Because when The Smiths split in 1987, for teenage misfits like me it was time to move on. And that meant spending the next few years in morbid, decrepit shitholes listening to bands whose world ended when Andy Warhol was shot. Post C86, Creation Records were king, the band wore leather trousers and they looked down on you if your guitar didn‘t have 12 strings. And fuck me, I hated the Velvet Underground. It was all so dull, worthy, male and cold.

Maybe I was lacking imagination, but the only other option I could see was getting a Prince Albert, listening to Whitehouse backwards and joining the TOPY, which I decided really, really wasn‘t for me.

It wasn’t the worst of times, it just all seemed to be backwards looking and tinged with disappointment. I started to think that maybe Jimmy from Quadrophenia had been wrong after all and it really was just a bunch of people hanging around listening to music. So when House erupted it was all the sweeter. I’d read about it in the NME and seen the reports on TV, but when it finally caught on here it felt like year zero. A strange alien sound, few words, sex, new drugs, mayhem, stupid clothes - Glasgow was the European city of culture and the future was here. Everything sounded new and dangerous and it blew me away. But for all the brilliant music coming out of Detroit, Chicago and New York (and I’ve got to admit I didn‘t know what the hell most of them were) some of the most vital stuff seemed to be coming from Creation, of all places.

Old hands Primal Scream and My bloody Valentine get shredded by Weatherall and Danny Rampling and come out sounding unlike anything they‘d done before (or since, sadly). Hypnotone’s ’Dream Beam’ and one time roadie Sheer Taft’s ’Cascades’ sum up the naivety and energy of the period perfectly. The Jazz Butcher (reborn as JBC) even put an appearance in, with a cover of The Stones ‘We Love You’ which is so dumb it still puts a grin on my face. The whole album is full of little moments and memories like that.

Of course it couldn’t last, and a few years later I sold a Casio synth to Sheer Taft who by that time was looking as bad as I was feeling. Creation records quickly stopped releasing dance stuff, instead putting it on a subsidiary called infonet where the bands had names like Dimensional Gravitation Technology. Slam got into techno and moved to a huge weekly riot at the Arches, Primal Scream went back to 1973, and I hung around for far longer than I should have. But that’s another story.

While it lasted it was perfect, and this album captures that time in my life better than anything else ever will.

Stuart Blackwood is 30 (odd), was born in Newarthill and lives in Glasgow. He supports Motherwell FC, has an MA in Economics and Philosophy and likes William Bell (the singer), Bukowski & Fante, Eric Arthur Blair, Negativeland, Eric Hobsbawm, politics, philosophy and ambiguity. He dislikes Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama, U2, categorization and Violence.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.