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Here’s the introduction and first chapter:
SLEEVE NOTES
“Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ‘n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfilment ever since.”
Lester Bangs
Wouldn’t it be great if life was like a mixtape? Picking the songs in the right order before you can even walk, throwing out the ones that don’t really fit now you listen back to it as a whole. Except... life is not a mixtape and it’s probably a good thing. Imagine all the things you’d miss out on and the people you’d never bump into by accident. So no, in hindsight, no matter how bad things get, it’s a good thing that life is not a mixtape.
I know a thing or two about tapes and it would only unspool at the most inopportune moment anyway-and yeah, sometimes you might need to tape over a song to protect your own sanity.
Life, it turns out, is more like a live show in which the cast of characters have no idea when to take the stage. Some of those characters might look fantastic but stick around long enough and you might discover they can barely play their instruments.
Jesus, I could play this analogy game all day long but let’s get into the grit of why this book even needs an introduction.
I’ve always been fascinated as to whether I’m actually real or not. The question forever on my lips has been ‘do we make pop-culture or does pop-culture make us?’
It’s a good question because I’m really not sure who I am without it. It’s coloured everything in my life to the point that I don’t know where I begin and it ends. I’m hoping that I’m not alone in this because that’s a sad state of affairs indeed if I’m the only one.
When The Music’s Over was initially titled Raised On Radio but it soon became a whole lot more than the flimsy soundtrack of my life with some sly observations. It became about archeology and psychology and demanded to be called something else, something deeper, so instead of stealing the title of a Journey song, I stole a Doors song title and everything started to shift into place.
See, I never imagined I’d outlive rock ‘n’ roll. Or at least, the version of it that mattered to me, but here we are. TikTok is the new MTV, and half the people wearing Bowie shirts don’t know who Mick Ronson is.
So what do you do when the thing that raised you starts to die in your arms?
You write a love letter that reads more like a eulogy. Maybe they’re the same thing. I know the music isn’t really over, I listened to some just this morning and enjoyed the hell out of it, but we’re getting there, and that’s OK. It’s a universal law that your kids should find their own nonsense to put up on a pedestal so that, many years later, they can watch their own idols tumble into the abyss of irrelevance, shame and eventually, death.
None of it matters because it’s just music right?
It’s not like it’s a family member or your dog.
Except...
Yeah.
Anyway, I feel a need to add a disclaimer here before you start flipping pages.
The first is that I have ignored time. People may turn up in a story long before I introduce them chronologically. Events may also be discussed out of sequence. When you’re making a mixtape, that can happen. Sometimes, you need to drop a song in early to explain how you feel about the next one... and you roll with it.
As to whether I answered my own pop-culture question by the end? I have no idea. That’s for you to figure out not me.
I’ll leave this intro the same way as I came in, with a quote from Lester because I can’t say it any better than him:
“Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude, it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock ‘n’ roll, or a movie can be rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a way of living your life.”
FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
One day—my best guess is 1975, which makes me seven years old—my mum handed me a record player and a bag of singles. I’d never seen this machine before in my life. Maybe it was hidden under a bed or buried in the back of a cupboard with other abandoned junk. Who knows? Maybe she was just tired of me rattling around the house and saw an opportunity to redirect my chaos. Whatever the reason, that dusty turntable turned out to be the gift that kept on giving.
It looked like it should be portable. There was a leather strap on the side and a faux-leather lid with metal clasps that made it feel like a guitar case designed by someone who had never actually seen a guitar. It had a speaker grill on the front that could’ve easily hidden ten kilos of heroin—though I’m sure it was just wires and magic. Regardless, it sounded great. It was a box of wonder, an instant portal into another world.
It had one of those stackable spindles where you could pile up singles and let them drop one at a time—a mechanical mixtape built by steampunk hippies. Four speeds: 33, 45, 78... and something else? 16, maybe? I’ve never seen a 16rpm record in my life, but the setting was there like a dare. Maybe it was for classical albums. Or maybe it was just for kids like me to play everything at the wrong speed for a few laughs. Which I did. Repeatedly.
I think it had legs, too. Actual legs you could screw on and off, meaning it could either sit in the corner of the room like a television or be dragged around like a briefcase full of noise. It was glorious.
The bag of singles? That was another mystery. They all had massive holes in the middle and no sleeves, just living loose in this nondescript paper bag. It took me a while to realise you needed those little plastic adapters to make them work, and even longer to figure out where the hell to get them. (Pro tip: you steal them from other singles–recycling before it was cool, but you could also buy something like fifty, for a few pence if you knew the right people).
My second best guess is that the records came from a pub jukebox via my grandmother, who worked as a cleaner in a pub. Most of them were probably rejects: scratched, overplayed, discarded. But to me, they were solid gold. I don’t remember them all, but I remember enough:
↔ Highway 61 Revisited/Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window – Bob Dylan
↔ Robot Man – Connie Francis
↔ Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini – Brian Hyland
↔ I Can See Clearly Now – Johnny Nash
↔ Apache – The Shadows
↔ Monster Mash – Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett & the Crypt- Kickers
↔ Return to Sender, Jailhouse Rock and All Shook Up – Elvis Presley
...and maybe thirty more. All gone now. No idea where they ended up. Thrown out, lost, traded for something more/less magical. I try not to think about it.
At the same time the record player arrived, so did some Music for Pleasure singles. Classic age appropriate material like Puff the Magic Dragon, The Runaway Train, I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat, and Here We Go Gathering Nuts.
Listen, the whole book isn’t going to be like this, but if we’re going to talk honestly about the path that led me to the music that shaped my life, then this is where it starts. If you’re wondering what kind of childhood includes a school maypole, pagan chanting, and singalong party games that end in “Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!”— well, welcome to life in the early-seventies.
So yeah, Bob Dylan and Elvis are in there, but so are monsters, robots and train crashes. That’s not a bad start. It’s better than what my kids were exposed to when they were seven and Sugababes were out there singing:
“My sexy ass has got him in a new dimension
I’m ready to do something to relieve this mission”
No wonder the future looks bleak.
Monster Mash might not win me any street cred, but Robot Man still holds up. Somebody should cover that song. If you’re a musician reading this, take the hint. I’d do it myself but I can’t work it out.
Sometimes I think there’s a whole essay to be written about listening to songs without ever seeing the cover art—just raw music, untainted by image or hype. Maybe all music should come in a bag with no names attached, and you have to decide if you love it on sound alone. Actually, in the age of tech, maybe we’ve come full circle already, but there’s too much information out there to truly stay in the bubble of the song being all you have.
What happened to that record player, I have no clue. I probably wore it out, or it vanished in a house move, or maybe I took it apart trying to be clever. But it was still with me in 1982, that much I know. That’s when it got replaced by an Amstrad tower system, so it’s highly likely I just stopped caring about it.
Curious about the start of this story, I called my mum to ask where the record player had come from. She told me it couldn’t have been hers—the lid on hers was red. And the records? Her mum used to buy them from a street market. The pub she worked in didn’t even have a jukebox because it was a “drinking man’s pub”. So now I don’t know where the record player came from. It definitely wasn’t red, so now I’m questioning everything I thought I knew as fact.
My entire origin story appears to be built on the faulty foundations of half-truths and bad memory.
And maybe that’s the reality of all our lives? Maybe we’re all walking around with fabricated backstories that we’d pass a lie detector on because we believe them that much. And if that’s the case, you better hope your version of events came with a decent soundtrack.
Good enough to base a movie on.