What’s your most embarrassing album or single? It has surely happened to us all. A chronic misjudgement of a moment and it’s there. You are happy with your buy at the time but then as years drag on it sits like a sore thumb in your precious collection.
Twas the summer of 1987, music was just dire then and Def Leppard released the enormous hit of an album Pyromania… I wince at the thought. Their drummer had just lost his arm in an accident and whilst he recovered they had a drum kit made he could operate with one hand.
They found time on their hands. Too much time. All obviously loved up, the album oozed over-produced AOR with tragically awful lyrics on the dreaded subject of love. Yuk. The album pumped out hit after hit of what my hero Jello Biafra called “sugar coated swill”. Sickly romantic lyrics like “Love bites, love bleeds, it’s bringing me to my knees” I guess resonated with me because I was 21 and falling in love. And that’s it. It is of its time, generally in your naive past in a vulnerable mental state, when a song captures a moment and no matter how shite, you buy it.
It still sits in my collection.
It always makes me laugh as my friend Adam also fell for the Def Leppard trap. We were both a couple of punk indie hipsters, disciples of The Clash and The Ramones but for some reason we both ended up with it. I am slightly more of a twat than him in that my girlfriend at the time ruined it, probably maliciously. She was a bright girl and I shamefully made her replace it..
I bumped into Adam at a wedding a few years ago and reminded him of our foolishness, my prompting of this sad memory was clearly one he wished to forget.
Chris Harris
Lewes CFC fanzine 