Monday 19 April 2010

Swervedriver 'Son Of Mustang Ford' 12"

Before upgrading to the ipod about five years ago, I used to use minidisc, and before that cassettes. I would listen to music every time I left the house no matter where I was going. But no matter how many discs/tapes I used to take with me, I would find that I always ended up wanting to listen to something that I had left at home. When my minidisc player finally died and I realised I would have to upgrade to something more up to date, I began to realise the convenience of having my entire music collection in my pocket at all times, i.e. never being without anything that I may want to listen to at any moment. So I've been on a mission for the past five years to get every piece of music I own into itunes and onto my ipod. Unfortunately though, I'm still not there.

However, even though I now have over 15,000 songs on my ipod, I still keep ending up getting songs in my head that I either don't have on my ipod, or don't have in my record collection. A lot of the time, this is stuff that I used to either own or like when I was younger, but which I then got bored of and sold. So whilst my mp3 "collection" started out as just being songs that I own on vinyl, I have in recent months added to my collection a lot of songs that I used to own in a physical format, or which I just used to listen to when I was younger but never owned. And then, sometimes, when I have been listening to mp3s of something that I used to like / own years ago, I then decide that I want to own it on vinyl.

Today's entry is one such record. For some in explicable reason, I got a Swervedriver song in my head a few weeks ago. So I downloaded the four song EP on which it features. And then I found a cheap copy of the record on eBay, so I picked it up. So here it is - Swervedriver 'Son Of Mustang Ford' 12" EP:

This copy also came with some kind of press release, which is interesting because it likens the band to Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth, probably in an attempt to 'push' Swervedriver, since both of those bands were pretty big back when this came out.


I would never go as far as to say that I liked this band, and I certainly never owned any records by them. But when I was about 15/16, one of my friends was into bands like The Cure, Charlatans, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Ride & Swervedriver. At this time I didn't know much about music, and I didn't really own any records. And even though none of the aforementioned bands appealed to me musically, there was something about these records and bands that I thought was cool. I guess it was probably something to do with the fact that the average dude at school had never heard of any of this stuff. But even though something about these kinda bands appealed, the music did nothing for me. That said, I do remember my friend playing some of this stuff for me in an attempt to convince me how good it was, and literally the only thing that I liked was this one Swervedriver song. So yeah, I admitted I liked it, but I never went so far as to own the song in any format. I never even had a taped copy of it or anything.

So, given that I can't have heard this song more than five times in total, and this was circa 19 years ago, I find it kinda weird that this song just popped into my head a few weeks ago, and I could remember enough of it to decide that I wanted to listen to it. The human brain is a mysterious thing! And also, after all this, I now wonder what my old school friend (who I haven't seen or heard from since 1993) would think about me buying this record in 2010. I wonder if he even still owns all his records, and whether he carried on buying vinyl to this day?

Finally, here's a video I found on youtube for the song 'Son Of Mustang Ford'. Given that most of you won't have heard (or heard of) this band before, I thought you might find it interesting to check them out and see (and hear) what I'm going on about.

1 comment:

jhulud said...

I have always loved Swervedriver. They're one of this bands that never really got their due when they were fully active. I recommend checking out their other releases Marcus.