I started at college in October, 1976, and I was there for three years. It was an auspicious time for music, and I had the time and the money - a full grant was really something worth having. The new releases in 1976 alone, and the new groups that appeared, still mean something to me: the first two Graham Parker and the Rumour albums, Station to Station, the first Blondie album, the first Tom Petty album, the first Ramones album, Songs In The Key Of Life, the first Modern Lovers album, The Royal Scam…Still to come while I was an undergraduate: Clash albums, Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe, Exodus, Parallel Lines, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Rumours, the first couple of Elvis Costello albums, fifteen or twenty all-time great disco records, Aja, Marquee Moon, the first couple of Talking Heads albums, Low, One Nation Under A Groove and scores of others. I got the ones I wanted pretty much the day they were released, and played them to death. Seven or eight of the albums released in those two or three years routinely feature in One Hundred Best Albums lists. That seems like more than the period’s fair share.
Most of them were pretty loud. The ones that weren’t loud were kind of jittery and neurotic, or simply intense. But 1976 and 1977 were the punk years, and in any case I was often loud, jittery and neurotic myself. I was 19, then 20. But despite all that, the two albums I probably played the most frequently were Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees, and the first side of Hall & Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette, which, incidentally, is in my opinion the greatest, perhaps the only, one-sided album. There’s nothing on side two at all. (It’s not blank. There just wasn’t a song I ever wanted to hear again.) I didn’t think about why I loved those two records for a long time.