Passionate bright young things…
Well that’s possibly one of the few headlines where you’re not going to guess the story…so here it is…
The August issue of
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I’ve spent my whole life hanging round record shops dreaming up ways to get more music than I’ve ever been able to afford. At nine, I was using a ruler and a sewing needle to create authentic scratches on records I’d cassette-taped, then taking them back to get more.
There’s only one force in the known universe that’s ever been able to stop me – my mum. Buying Aladdin Sane on its day of release, I took it home to play it on the front-room family radiogram: the only record-player we had. The whole family sits down to their egg and chips at tea. “Not a patch on Johnny Cash,” says my dad. “He should eat something,” says my nan on inspection of the cover. And then we get to the track Time and the line “falls wanking to the floor”. The room goes silent but for the chink of fork on plate. “You can take that back”, says my mum quietly.
Thirty years later, standing at the counter of King Bee Records in Manchester, I look on as another mum comes in and explains she’d like to return her son’s Eminem due to the “choice language”. Owner Les politely obliges. The woman leaves with a refund. He opens the CD to find a Daniel O’Donnell disc inside. The kid had cannily switched it. “The woman’s over there at the bus stop, you can catch her,” I say. “No,” says Les, “he’s done well.”
Thirty years too late, the penny drops. I could have kept Aladdin Sane and put a Mrs Mills LP in the cover. – JOHN McCREADY
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I have to agree, that as excited as we all were by the naughty word on Time, I bet I’m not the only one who used to turn the volume down at that point if mum was around.
Finally, the picture above has absolutely nothing to do with the caption beneath it. It’s actually just one shot from one of the brilliant photo sessions in the upcoming
Stay tuned for some more exclusive previews from Lemon #4 next month.