It’s not actually this album that changed my life but what it represents. Punk! (NB Some great tracks on this compilation)
1976 & 1977 were pivotal years in my musical development. I've always been a sponge as far as soaking up music, even to this day, but back then I was trying to listen to everything that I could get my hands on, or that my friends had discovered.
Punk was so out there and like nothing we had heard before although my mom compared it to when she first heard Elvis and Bill Haley which I think is a fair comparison. My dad hated punk and also glam before it. He didn't get Bowie at all
This was the first time that it felt like people like me were making music. Prog had been great in the early days but by 1976 it felt like you needed a masters in musicology to really appreciate what you were listening to and if you criticised it, you just weren't musically aware enough to understand it.
Three of my friends at the time were in three different punk bands. None of those bands lasted long or were actually much good but that didn't matter.
Barbarellas in Birmingham was the home of punk for a couple of years seeing bands like The Vibrators, The Clash and many others, also adjacent acts like The Solid Senders and The Runaways (I was in love with Joan Jett).
The music felt real and relevant to us in a city that was always on the brink of another strike and I guess the grimness of being in a city which felt a little chaotic at the time. This was also when I started getting into politics seriously so I appreciated the environment around punk more
There was also a change in the clothes that we were wearing so the whole thing felt like it really belonged to us and not those older than us. I was 18 / 19 at the time
Last edited by Johnnyo on 10/09/2025 19:30; edited 1 time in total
Your post about Black Sabbath is an amazing read. Thank you for sharing it 🙏 It's amazing to read a story first-hand from someone who grew up in the same town as the band members.
II'm grateful for Black Sabbath, as some of my favorite artists' sounds likely have stemmed from this band.
Your post about Black Sabbath is an amazing read. Thank you for sharing it 🙏 It's amazing to read a story first-hand from someone who grew up in the same town as the band members.
II'm grateful for Black Sabbath, as some of my favorite artists' sounds likely have stemmed from this band.
Thanks for the comment II. I think that, even all these years later, no band has ever resonated with me as much as Black Sabbath have. Legends.
I moved down to London from Birmingham in 1982 and was fortunate enough to fall in with a great bunch of people, some of whom are still friends over 40 years later.
Amongst those folks was a guy called Terry who is a couple of years older than the rest of us and who, even back then, had an awesome record collection. At the time of the release of this album he was living in a bed sit in Notting Hill. This was before the eponymous film came out and made the place trendy and priced out the locals but don’t get me started on that.
Anyway, Terry’s flat was literally a bed, a record player, speakers and his record collection.
At the time Notting Hill had more record shops than you could shake a stick at, top of the list then, as it still is today, was Rough Trade West. Always a great place to visit, chat, meet people and buy the occasional album.
Terry was a frequent visitor and one afternoon we ended up at his flat and he said that he’d been recommended an album by a new US band. He put it on and wow, it was like nothing we had ever heard,
Incoherent vocals and a sound that grabbed you from the first listen. Little did we know that they would go on to become the biggest band in the world. They were our secret back then. Changed my music listening habits from that point on.
This album brought various artists into my world like, The Wipers, Dream Syndicate, Bob Mould (Sugar, Husker Du), Rain Parade and many others
This album followed very quickly on from my discovery of R.E.M.'s Murmur. Can't remember where I first heard it but it blew me away at the time and still does every time I hear it.
Dream Syndicate was a natural progression from R.E.M. (Steve Wynn and Peter Buck have worked extensively together over the years), and led me into bands like Rain Parade, 28th Day, Green On Red, Game Theory and The Bangles.
This album is sprawling and messy and I love that. This type of post punk Rock N Roll (as a critic once described it) has an endearing quality for me. Ever changing and evolving.
In a way, and i only thought of this just recently, it set me up for my return to Neil Young (more to come on that later) as the Paisley Underground bands drew influence from the likes of Big Star, Velvet Underground and an extensive nod to Neil Young & Crazy Horse.
Around the late 80’s / early 90’s I used to frequent a fabulous record shop in Kingston, South West London, imaginatively called, The Record Shop. It was literally the other side of the road from the railway station.
The guys who ran it were real rockers, leather jackets, tattoos, the works and really lovely blokes to boot. We, my friends and I used to spend hours in the shop chatting about music and learning from each other (they were as keen to hear about what we were listening to as we were their new stock.
I’m not sure who was first to mention Green River and Soundgarden but then one of the staff put something by one of the early grunge bands on (can’t even remember who it was) maybe Green River and I was blown away in a way that I really hadn’t been since Punk or Heavy metal and here was a shout that sort of fused the two together. So visceral and unrelenting.
So I got into bands like Nirvana and Peral Jam (obvious picks) but also Mudhoney and Alice In Chains and way more that I could mention
My time spent with grunge lasted quite a while and I own many many grunge albums and still pull then out on a regular basis.
The album chosen above is probably a fairy obvious one but it is a good illustration of the music
I was a 12 year old in 1970 living in, as Ozzy and the guys would see it, the wrong side of Birmingham. For those who are not aware, football is a religion in Birmingham and the city is split across the city centre and your either a villain (supporting Aston Villa), or if you come from the south of the city you’re a bluenose (supporting Birmingham City). I’m a proud bluenose and the band all support the villa. Never the Twain shall meet. Until……..
Birmingham is the quintessential blue collar city. Back then, The home of British Leyland and heavy industry. The city of a thousand trades. If you wanted it built, Birmingham could do it with highly skilled tradesmen. That was our identity and it was a rough place to grow up but we didn’t think of it that way as kid. It was just Birmingham.
What we didn’t have as teenagers was our own identity as far as music, not like Liverpool with The Beatles or London with The Stones. Then along came The Sabb.
The first time I heard the self titled album I wasn’t interested in Gezzer’s politics, although this became more important and relevant as I got older, no, it was the first time that I heard anything that sounded like the city that I loved. Industrial, visceral, something that actually had a physical effect on you.
We didn’t know that a whole new genre of music was being created in our city, me and my friends had simply found the music that felt like our city. Didn’t matter which side of the city you lived, there was no divide as far as the band were concerned.
Ozzy famously hated putting music into genre but I do feel proud that, more than 50 years later, and after many sub genre of heavy metal, my city is still the place where it was born.
Ozzy and the band mean a huge amount to me and although my musical palette has expanded hugely since my early teens I still love going back to Black Sabbath for a fix on a regular basis
I thought that I'd add a track to illustrate each phase in my musical progression.
So, for the next five years or so I was heavily into heavy rock / metal. Loved bands like Black Sabbath (see above), Led Zeppelin, Budgie, Uriah Heep and Atomic Rooster.
Then, in around 1975, I discovered this album. Not sure how I got to meet these folks, probably through an x school friend, I was 17 by now, but I got to know what, at the time I called "The Hippy Lot". They introduced me to loads of great music and this was the first album I heard that this girl in the group owned.
We were sat in her parents living room (they must have been out or away), after having been down the pub. I remember thinking that her parents must be rich because they had such a big house.
Anyway, she put this album on and it blew my mind. I was used to great heavy music but this was something totally different but equally great. Pretty much my world opened up to a whole new strand of music and I never looked back.
Over the next few months I discovered The Allman Brothers, Traffic, Steve Miller Band, Robin Trower and a whole lot more. At 17 I was a sponge, eager to learn as much as I could.
If I'm going to pick a track from this album, it has to be this one. It's the epitome of Abraxas
Shortly after the encounter with the "Hippie lot" I wanted to hear a greater selection of music from different genre of music.
Not being part of my group of heavy metal listeners, my mate Steve Hunt was into something rather different. He liked Prog and introduced me to this album. We can argue whether COTC is Prog or not, I don't think that it is but he loved it and I have to admit, I fell in love with it as well from the first listen. Took me into yet another genre of music and bands.
As an aside, I hadn't listened to this album much from about 1982 to the early 2000's. I had just started dating this gorgeous blonde at the time (later became my wife and still is) and we were round at a friends house having a great music session, taking it in turn to pick albums. My wife picked COTC and I fell in love with the album again, and her a little more by the end of the evening.
If I'm going to illustrate COTC, I just have to play either the title track or this
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