18:

Saxon. Oh, I wish it wasn't them, really. Although, having said that it could have been a lot worse. They were - still are, it seems - a decent, hard working bunch of lads from Yorkshire who liked their music loud. Bloody loud. And early 1980, this was the next new thing - the (ahem) New Wave of British Heavy Metal. I thought it might be a passing phase, something which captured my interest for a few months like everything else I had liked up to then, but this one stuck. Maye it says something about me at the time - leaving home, fending for myself in the big city, being forced to grow up - I seemed to take refuge in a kind of music which, while viscerally enjoyable, was a long way from the more thoughtful stuff I used to like. It's a long way even from the recent punk and new wave music which could be just as noisy and obstreperous. For some time afterwards, I pretended to myself that this phase hadn't really happened, and recently some of it has become fashionable in a kind of post-modern, ironic sort of way. And of course, as with any genre of popular music, there are those for whom it has never been away.

So why Saxon, particularly? Because they were the first. The first band I grabbed at when my friends started liking this stuff - pretty much at random, I think; and the first band I ever saw in concert. So they have to be here. And I remember the noise and the mayhem, the heat and the sweat; and I remember thinking I had never experienced anything like this, and I wanted more. Like I say, visceral. And, no - I'm not really embarassed, it's just who I was back then. I might even go and listen to some - for old times' sake...