The sheer horror of it fresh after Kylie made me groan out loud in frustration and my companion turned to regard me coolly.
"You're not particularly patient are you?" he asked and I had to explain that waiting I can handle, but waiting to a backdrop of awful music is really not my thing. Then an awful thought occurred to me.
"You're not like a closet Farnham fan or anything are you?"
Now this is a man whose publicly acknowledged preference for music runs to techno and metal. He was even sitting there in a Mastodon T-shirt and Gojira hoody and was clearly deeply unimpressed that I would even ask him such a thing. He stared at me for a second.
"What do you f#$king think?"
Okay, point taken. But what I had been trying to suggest, rather insultingly as it turned out, is that John Farnham might have been a secret shame artist. We all have them. Someone we sing to when no one's around, claiming the CD belongs to a friend or was a gag gift we can't bring ourselves to toss if someone asks us about it. Or even one of those inherited loves from fruit-loop parents. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop. I have so many songs and artists I love purely because of the time and place when I first heard them/came to love them. Here are my secret, and not-so-secret, shame artists;
Europe; First LP (okay, only) I ever got was a compilation called "Smash Hits '87". The only song my brother liked off the whole album was Europe's The Final Countdown and I would have to lift the needle and drop it back at the beginning at least twice every time I played it. Now here we are, 25 years on and it's the only song off that album I even remember. I crank it up every chance I get and remember my mad little bro' dancing like a freak and playing air guitar. It's also worth noting that Europe play right into my fetish for man bands with better hair and more makeup than me. Not to mention the coordinated dance moves, laser lights and explosions. Sad that today's rockers just aren't trying as hard. Of course, there's always 30 Seconds to Mars.
Jimmy Barnes; Okay, I'm not at all ashamed of this one but this one song is such a massive piece of my childhood that I had to include it. We moved to a farm when I was six and lived near a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. One of the only cool things about this town was the blue light disco and the coolest thing about the disco was when Jimmy Barnes Working Class Man came on and every single person would get up to help belt it out. It was the late eighties, early nineties, people had been doing it tough with interest rates and this song spoke to every person in the place. I learned how to head bang at the age of eight to this and Acca Dacca's Thunderstruck and for that, they will always be on my favourites list.
Fleetwood Mac; When I was 13 and just getting into music I had a tendency to play it a little louder than my parents probably would have preferred. We lived in a house where the living room had 12-foot high cathedral ceilings and my Dad had bolted the rather impressive set of speakers from our pretty decent stereo to the ceiling. About two minutes after I'd started belting out Def Leppard on my newly-acquired stereo my father yanked me out to the living room, sat me under one of the speakers and then cranked up Fleetwood Mac's The Chain until every cell of my body jerked to the beat and the windows shook in their panes. If I was going to play music loud, he informed me, it had better be good music and if I was anything like him, it better be at a volume where no one could hear me sing. I still love this song and I still play it at levels that would make most people's ears bleed. I just do it when no one's around to hear.
Def Leppard; The first album I ever bought on CD was Def Leppard's "The Vault". I love every song on there but in particular "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Let's Get Rocked". That last one makes me feel incredibly rebellious and makes me fantasise about going on some sort of vodka-fuelled anarchist rampage armed with spray cans and brass knuckles. Also, check out the dodgy animation. Good times.
Snow: I've got no idea if Snow ever did another song but the phenomenon that was Informer was enough. Almost everyone in high school spent months trying to work out what the hell he was saying so we could copy it. Still haven't got a clue. And what the hell is that accent?
Enigma; Saving the best for last. I discovered Engima when they were onto their second album and the Enigma had been busted. Everyone knew it was Michael Cretu but it didn't make the music any less amazing. I first heard it at the 1995 Pagan Summer Gathering, a camping event I'd been reluctantly dragged to by my hippy parents. That reluctance melted somewhere in the first hour of landing when I quickly discovered that unwashed pagans come hand in hand with alcohol, weed, sex and no concept of anything as mainstream and boring as age limits. My first experience of Enigma was that first evening when The Cross of Changes got played through speakers as tall as me out over the valley at dusk. When I stood before them my body felt like it would be shattered by the beat. It was impossible not to dance and I instantly loved them. I only own the first four albums, as the rest were crap, but I play them to death and both my children were born to the sounds of Enigma (Charlotte to Three and James to The Screen Behind the Mirror).
Tonight was the first night I saw the official video for Return to Innocence (the first Enigma song I ever heard). It does not surprise me that it's beautiful and makes no sense whatsoever. But with unicorns and everything moving backwards it's not hard to remember what it felt like to be 15, stoned to the wide and plugged in to the heart of the universe for the very first time. Wicked.
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