Although my dad's vinyl collection is by all standards pretty impressive, very few actual records made an early impression on me. Now that I think about it, however, it's perfectly understandable: we didn't always have a record player in the house (the details of what stereo equipment followed us where are somewhat blurry before the early 2000s), and even when we did, CDs were always the dominant format. Vinyls were played only occasionally — when, I imagine, a nostalgic mood much like the one driving this post took hold of my dad —, and remained an archaic, overdelicate and thus implicitly forbidden medium for me until… Well, until I left home and discovered that people my age owned them and even played them regularly.
So while I'll never forget the wonder I felt handling CDs, opening up empty cases to unfold cryptic liners, and quickly matching particular artwork with artists or songs I especially liked, I have only three vivid vinyl memories. One was pondering the sleeve to Ziggy Stardust; one was wondering why on earth someone would call the Sex Pistols music. Less cliché, perhaps, was a deep, somewhat inexplicable fascination with Basement 5's 1965-1980.
(Basement who? Ah yes, my apologies. The Wikipedia note for the band confirms the little I know about it: Basement 5 formed in London in the late 70s, released only one album and an EP (both of which I believe are out of print today), and played an, I quote, "avant-garde" mixture of punk and reggae. That's not really doing justice to the Basement 5 sound, though, so I'll add a further hint for the connoisseur: they were produced by Martin Hannett. Oh, come on: the man responsible for Joy Division's spectral, abrasively cold, cathedral-punk sonic identity?)
I don't remember exactly when the following scene takes place; I probably wasn't more than six or seven. Imagine a cozy, standard living room in a well-to-do family, in, say, late-afternoon lighting. I was busy with what occupied most of my days, back then, which was reading (funny how things have changed, cough cough), on our dark-green-and-red sofa. I watched my dad walk to the bottom row of records on our wall-long shelf, pick one with a whitish sleeve and something that looked like a BMW logo on it (my grandpa owned a BMW, which is how I know… oh whatever), and drop a needle on the mysteriously oversized black disc.
I listened in terror as a strident siren filled the room, followed by an intimidating bass, laced around a sharp, martial and commanding drum rhythm. But that voice. That voice was truly paralyzing: deep and rough, grating even, toneless and aggressive, buried under layers of tinny echo, it sounded more like a German shepherd barking into a megaphone than anything human. Since I didn't know English, it wasn't until my dad starting yelling random words and phrases ("There's a riot going on!" "Immigration, you know what it's like!") that I gathered there were words being enunciated. As for my father himself, I'd never seen him like that: maybe this is the veil of memory distorting the facts of history, but he was dancing. Or at the very least, bobbing around, nodding his head, tapping his hands on his jeans. At that point I had set my book down and stood up; I proceeded to join in, ecstatic and utterly terrified. We danced, he blurted out more slogans I couldn't understand, which I probably repeated in my own version of Shakespeare's language (much like this Bulgarian Idol contestant), and — Awwwwww! — we bonded.
Shortly afterwards, though, my mom stormed into the living room to turn the volume down, my dad picked up a magazine, and I tried to go on with my book. Years passed, during which Basement 5 made too few appearances — all of them instantly recognizable, and a source of complicity between my father and me —, and it wasn't until this summer that I set out to find a CD or digital copy of 1965-1980. (No, I don't own a record player.)
It wasn't easy, and took a lot of looking around. But I now have confirmation: that album is pure, unrivaled genius. Just when you think you've heard about all that a punk-dub fusion can produce, you get hit in the face with a massive piece of cracked concrete, with mean riffs and lead-heavy grooves ("No Ball Games", "Last White Christmas" - CLASSICS! Seriously.), with visceral, depression-era working-class politics, charged with anticolonial rage and urban exasperation, all of it clad in a steel-armor sound both icy and incendiary — like tear gas in a blizzard.
(Thanks to Thom Henley for the hilarious video.)
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