Love Is The Slug
|December 29, 2010 | Found Sounds
Songs get stuck in my head. Sometimes it’s the last thing I heard ( which is then replaced by the next thing ), and sometimes it’s an old melody that comes roaring out of a far corner of my brain, hooks in, and won’t let go. This is an actual psychological condition ( there are two excellent books on the subject : Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, and This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin ) that I suffer from, although I don’t think of it as, you know, an affliction. I started learning to listen ( I mean, really listen – you’d be surprised at how many people, even accomplished musicians, don’t – or can’t ) at a very young age, when I realized that I derived an intense, almost physical pleasure from music, and I think of listening as a skill that is a lifetime in the making. I have learned to abstain from humming, whistling, desk-drumming a song that’s in my head, because those things make people crazy. Anyway, it’s absolutely miraculous that years of playing guitar in front of blaring stacks of amps didn’t damage my hearing ( the owner of the rehearsal studio where we wrote most of Astro-Creep : 2000 told me that we were the loudest band he’d ever had in there ), but I know that my grasp of music comes from having learned to pay attention, not some superhuman ability to hear dog-frequencies.
We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It : Love Is The Slug
We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It : Love Is The Slug
So a couple of weeks ago, I woke up with this song, which I hadn’t heard in something like 23 years, playing in my head – non-STOP. Wacky British cartoon punk chicks with a winning melody, clever, dynamics-creating production by Martin Rushent. You remember the Monty Python sketch where Michael Palin has the tape recorder in his nose, sticks his finger up there to press the stop button? I wish. Usually when this happens, I can hit ‘stop’ by auditioning the offending track on iTunes, but, for whatever reason, there’s only a demo version of this one on there, not the recording that I was trying to get out of my skull. It seemed pre-ordained, then, that just a few days later, while browsing in a musty, dusty, up-a-flight-of-rickety-stairs record store, I found a mint 12″ pressing. Here it is, sorry if it gets stuck in your head.
