Episode #16 - The Albums That Changed Our Lives
Thumb through your record collection on any given date and you'll spend hours wistfully remembering with fondness how, where, why and damn well when you bought every single one of them.
It's a journey which will take you back to happier times, of having no money or cares in the world, of blowjobs and booze, smokes and jokes, thumps on the ceiling from downstairs because Fight Fire With Fire is making the Artex crack. Ahh, good times.
All those albums, all those years on, still have stories to tell, even the ones by Dio, though those are only about games of dungeons and dragons on a sad mate's floor, nursing a four-pack of hamster wee, or Carling as the branders insisted on calling it.
Well, the Sadmen have been through their record collections (Richard's was in alphabetical order, double wrapped, with duplicates under lock and key somewhere in the Cayman Isles; Mark's was draped over his radiator as per) and picked out three that, in their words anyway, changed their lives. I know, I know, I thought one of them would be Stakk Attakk as well, but their addled minds somehow overlooked the obvious.
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
And so to the first of this trio of life-changers, kindly brought to the party by Mark and offering Steve the opportunity to use the word "pretentious" a lot.
Eight-year-old Mark, hinting at the life he would later lead as pickpocket and serial felon, was raiding his mum's record collection one day when he clapped eyes on Dark Side of the Moon and reckoned it was worth a spin. And boy he's glad he did.
Halfway through side two this troubled child had been transformed into a wizened man of the world, able to see the follies of modern living, the suppression and oppression of man, unfairness and inequality, he could understand the complexities and parameters of life itself, emotional interactions and causal reactions. Mind you, he went without any pudding that night, the cheeky scamp!
It's going to give current Hall of Fame pacesetter Led Zeppelin IV a run for its money, bragged Mark, now in his 50s and still clearly deluded because he hadn't counted on (or he probably had but chose to ignore him) Steve finding it, yeah you guessed it, pretentious.
Richard, like Mark, loved Floyd's eighth album and so too did the band themselves it seemed, since they actually premiered the bloody thing before they'd even started recording.
Chas and Dave have been known to get the odd mention in a Sadmen review but here gird your loins instead for more high-brow artistic parallels, namely Jean-Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk. Hmmm. As Steve says…
Boston – Boston (1976)
It's been a while since the boys talked about shagging – Dark Side never quite leant itself to such talk – but Richard had stories of sexual conquest to tell and the 12 inches he whipped out for the occasion was Boston's debut album.
This is the story of a man who was famous for going downstairs, playing with knobs and pulling out his organ (ooh matron) but enough of our Rich, the boys were keener to discuss the merits of the mad professor, late developer and control freak Tom Scholz, the brains behind Boston and their stunning first album.
Yes Scholz, an extraordinary figure with quite the story to tell himself, was the man behind one of the greatest AOR albums of all time and, therefore, one of the genre's greatest songs, the opener More Than A Feeling, a song which clearly got Richard's juices flowing once upon a time and still gets him purring now.
And indeed Mark and Steve purred while Richard purred. The question is, could the collective purr-fest at listening to the majestic More Than A Feeling continue throughout the album or did Mark say, more than once, in fact a lot more than once, that the album goes downhill from thereon. Ah, that might have given the game away.
Y&T – Mean Streak (1983)
And so, on this storyteller's night, the mic passed to Steve to tell the world why Y&T's fifth studio release was the one that changed his life. It also ended in an unseemly row, but one step at a time.
What's not to love about Mean Streak, asked Steve, (a question that doesn't need answering, incidentally) as he fondly recalled days of visiting pubs, cafes and a pier and proclaiming that rather unprepossessing backdrop as the canvas upon which to draw a life-changing masterpiece.
As it happened, he could have cut the shit and simply said "er, title track, hello" to anyone who cared to listen and would have known full well that there wouldn’t be a soul who wasn't equally blown away by one of Dave Meniketti's high points. And the man had many.
Steve thought his love for the thing was off the scale until he then discovered that Mark had stuck Mean Streak (the track not the album I hasten to add) on both sides of a C90 (no, I can't be arsed kids, it's what Google's for) and played it on a loop until presumably, a few years later, he reckoned Straight Thru The Heart might be worth a shot.
Slightly scarier is a run-in he had with some, ahem, young ladies on a zebra crossing while Down And Dirty blared out of his car speakers. It's ok, he got off with a caution. Oh yeah, and talking of Down And Dirty. Remember that row we talked about?
