who were having very same experience as me.
I was a typical teenager who wasn’t very sure of himself, but I was sure that I loved music and this was largely due to my mum who always had music playing around us as I was growing up. In house and in car, it was always on but was mostly chart music from radio or 50s and 60s ballads that my mother liked.
I started to hear about some new bands from other kids at school and I also began to find some interesting sounds on a station called Radio Luxembourg, which was a pirate station broadcasting from Europe, and it played a lot of post punk new wave music that I was destined to fall in love with.
I remember it well now – lying in bed with radio on at midnight, volume turned down low so my parents couldn’t hear it while Alternative Top 30 chart was broadcast late into night. It was around this time that it happened – I discovered my first favourite band.
My first love was a band called Japan, and it was in 1984, two years after they had split up that I fell in love with their music.
It was through a friend at school that I discovered them, he was one of cooler kids who was at forefront of alternative music scene that was leading that way then.
We were all Baby Goths at time – too young to be ‘proper’ Goths but wearing as many of clothes as possible - dressed in regulation tight black trousers, pointy toed boots, flowery psychedelic shirts and black bikers jackets or long black coats, all topped off with lots of silver jewelry and chains.
We were in park one day listening to that great staple of 70s and 80s teenager’s musical diet – compilation tape.
John had a typical ‘alternative’ compilation with A Forest by The Cure, Spiritwalker by The Cult and several Bauhaus tracks, but he also had some tracks by another band I had heard of but never heard any music by, and that was Japan. He recommended that I get Assemblage album, which was basically a compilation of their early singles.
