The JaM Sessions find my friend Jon and I listening to vinyl, eating snacks, drinking wine / beer, reminiscing about life growing up in the Midlands and contemplating the major issues du jour.

At our May meeting, we found ourselves talking about Jim Reeves’ Distant Drums (RCA Victor, 1966). While flicking through LPs to take to Jon’s, I came upon a copy of this on my desk and couldn’t fathom where it had come from. Finally, I realised that it had been one of two old LPs that had been used to pad out a copy of a Disney themes album that my eldest daughter had bought. That became the first album we listened to this time around. The album was produced by Chet Atkins, and the shiny LP sleeve smelled of charity shops. ‘Distant Drums’ is a brilliant song, incidentally.

Next up was The Real Glenn Miller Orchestra’s Play The Original Music Of The Film ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ (RCA International reissue, 1971). I watched The Glenn Miller Story recently and have had some of Miller’s big band melodies swirling around my head ever since, so it was a useful way of scratching that itch. Both of us wondered whereabouts in America Kalamazoo is, but neither of us were ‘In The Mood’ to Google it.

Jon and I became mindful at this point that we should probably bring things up to date a little more before we ended up succumbing to an entire of easy listening. For both of us, ‘up to date’ is shorthand for the 1980s. Jon suggested The Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (Go-Feet, 1980). This found its way onto Jon’s turntable after a conversation about my youngest daughter going to see The Beat and Bow Wow Wow at The Roadmender in Northampton earlier in the week. Neither Jon nor I have seen either band; my 15 year old daughter has.

Staying resolutely in the 1980s, we concluded the evening with a spin of a very crackly copy of Thompson Twins’ Quick Step & Side Kick (Arista, 1983), which I’d bought from the Oxfam in Aylesbury recently. We spent most of the time pondering precisely what it was that recording at Compass Point – as the Twins did for this album – brought to the sessions.

In a departure from our previous focus on snacks that can be dipped into various flavours of houmous, Jon rustled up two very fine vegan salads. Major topics of discussion included his son’s diary entry about eating sushi for the first time, coups, the breakdown of Keynesian economic theory and Les Patterson’s fabled appearance on Parkinson sat next to a cringing Martine McCutcheon.

(c) 2023 Further.