I think I really properly fell in love with music when I first heard Happy Mondays in 1989.
I was round my best mate from primary school, Daniel Wilson’s house. We’d grown up together doing the fun stuff kids under twelve don’t do anymore. Like cycling for miles, getting as lost as possible and then trying to get home in time for tea. And we were always looking for the newest money making hustle. We’d look for the big Globe juice bottles and take them into local corner shops for the return deal. And that meant a free 10p mix.
We’d go to the local golf course and look for lost balls, selling a bag to the golfers for a quid. Wasn’t long until we progressed to hiding in bushes and stealing from the fairway, though this technique was abandoned when I got cracked on the head by a stray ball and knocked out. Daniel having to sprint the mile back to mine to get my mum, who, thinking I was dead, did a four minute mile to get back to the course to find me chattering nervously to the poor bastard who’d lost his ball in my skull. (One we probably sold him earlier that day.)
But our favourite money maker was music piracy. A simple method. Step 1: Visit the Corstorphine branch of Woolworths and steal a couple of cassettes from the Top 40 section and a pack of blank TDK C90s. Step 2: Use Daniel’s state of the art Aiwa tape to tape machine to transfer the album to a blank C90. Step 3: Return the stolen tape and swap for a new one (you didn't need receipts in those days). Scrawl the track-listing onto the card. £1 a tape to the kids at school. A business is born. The problem was that neither of us really knew shit about music at that time. The first tape I stole was Tango In The Night by Fleetwood Mac. No eleven year old wanted that.
So on this day, realising we needed to up our taste game, we crept in Daniel’s older brother’s room. Andy Wilson was in 4th year when we were 1st years and had a bit of a rep of being a hard man and part of the YLT, Hibs casual youth crew. He dressed in Chevignon, Sonetti and Chipie and we were confident he knew good music. It was there we discovered a trove of tapes - Pet Shop Boys album Introspective, The Innocents by Erasure but most impactful to my young ears that day, a copy with The Stone Roses eponymous debut on one side and on the other Happy Mondays second album Bummed. Listening to these songs I realised my life would never be quite the same. The blissed out groove of the Roses and the poetic chaos of the Mondays were a far cry from anything I’d heard on my Now and Hits tapes. But it was as Wrote For Luck started playing my mind was well and truly blown. The driving tribal beat, the sleazy baseline and Shaun’s cryptic lyrics absolutely had me. I was changed.
Our music piracy career didn’t really take off, although a few years later I used a similar technique to get into computer game piracy, however it was that day that I guess I formed the first of my many bands. Daniel playing classical music on the piano in his living room and me tippy-tapping on ice-cream tubs with a couple of biros…
