COVENTRY Music Museum curator Pete chambers BEM writes for the Observer.
Back stage passes to bus passes
So as this very day is the day I turn officially into a pensioner, I thought I would reflect a little of where that 66 years went.
Do I feel old?
Well like most of us, I still have my love of music that I first discovered as a seven-year-old listening to The Beatles’ Please Please Me LP.
My first published article was in the local fanzine Alternative Sounds in December 1980, so that means I have been a local music journalist for over 40 years.
Coventry music still helps me get up in the morning and bus pass or not, I never get board of the drifting sands that constantly reveal new local talent and musical innovations.
I began as a Beatles fan, morphed into T Rex and glam rock, delighted at seeing the likes of Roxy Music, Genesis and Cockney Rebel at the Lanch and was happy to rock away to the power of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath at Coventry Theatre.
Later seeing Queen and Bowie before 2-Tone beckoned and my world really did change.
Coventry in the early 1980s was so full of music that I took it upon myself to become a local music journalist as I marched into the offices of The Coventry Weekly News in New Buildings and announced: “You need a music column in your paper, and here I am.”
For my cheek I got the gig and never looked back.
I’m happy to have written more words about Coventry and Warwickshire rock and pop music than anyone else on the planet, but I’m not trading in my press pass in yet.
This year’s Godiva Festival and COVtember gigs demonstrated all the amazing talent this city is still producing, and I’m happy to be a small part of it.
Eyeless In Gaza: Skeletal Framework – The Cherry Red Recordings 1981-1986, 5CD Box Set
I often get asked what my favourite song is of all time, when I reply with my answer I invariably get a far distant look of ‘never heard of it’.
The song is ‘From A To B’ and the artists are Eyeless In Gaza a beyond brilliant duo from Nuneaton comprising of Peter Becker and Martyn Bates.
Their sound was unique, electronic and inventive with Martyn’s melancholic vocals creating a feeling of nostalgia that was pleasing and disturbing at the same time (a similar feeling was also brilliantly conveyed visually to full effect on their album sleeves).
Well now Cherry Red is releasing an epic five CD clamshell box set of their earliest recording from 1981 to 1986.
Each track has been hand-picked by the duo themselves and sleeve notes are provided by Martyn Bates.
It includes the classics ‘Invisibility’, ‘Veil Like Calm’, Kodak Ghosts Run Amok’, ‘New Risen’, ‘From A To B’ and many more.
It will definitely be one for the die-hard fans like myself, but it’s also a perfect way to submerge yourself into a band whose body of work has defied pigeonholing and has given the band a huge fanbase internationally.
