4.
Colourbox – Colourbox
That album is the only decent thing they’ve ever done [laughs]. I can remember being a kid, with that Colourbox album, in the days you’d listen to things on just a little Walkman. That tape would just be going round and fucking round, and I can remember the books I was reading at the time, the whole atmosphere of it. It’s a pure association thing. It’s amazing how much these things tickle your synapses, and all sorts of memories and feelings come out from the periods you listen to these things.
I very much remember the tape, it had Colourbox on one side, and Prince’s 1999 on the other side, which almost made it onto my list, but it’s slightly inconsistent for me. The tape was made for me by my older brother. I should probably have put these albums in chronological order, we would have had a more sensible conversational flow! But my older brother was a big musical influence on me, he’s thirteen years older, and used to play guitar and had loads of dub records, he got me into all the On U Sound stuff. I used to love sitting in his room and listening to him playing guitar and sticking records on, and was always fascinated by the various things he was into. This was one of the many tapes he made me, and it was one of the few albums that I can honestly say that from the age of about ten years old, right through to now, I’ve consistently liked and enjoyed. It’s kind of like dub crossed with electro in places, and some of it was quite experimental at the time. Some of it probably sounds quite cheesy in a way, but if you have all the assocations I do with those tracks, they’re so joyful and strange. I don’t actually know a huge amount about them.
I lost the tape, and I remember spending about two years trying to track down this fucking Colourbox album, and I had to get the shop to order it for me. And the annoying thing is that they’ve only got a couple of albums, but they’re both called Colourbox – Colourbox, and one’s great and one’s fucking shit [laughs], and I accidentally ordered the shit one. I was just gutted, I was like ‘what’s going on here?’ You can’t imagine the misery. You get the bus into town, you put in this order, you wait two weeks, you go back in again – all this time, effort, preparation – then I got the album, but I’d never even seen the cover so I didn’t know it was the wrong one. So then I got home, stuck it in the CD player, and it was like ‘What the fuck is this shit!?’ It wasn’t until about six years ago that I decided to see if it’d pop up online and it did, and I got hold of it again.
