2. Island samplerNice Enough To Eat
Back then you only had about four albums because you couldn’t afford them and you were absolutely broke. Samplers meant a lot then. I think was one of the first albums I actually bought and I only bought it because it was so cheap. It was only 14 shillings, which was half the price of an album.
You just had to listen to every track on it because they were all you had. So I was forced to listen to Traffic, Nick Drake, Jethro Tull, Traffic and Mott The Hoople. It did introduce me to the label Island and from that day on I followed what they released and the label. And The Slits went on to stalk Island Records and insist they took our record. We had lots of labels wanting to put us out but we weren’t interested. We wanted a really good label with a really good stable. And it started back then, for me, following what they did and their output with The Wailers and everything, by buying that sampler, which was incredibly important to me.
I saw the record in Oxfam the other day and honestly it was like seeing an old friend. That blue cover with all the scattered writing across it, it was coming across someone from my past. But even though the prog-rock and the folk-rock and everything on it wasn’t necessarily my thing, I got to love the songs. The ones I liked were Mott The Hoople, King Crimson, Nick Drake; they were the ones that really stood out. Good songs, I’ve always been into a song. Some of them were absolutely stupid, Spooky Tooth and stuff like that. But it didn’t matter, I listened to them all anyway. It’s all I had. I felt quite moved when I saw it there in the shop, it brought back so much.
