1. The PassionsThirty Thousand Feet Over China
I didn’t get a record player until I was a bit older. I would have had this on cassette and you can’t really skip tracks on a cassette player, so I think this was probably an early journey into that idea where your entry point is a number one hit and then you’re listening to a bunch of other tracks that you don’t know anything about. [Barbara Gogan’s] got what now feels like quite a conventional voice. It’s got a breathy, slightly indie-ish bit to it. It does launch into a bit of a powerful transition at certain points, but in a funny way I think a lot of the familiarity with that sort of voice has come later. Maybe it was quite unusual, even for its time. Maybe that’s what helped it make it a Number One.
I think what I like about it is that I just didn’t know anything about them. There’s a lot of music I got into because as a teenager you latch on to that fandom of thinking that people are cool, or liking music because you like the image of a band, but actually there’s something slightly pure about what I think about The Passions. They came out of nowhere, had a Number One and then pretty much vanished. The fact that I can still listen to this record and think it’s really great is quite testament to the music on it because it doesn’t really have any associations with anything else for me.
