AS an adult you can enjoy – or violently hate – any music on its own merits. But in your teenage years you were put off perfectly good bands by the twats who were into them. Bands like these…
The Cure
Just Like Heaven is a brilliant song, and these days you can happily listen to Cure oldies like Boys Don’t Cry and Charlotte Sometimes. But at school there was a major obstacle to liking goth music: goths. The main problem was that they weren’t enigmatic undead immortals inhabiting a twilight world between life and death, they were called Gary and Clare and they were doing A-level sociology. There is literally nothing sadder than seeing vampires waiting for the bus to sixth-form college in Crewe.
Guns N’ Roses
G N’ R injected some much-needed cred into heavy metal, and herein lies the problem. The kids who liked kick-ass tunes like Welcome to the Jungle were the same ones who just months earlier had been into Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper and Whitesnake. That is to say: obvious virgins with unflatteringly tight jeans, lank hair, a Saturday job in Kwik Save and the worrying delusion that they were essentially leading the same lifestyle as Mötley Crüe.
The Jam
Everyone respects The Jam, which is just as well for Paul Weller now he’s cranking out dad-rock albums instead of All Mod Cons or Setting Sons. However at school, mods were a bit too intense, obsessing not only about music but also odd things like 60s suits and bolting bits of crap to Vespas. If one of your colleagues came into work dressed as one of The Small Faces and told you he was attaching 18 rear view mirrors to his Vauxhall Corsa, you wouldn’t be thinking ‘I admire your individuality and sense of style’, you’d be thinking ‘twat’.
The Stone Roses
Precious, up-themselves wankers, yes, but their first album is good, and before they ignominiously fizzled out they managed to do the fresh-sounding Fools Gold. Unfortunately they were a major contributory factor in thousands of teenagers wearing stupidly long baggy jeans, the bottoms caked with dirt and probably a decent helping of dogshit. Fans also held the cultish belief that ‘The Roses’ were the greatest – and possibly only – band ever. Christ, they were twats. If further proof were needed, ask yourself: which famous youngster was particularly into ‘Madchester’? That’s right: Perry, Kevin the Teenager’s dickhead mate.
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd get a lot of flak, despite Roger Waters not exactly being the first egomaniacal control freak in music history, and the band’s output being way superior to actual prog rock like Yes. But back in 1987 the kids who liked A Momentary Lapse of Reason tended to be massive spods who were asking to have their pencil cases gobbed in. If this sounds gratuitously cruel, bear in mind some of them also liked The Alan Parsons Project. They deserved every bogwash.
The Wonder Stuff
A contemporary listen takes you back to Radio Ass Kiss and consistently good songwriting. It’s hard to put an accurate name to the ‘scene’ The Wonder Stuff were part of, but you didn’t fancy being lumped in with Stuffies fans, who also tended to like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and The Waterboys, and would bore you senseless quoting the unbelievably brilliant lyrics of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. You were wise to keep your distance.
Duran Duran
Okay, no one’s claiming Duran Duran were significant, but boy did they write a lot of catchy tunes. And at the time nobody was objectively appraising their music because their fanbase was entirely idiot teenage girls who did weird things like kissing their poster of the band until Nick Rhodes got soggy and his mouth fell off. And due to their pretty boy image – this was the 80s – any male pupil confessing to rather liking Please Please Tell Me Now would have been signing their own death warrant and marking it ‘URGENT’.
