January, 2021. 

I live a musical life. I play music, I sing a bit, I buy records, I listen to music, I go to see bands.

I used to, at any rate. This is undoubtedly the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing a band, and that includes a three-month stint living in Guatemala and Honduras. There are far worse off people than me. It still hurts. And there’s no end in sight.

So, I turn to mundane tasks to keep me going. My actual job is fantastic and I enjoy getting stuck into the day to day challenges it brings. It’s the fallow ground though, the spaces in between, the hours between clocking off and dinner and sleeping; they all need to be filled. If I was a younger man I’d just get hammered every night, but having spent rather too long indulging over the years I paradoxically found myself cutting down quite substantially during Covid. Perhaps I could see how it might end.

Writing is a great release, and to my surprise I found myself churning out page after page of semi-readable stuff. And even though I couldn’t see bands in person, my purchases could still keep them going, and as there were no coffees, no sandwiches, no after-work pints to spend on, it was nice to have a bit of extra cash to be able to plug some gaps in my vinyl collection. The Belle & Sebastian album I had on CD but not LP, the Cocteau Twins album which had marked an ill-fated venture into cassette buying, the Underworld album I’d been fascinated by but never quite listened too. All arrived, all were played, the empty hard-backed envelopes stored carefully for the imaginary day I decided to sell something.

I discovered a new addiction – Discogs. Not only could I catalogue my records (now neatly alphabetised on one particularly boring weekend), I could also assess their worth. I was rich! Rich beyond my wildest dreams! This flexi by Another Sunny Day is worth £30 on its own! Not that I was selling, you understand.

The process of organising and recording led to a subtle but unmistakeable realisation. My collection was extensive, unusual, interesting, perhaps even admirable. It had moments of curiosity alongside plenty of mass-market appeal.

It was also wafer-thin. My envelope appeared to stretch from four skinny white guys singing about girls at one end, to three skinny white guys and a girl singing about hip dudes at the other. I was an indie kid, sure. But this was almost pastiche. Had Biff Bang Pow even released as many albums as I seemed to own by them?

The germ of an idea began to appear, that perhaps having endured a year to forget (c. everyone, 2020), perhaps this year could be a year to remember things. An exploration of something that might serve not only to introduce me to some new music, but also illuminate some of the other cultural and personal choices I’d made over the years. I picked twelve acts, one a month, and pledged to listen to all of their studio albums properly.

There were just two easy-to-follow rules: firstly, they had to be acts who I owned no records by on vinyl. None at all. And secondly, they had to be reasonably well known. There was no point replacing one set of obscurities with another.  

Perhaps there would be hidden gems amongst the back catalogues of these untapped archives. Or perhaps I would realise why I never bothered to buy any of their records.