The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 12/04/11
Roxy Music - "Street Life"
Rather frustratingly, one or two tracks which I've wanted to feature here from the period 1970 to 1973 will have to remain unregarded because I've either been unable to find any video relating to them, or what video I have unearthed has been a different version or simply not very good.
So we lurch over to late 1973, and what I think was the first real rock single that I ever bought.
I'd had virtually nothing to do with rock music (or, to give it my father's technical term, "That bloody noise!") because my parents were of a much older generation altogether. So, it was very mainstream pop, novelty songs and The Light Programme (later Radio Two) in our house.
Then my elder brother moved back in with us, bringing his collection of rock LPs along with a sizeable, matter-of-fact hi-fi to play them on (shows how long ago this was - it had an eight-track player).
I still didn't warm to much of it - it tended to be far too loud for my tastes - but over the following months my horizons were gradually but surely expanded.
It was early on in this period that this track emerged. I'm not quite sure at this distance quite why I took to it, but I did to the point of buying a copy of it from either Padgett's ("The Disc Shop"), tucked away behind the carpet stall in Wrexham's wonderful old market hall (destroyed in the next decade by avaricious developers and bent council officers); or from Crane's, the rather intimidatorily posh music shop on the corner of Duke Street and Regent Street.
Street Life was the lead track on Roxy Music's LP Stranded which was their first without the presence of the later-to-be-ubiquitous Brian Eno, and reached Number 9 ("Number 9, Number 9, Num..." erm, sorry, wrong band) around the turn of 1973-74.
