Brierly Hill 90210

As the 1980s draw to a close, incredible events take place that loom large in memories and have a profound effect on the world for years to come, possibly forever.

Those are grand statements to make as 22 year-old me certainly didn't see himself connected to such momentous stories. I'd moved to a different part of Cheltenham, still sharing rented accommodation. While the location and, therefore, my local pub had changed (The Bass House on Hatherly Road), nights spent drinking, clubbing and in a close relationship with chemicals remained the same.

All of this coincides with a change in music. Just 10-years earlier, synthesized sounds were hardly ever heard (apart from Kraftwerk) but now the use of electronics is pervasive in the mainstream. Others are obviously immersed in the same world of music and drugs that I was and you'll heard a musical revolution (or is it evolution?) coming out of Manchester.

Elsewhere, an FA Cup semi-final doesn't usually make global news headlines. But events at Hillsborough in Sheffield, had a profound effect on many of us and will change the way people watch football matches forever.

Further afield, with many, but certainly not all, benefiting from a more affluent society and with Reagan's 1987 speech about tearing down a wall still ringing in our ears, there is a feeling of increased optimism. It was hard to think that way at the time. Was that the optimism that comes naturally to a 22 year-old drug-fueled me? Or is it part of the natural flux and adjustment of the world?

Throughout this series, I'm continually drawn to parallels with the present. It's enough to drive you crazy but maybe a new optimism is just around the corner.

I was 21 as the year began and, since leaving school, had been buying music like crazy. That made compiling the soundtrack for the last 4 or 5 episodes very easy. But by 1988, the growth of my record collection had definitely slowed. I don't know if that's because the quality of music dipped. There was certainly a marked increase in manufactured pop in the charts.

But I also suspect a personal shift in focus; spending more time involved in drugs and alcohol than in music. Amphetamine sulphate (or speed) was my drug of choice and I saw it as bringing me out of my shell, making more of what I wanted to be. In hindsight, it probably made more of what I wasn't.

It's the start of a period of my life that I'm not particularly proud of but it certainly had a formative impact on me and where I ended up. So I refuse to be ashamed either.

As a result, some of my memories for this episode are a bit of a blur. So welcome to the hazy days of 1988.

In 1987, I moved from my parents in the sleepy Cotswold Hills into a shared, rented three-bedroom house in the sprawling metropolis of Cheltenham Spa. I wasn't earning much money but I found enough for beer, records, cigarettes, sausage & chips and watching the non-league football of Cheltenham Town.

Luckily, this coincided with a golden age of live bands playing in Cheltenham. I got to see many great concerts over the next few years. A personal highlight was meeting Attila the Stockbroker at the bar at a gig in the Pittville Pump Rooms. He kicks off our journey into 1987.

I was 19 as the year began. Technically an adult, drinking in pubs and even had my own car; a 1968 Mini Clubman estate, blue with fake wood side panels. I still lived with my parents even though my government training scheme placement had turned into a full-time job, albeit a very low paying one.

I worked alternate weeks on a night-shift until 11pm but that was OK; I listened to Janice Long and John Peel while I worked, writing down what caught my ear to buy at the weekend.

When not working, evenings were spent rehearsing with the band, down one of the local village pubs and, at weekends, Chedworth discos!

It all sounds very mundane now but, looking back, it was probably the start of one of my happiest periods as an immature young adult.

Stephen King said that, if you want to be writer you must do two things; read a lot and write a lot. The same is true with music. Any budding musician must listen to a lot of music. I'd been playing in a band for a few years but we didn't know what we were doing and weren't very good.

But, in 1985, from listening to so much new, good music, something clicked. Stripped down to just the two of us and a drum-machine, we found our own sound that we liked. Nobody else seemed to care for it much, but we really didn't care. See if you can spot where I sneak it into this episode.

I had left school in the summer of 1983, a year early and to the disappointment of many, not going onto university. Instead, I became a “Computer Room Operator” for a replacement door and window manufacturer in Cheltenham, earning the princely sum of 25-pounds a week on the Youth Training Scheme.

I was still living with my parents (apart from a brief period of roughing it in an old farm-house) and 25-pounds seemed like a fortune. I was absorbing new music like a sponge and could have spent nearly all of my income on records and beer each week. And I did.

The episode kicks-off with the music that, at 10pm Monday through Thursday, signaled the start of the John Peel show on Radio 1. Pickin' the Blues by Grinderswitch. I had started listening to Peel's show the year before and absolutely loved the Festive Fifty at Christmas time, when listeners voted for their favorite songs of the year. There was so much good music delivered in a way that I'd never heard before. It was raw, heart-felt and, above all else, really good music.

I was an avid listener as 1983 began, 16-years old and still too young-looking to get served in pubs. I'd stayed on at school with the intention of completing some A-levels and heading off to college. But by January of 1983, that plan was already looking a little iffy. I was starting to drift and loose focus... except on what was in this week's NME and what John Peel would be playing tonight.

1982 was a significant year for me musically because it was when I started listening to the John Peel radio show and broadened my musical horizons. I'd been listening to late night radio for a while, with head and radio under the covers so that my parents couldn't hear. I'd tried Peel's Radio 1 show a year or two earlier but found it too frightening! I preferred the satirical humor and radio theatre of Radio 2 and Radio 4.

But in 1982 I realized what a terrible mistake I'd made and the likes of the Farmers Boys, The Higsons and the Cocteau Twins were to be cherished, not to be scared of. But in compiling this episode, I realize, sure... that's when it started. But it was the discovery of the Festive Fifty at Christmas time (when Peel's listeners voted for their favorite tracks of the year) that really captured my imagination. That set-up 1983 for a glorious year of musical discovery.

But it all starts here, in that transition year of 1982. Out with the old and in the with new.

In some ways, 1981 was the last year of my childhood as, aged 15, I started 5th form. It was the last year of school for some of my friends. They would be going out to the real world while, though I didn't know it at the time, I had only one more year of education to go. 1981 was also the last year when my world of music was centered almost exclusively on what was in the charts. A group of us started keeping a tally of the records we played at home and totaled them into our own chart each week. Madness was number one most weeks.

Meanwhile, outside of our sheltered little Cotswold world, the hunt is on for the Yorkshire Ripper, royal watchers have a new darling in Lady Diana Spencer and it's going to be a pivotal year for race-relationships in the UK. Welcome to the real world. Welcome to 1981.

There's a statistic about how the music you like when you're 13 will stay with you for the rest of your life. It was certainly a key age in my life and musical journey.

As a teenager in the Gloucestershire countryside, financial opportunities were few and far between. The only way to indulge my fledgling love of music was to buy a handful of 7” singles a year with money saved up from birthdays and Christmas. The cheaper alternative was to record songs to cassette tape from the radio. The Sunday night chart show was essential listening, with finger poised over the record button should something good come on, hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over it. That would have been Tony Blackburn in 1980. Or, if you were lucky enough to have a whole tape spare, you'd record the entire show and pour over it afterwards.

Music was a valued distraction from the the Yorkshire Ripper, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and “the troubles” in Ireland that seemed to take up most of the time on grown-up TV. Meanwhile I was still trying find something to fill that last 3-minutes of side 1 on my latest C-60 cassette tape.