This much was true, I had recently began my musical journey and this was an apt description of the music I was listening to; The Beatles, Blur, Smashing Pumpkins and very little else. My friend's statement stuck with me through all of these years.
I would be 19 before I finally did something about it. I used to go into a shop in Liverpool to buy Smashing Pumpkins bootlegs (religiously), and one day I decided to see what else they had. It was then. That I stumbled across a track that I hadn't heard for a couple of years, a track that actually predated my love of music. This track:
It was that track, and it's b-side (Sister Janet), which turned me on to her music, and I remember at the time, I was playing that, Radiohead's My Iron Lung EP and 13 by Blur constantly. At the time, though, I didn't buy any of her albums ... Not for another six months.
Come September, I remember buying the NME (which was common, when I had been paid), on a Friday afternoon in Manchester. On the way home, there was a full page spread for her new album To Venus and Back. I still have the magazine in storage. I shall hunt it out sometime. That was the first album that I bought of Tori Amos, and over the next couple of weeks, I bought them all. They've been with me ever since, wherever I have been.
There was a guy called Mike who worked in said shop, and he was my supplier. Such treasures he found me, unable to resist a young man with a new cash flow every weekend. It was he who suggested to me that I try Kate Bush, if I liked Tori Amos. So I did. Where to start? Why, at the beginning.
Immediately, I was hooked. I went and bought the Bush back catalogue even faster than i had purchased the Amos discs. That was the start of a long and interesting journey; the discovery of a multitude of powerful female singer-songwriters, so that one day, I would run into my old school friend and tell him to EAT CROW!
-Joe
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