A festive mood descended on Jon’s and my last evening of vinyl and vino for 2023, beginning with the impossibly groovy Moog Party Time LP (1972) that Jon had secured at Woburn’s market the week before. A post-JaM Session text conversation with my friend Bryan led to the acquisition of The Moog Machine’s Christmas Goes Electric LP (1969) from Discogs, so next year’s final JaM Session looks set to be wild.
From Moogs to Men At Work and their 1982 album Business As Usual, then onwards like an out-of-control sleigh ride to Frank Sinatra’s A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra (1957). Old Blue Eyes’s version of ‘Jingle Bells’ is, to this writer, nothing short of perfection.
Dexter Gordon’s Go! (1962), with its seminal opening cut ‘Cheese Cake’, took things in a hard bop direction, and we concluded the night with Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You (1963).
Conversation topics included sandwich thievery, Jon’s experiences of working at a Royal Mail sorting office as a student, and the disappointing fact that Milton Keynes is not named after economics titans Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes but rather the medieval village that was swallowed up by MK’s creation. Breadsticks, pitta, olives and a Christmas Eve hangover’s worth of red wine provided the snack and drink accompaniment.
The eagle-eyed will note that the write up of JaM Session VII is missing. This is because I forgot to write that one up and can no longer remember what we played – but it definitely included Supertramp’s Breakfast In America from 1979 and an album of New Age electronic music that I’ll be writing about here in 2024.
My monthly musical meetings with my friend Jon continued in September with albums from OMD, Van Morrison, The Mamas And The Papas and Huey Lewis & The News. The vintage RCA Victor centre labels on my mum’s copy of Deliver by The Mamas And The Papas were regarded as classic, whereas the sleeve for Fore! by Huey Lewis was definitely not.
Conversation topics included RAAC, our respective Californian driving experiences and a return to the topic of the ineffectiveness of Keynesian economics in 2023.
The wine was Waitrose’s cheapest red, which we concluded was not as good as Tesco’s cheapest red, despite being double the price.
Olives, breadsticks and houmous were September’s snack selections.
In a break with tradition, Jon and I decided to accompany our vinyl listening evening with a takeaway curry instead of our usual pan-cultural snack assortment. Fine Indian cuisine was provided by The Woburn Fort in Woburn Sands and we ducked in to The Gapevine for a drink while they prepared the food.
We left The Grapevine as a crooner picked up a microphone and began, er, serenading the customers. Any temptation to hang around and listen to him presumably belting out big band hits by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett (may he rest in peace) over a tinny karaoke backing track was swiftly overridden – after all, there was serious LP listening business to attend to.
The evening’s listening began with The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (RCA, 1972) by Davie Bowie. Little else needs saying about this album, so instead of analysing its myriad highlights, I told Jon the story of how my former boss Antony once had a private dinner with Bowie at Montreux.
Next up was Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield (Virgin, 1973). This LP used to belong to my mum, who bought this when she moved from Scotland to Stratford-upon-Avon, not long before she met my dad in the pub she worked at. I only have affection for Tubular Bells, and I was absolutely obsessed with this LP as a small child. I used to pull all my parents’ albums out of the rack where they stored and pore over them for ages. This was one I studied intently, hoping that one day the mystery of what exactly a ‘nasal choir’ was would solve itself.
The evening being somewhat curtailed by me needing to go and pick up my eldest daughter from work, we managed one more LP before I left – The Shadows’ 20 Golden Greats (EMI, 1977). This LP used to belong to my dad, and was another sleeve I absolutely loved. Playing the album was accompanied by Jon attempting to copy The Shadows’ dance moves, and concluded with us deciding that while they had some pretty brilliant tunes (‘Foot Tapper’ was called out specifically), twenty of them played back-to-back was a little much. A bit like overeating Indian takeaway, maybe…
Our conversation included a brief discussion of Taylor Swift and the Speak Now snafu involving an album including tracks by Cabaret Voltaire and Matthew Herbert finding their way into certain sleeves of Ms Swift’s latest re-recorded release. The night before, coincidentally, I’d spoken to Mal from the Cabs. This may be apocryphal, but Mal had heard that this was a deliberate act of sabotage by disgruntled pressing plant staff annoyed at a statistic that four out of five vinyl albums are bought by people without record players. I find this specific statistic amusing, because four out of five references to music in a typical conversation are about Taylor Swift*.
We also spoke of the sad death of postal orders, Jon’s appearance on Pebble Mill, pre-Amazon mail order shopping, fishing, Milton Keynes’ new four bin household waste solution, and domestic chores.
The highlight of the evening was a duet between Jon playing a harmonica and his faithful canine sidekick Chester howling along in time like a tortured blues singer. Recorded evidence will follow after our sixth JaM Session.
* This statistic may not be accurate, but it certainly appears to be correct based on my own recent monocultural household experiences.
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.
Another evening of vinyl, vino, beer, snacks (a very nice baba ganoush, samosas from Leighton Buzzard market and Italian garlic tomato bread) and conversation with my friend Jon (and Chester, pictured – clearly not a fan of Dark Side Of The Moon).
Our exclusively vinyl playlist for the evening is below.
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms (Vertigo, 1985)
Jean-Michel Jarre – Les Chants Magnétiques / Magnetic Fields (Polydor, 1981)
Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon (Harvest, 1973)
The evening of Saturday February 25 saw the inaugural monthly JaM Session* : my good friend Jon and I meeting up to listen to records, drink wine and beer, eat snacks and talk about the super important stuff that two middle-aged blokes talk about (family, travel, work, music, coffee, IKEA).
Further. 
You must be logged in to post a comment.