Those really were the days..

Sometime between 1976 and 1980, my then brother-in-law Steve had completed a course in plant biology at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and had moved into a nice little flat in West Lancashire. 

Before long, everything he'd had at Wolverhampton as a student was moved up to the new flat. Steve's much prized Roger Dean posters; beautifully crafted and perfectly positioned next to his Pioneer hi fi and turntable was incredibly detailed and was more like a window into another world than it was a piece of art!

The newly acquired lava lamp stood like a mini monolith behind the ornately carved walnut and oak chess set bought from the Games shop in Liverpool (a favourite AD&D gamers haut). Just across from the fireplace stood the 'infomred' album collection nicely lit by one of those Habitat spherical paper lamp shades. On the west wall was the bookcase filled almost entirely with around a hundred or so science fiction paperbacks. 

I was completely enthralled browsing through these classics that included A.E Van Vogt, Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Philip K Dick, Issac Azimov and Arthur C Clarke. Steve's book case were testimonies not just of good reading but of experiencing previously unexplored worlds and alternative dimensions. Just looking at them tugged at your determination to get into that stuff whether you wanted to or not!

Conversations at the flat ranged from basic astrophysics and trendy scientific theories to shared and somewhat slightly exaggerated life experiences that were detailed to the nth degree. The sci fi writers and their works were examined in detail too and book covers were scanned with hungry adventurous eyes before being filed into our imaginations and inspirations.

Steve's flat then, was an incredibly perfect environment for me to be introduced to a whole collection of recordings by bands and artists I'd never heard but who's album titles and cover art were themselves overwhelmingly inviting with their scientific fact and fiction associations and often spiritually uplifting abstract presentations.

So, with the lights slightly dimmed (by the lamp shade not a dimmer switch!), and with the occasional glass of wine with Lancashire cheese and Ryvita, the first album to be positioned onto the turntable platter was Tangerine Dream's Rubycon on the Virgin Records label. For that moment, I had been introduced not just to one of the world's finest electronic music purveyors, but to the soundtrack that accompanied just about every thought and imagining I'd had about the universe, the stars and galaxies, the possibilities of Saturn having more than just nine moons (it has 49 today!). 

This was kind of what was meant by 'ambient' or 'atmospheric' music and yet we referred to it simply as instrumental rock or 'progressive electronic music'. The textures and pulsating rhythms were enchanting, the trickling glassendos and the 'spacey FX and sweeps were really genuinely out of this world!

For conversations on God, life, and just about everything else that leaned towards the spiritually informed, the soundtrack next on the playlist had to be Vangelis 'Heaven and Hell'. This, like Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' seemed to me to constitute 'impossible-for-mere-mortals-to-reproduce' music. I was a guitar and bass player that would have been shamed into the dankest darkest corners of these guys living rooms had I known them personally. As musicians, Mike Oldfield and Vangelis, although a few altered sub-genres apart, were just TOO good, too brilliant, and naturally yet extraordinarily talented craftsmen of forward thinking in instrumental music.

Heaven and Hell had the choirs and anthemic keyboard work laced with heavy and progressive percussion that was woven between and beyond thunderous, wonderous, production work. Tubular Bells, on the other hand, already recognizable by it's related and remixed Exorcist theme, was the work of a 19 year old guy who HAD TO STATE 'no synthesizers' on the back cover! And, unlike the short 35/40 minute deliveries from Tangerine Dream, both Heaven and Hell and the impressively long Tubular Bells very quickly became diamonds among bricks!

The record labels RCA, Polydor, and Virgin were each putting out their fair share of instrumental stuff outside of the classical arena. Artists like Tomita who grazed through the classics and transformed them with VCOs and VCAs was doing exceptionally well in the UK. Tangerine Dream were touring right, left, and centre, complete with mountains of synths and sound modules, strange looking sequencing hardware and bulbs instead of lasers! Dave Greenslade put out 'The Pentateuch of the Cosmogany' contained inside a hardback beautifully illustrated book by Patrick Woodroffe.

The mid to late seventies was indeed a time of transformation, not just in the use of electronic instruments and modules, but for the initiated, it was a transformation of 'vision'. 

Album artwork was something to behold again and again and somehow matched the music perfectly. Try getting that kind of association today and believe me it's incredibly rare! The sleeve notes, if any, were read hundreds of times. Y'see we absolutely had to know where these things were recorded, in what time frame, with what equipment, and more importantly, and I know some of you will be confused, but we also had to know who the producer was! Yep... back then, it really was IMPORTANT that we knew these things even if we didn't quite know why!

The sound from our speakers made grey mountains blue and crystalline, it made moods swing to the positive and creative, it made reality a little brighter than normal, but perhaps more importantly, this music transported us to planes of existence that drugs could never touch! The strange thing was.. we got all of this from listening to music with no lyrics!

Then, in the middle of all that, 'Oxygene', and shortly afterwards 'Equinoxe' were released by a French guy named Jean Michel Jarre for Dreyfus/Polydor. Perhaps more than any other instrumental artist of the day, Jean Michel Jarre managed to bring home exceptional electronic music not just to the likes of me and Steve, but all the way across to the pop charts too. 

Embarrassing as that was to us, both albums exuded genius! Here we had intricately crafted sequenced arrangements and drifting, sweeping melodies that were as palatable to the masses as you could possibly imagine but even more palatable to those who were still working their way through Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield, and Vangelis. If these three artists took us to the outer reaches of time and space, Jean Michel Jarre took us to the foundations holding everything together! Jean Michel Jarre unified stuff!

Ridiculously frequent visits to record stores, where new releases were decorating the walls, were absolutely essential. The music press icons that were NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds, in England told us everything we needed to know and remained positively encouraging towards these anthemic albums. It was almost like they knew we were witnessing ebbs and floes in musical history and if someone was going to document these things accurately, they were the guys to do it.

BBC Radio DJs Bob Harris and John Peel also brought stuff to our attention that would otherwise have been acquired through word-of-mouth. 

The immense gratitude when these guys got it right (and they very often did) is something we never really shared with them, but the real legacy of those introductions lies in the timelessness of the music they were broadcasting.


I'm not going to go on about 'if it wasn't for what's his name' and 'such an event' and 'what some guy did in a lab coat with wires and pliers after the war' because although it's interesting historically, it's completely irrelevant to me personally. What is relevant however, is that the artists and the settings I've discussed for this feature, kind of went hand-in-hand for us then. The sci fi, the science, the wonder of it all and maybe things are not alot different today, but I sometimes wonder if the transformations of vision this music seemed to engineer, inspire, and encourage back then, are a whole lot rarer today than they used to be. Or, am I just getting old and nostalgic?