Galaxie 500: Today

Just sublime. One of the albums I've listened to most in my life, and it still sounds magnificent. It was John Peel playing Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste that got me started. I loved it straight away. It reminded me of Neil Young at a time (1988) when Neil's reputation was still on the skids prior to his rehabilitation. I saw the album in FON records ("£12.99, USA import" says the sticker), and gradually fell in love with it over the coming months and years.

It sounds simple at first, but there are always new things to be heard. After a year or two I began to see Galaxie 500 as the perfect triangulation of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Velvet Underground and Joy Division (Naomi freely admits Hooky's influence on her bass playing, and who cares if she never uses the E-string?). Which is a damn fine recipe. However, after a decade or two, I think Galaxie 500 are better than that. There's a twist of hard bop jazz in there, even though they never play anything jazzy.

Much credit must also go to Kramer for his production. I think he found the band that was perfectly matched to his skills (and, after they split, went looking for other bands that were similar — hence his work with Low — though this is all my idle speculation and not unconnected to any facts I can cite). Somewhere, I think it's in the boxed set notes, Naomi remembers getting the tapes back from their early recordings and being overwhelmed by how their sketchy songs had been transformed into things of such beauty.

Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste has held me in its tide like the moon. Remember I bought two Modern Lovers' albums (1, 2) to get hold of all the other recorded versions I could find of this song — if anyone tells me of others (apart from the Modern Lovers' Live at the Long Branch), I'll buy them too. Yet it was probably a decade before I worked out what the line about "bleed in sympathy with you" was referring to, and about as long before I could even make out the line about "your dating-bar ways". This was before you could look up the words online.

Not that it everything hinges on that track. As I type I'm listening to Instrumental, another favourite, great to drive to. In fact, that's why (even though I don't drive much, especially in recent years) I've listened to Today so much. It was when I drove to and from Kate and Simon's wedding in 1991, a 200 mile round trip down and up the A1, that it really hit me how great Galaxie 500 were to drive to. I had a tape with Today on one side and This is Our Music on the other, and I used to have it on continuous loop in the old Astra. After the split with M in 1999, I made a resolution that I was going to play nothing but that tape in the car until the point where I started another relationship. I pretty much stuck to that too, with one exception: when driving Tim down to Gatwick for our Barcelona trip in December '99, I thought over three hours of continuous G500 was a bit much to inflict on him, so he got away with just one play-through.

Whenever DLOYGTW came on I'd turn it right up to get the full power of the bass drum that opens the track. Of course this pleasure was short-lived, as before long the bass response of the speakers was blown, and you could hear their sinews crackling as they struggled to reproduce the sound.

MusicBrainz entry for this album