Music Arcades: Galaxie 500: This is Our Music

Now here's an album, from just a handful of years after Famous Blue Raincoat, that really does sound magnificent on your hi-fi. When I moved into my new house in 1999, I realised it wasn't just the hardware that affected the quality of the sound. Suddenly I had a significantly bigger, acoustically 'clean' room where all my music sounded better. And it was a detached house, so I could crank it up.

I found it was especially fun to crank it up at the start of this album, because of the long, long fade in, where you start to think "hey, that's quite loud now" and yet it keeps getting louder, and louder. Later that year I invited some friends back late at night to continue a drinking session, and put this on right at the start. Jo M said, "Hey, Galaxie 500!". That was only the first or second time we'd met, but we've been friends ever since.

This is Our Music also sounds great on a cheap in-car cassette system with slightly broken speakers. That's where I listened to it most, with the cassette on a continuous loop, playing this and Today, one after the other, after the other. It's all one song!

Despite those tens or hundreds of listens, the car journey that I always remember when I play this album is the one I made with Caroline up to Northumberland in mid-November 1990. Somehow I had missed the release of Galaxie 500's second album, On Fire — no RSS feeds or automated search alerts then — but I'd seen this one reviewed and bought it as soon as I could. It's the cardboard gatefold version, £11.99 from the Warp shop on Division Street in Sheffield. C and I had been to see Galaxie 500 at the Leadmill the weekend before. (I wish I could remember more of that show, but I think we were at the stage of paying too much attention to each other.) So I recorded the new album onto tape to give us something to listen to in the hire car for that trip, and maybe we only played it twice during those 48 hours, but some of the songs take me straight back to that cold but beautiful northern landscape.

It's wonderful from start to finish to start again.