Quite soon I will stop with the Norwich bands. Well, I won’t actually stop, but they are going to live in a new online home… not with monkeys. This has to be one of my favourite singles of all-time. I love everything about it. I got it for my birthday from Cuz, aged 14. It came in a brown paper bag on which he had meticulously copied the sleeve. So many record sleeves to copy, so little time. Little wonder we both ended up at art school, eh?

We used to spend a fair amount of time painting the flaps of those canvas army surplus rucksacks everyone had as school bags in the Eighties. I was quite proficient and vaguely recall taking on a commission or two. My bag of choice for everyday use featured the cover of Altered Images’ ‘See Those Eyes’, and I also had a Genesis bag too. Can’t quite remember which cover, or why.

The Higsons then. By the time we were wandering from the well-beaten track of the UEA LCR and heading for the bright lights of Norwich city centre, The Higsons were very much on the up. We were regulars at The Jacquard, The Gala and the Theatre Royal’s studio round the back of M&S as well as the Arts Centre. I vaguely recall the UEA Barn being good too.

I didn’t see The Higsons live all that much. I can remember seeing them at Pennies on Edward Street once, and I think, but I’m not totally sure, we were at The Jacquard when the ‘Live At The Jacquard’ tape-only release was recorded in February 1982. I still have the tape at least.

If The Higsons were any kind recommendation for soul music, you could have signed me up there and then. They seemed effortlessly cool, being a UEA band they weren’t Norfolk boys and as such they seemed all the more exotic. In our little world, they seemed enormously famous. And of course, Switch, or Charlie Higson, did go on to be exactly that. Enormously famous.

I think the thrill of The Higsons was seeing all that brass on stage. The bands we were used to were all guitars and drum kits, but here was something new. I’d seen trumpets and trombones before, but they made a horrible noise played by spotted orchestra girls at school. Alex James in his very readable book about himself mentions something or other about being at close quarters with a trumpet and how it’s just the loudest instrument in the world, ever. It is, but blimey, what a great noise in the right hands, and The Higsons were the right hands.

Later in life, I made frequent beelines for the Super Furry Animals live. Hard life, but it was my job, and the Furries were a stonkingly good live band. They often reminded me of The Higsons, especially when their brass section would wander onstage for tracks like ‘Demons’. The Higsons never went for fancy dress like SFA, not many did really, which is a shame.

Somewhere, some time, in between the two, I got involved with another fine Norwich band called Basti who also understood the power of a decent brass instrument. But that’s a whole other story. Another time eh?

See, we made good with our promise about moving on from 1982. Admittedly we’ve only managed 1981, but it’s a start. Formed in 1980, the Edinburgh four-piece burned so brightly that they were all shagged out by the end of 1981, leaving behind them just three singles, and the fabulous ‘Lubricate Your Living Room’ long one.

‘Candy Skin’, pictured here in full-colour MP3, was their second single and was filed in the very top drawer, the one mark ‘joyous, exuberant racket’. It remains, in our very humble opinion, a pop classic, sounding as fresh now as it did nearly 30 years (gulp) ago.

What it also did all those years was light a musical torch for mainman Davy Henderson. We didn’t stumble across him again until 1988-ish when a visiting lecturer gave a talk about documentary making and showed a pop video she’d made earlier. The band were called Win (check out this super impressive history) and they sounded strangely familiar. Yup, turns out they were one half of the Fire Engines, the Davy Henderson half.

Turns out that they were the same half who somewhere in the late nineties we went on to love again as The Nectarine No.9. But that, as you will probably learn as we continue to stroll down our vinyl path, is a story for another time.

Download lowdown…
- Look, we know we said the point of this ‘ere site is amazing music you can’t get on download, but sometimes you might just have to indulge us. By crikey eMusic, here’s the lot on download. Amazing stuff.
- There’s also some stuff to listen to on the jolly nice last.fm.
- And then there’s the stuff that you can hold in real life – 2005′s ‘Codex Teenage Premonition’ compile that collects together demos and the like and 2007′s ‘Hungry Beat’, which is essentially Rev-Ola’s long-deleted ‘Fond’ CD by another name.