When I was a teenager I wanted nothing more than to present an album no one else had or knew about. While I was embracing the very mainstream Deep Purple records, I searched for something more obscure that would set me aside as a very knowledgeable hip cat.
At first I thought early Uriah Heep albums might do the trick. They were recorded five or six years previously which seemed a long time ago when you’re 15. But their most famous track Gypsy was on the debut album so that didn’t quite work.
Then I thought Mahogany Rush might lift me up in the eyes of my peers. But my pal Russell had got in early on them and had imported stuff which was brought in to play at lunchtime.
I briefly considered Manfred Mann’s Third Chapter as a candidate but backed out of it because he was too associated with 60s music we’d grown up with.
I searched the racks. Trouble was rock music was, at this time, a collective endeavour. We all listened to the same albums, often at the same time round someone’s house. So you had to really try hard to unearth something heavy enough to be ‘serious’ but obscure enough to get you credibility points.
The record that saw me briefly top the ‘have you heard?’ stakes was purchased from Alan Fearnley’s second hand. I had read about the band but hadn’t heard them but I trusted my NME book of rock, so when I saw a now rare UK first pressing (now worth over £100) of Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer for £1.00, I knew it had a heavy version of Summertime Blues on and that it had been a hit in America.
It did the trick, obscure enough to be hip but with a hit on. I was the first to have a Blue Cheer album or to even know anything about them, plus that record is hugely loud and amplified. You can hear everything was on 10 and such things mattered at that age.
Subsequent records were never as earthshattering as their debut and my hipness was soon overtaken by a lad who’s got hold of an obscure record, the debut by Help Yourself on Liberty, which I jealously coveted. Anything Man-related was to be greatly desired. So I wasn’t king of the albums for long and I soon stopped troubling myself with such silly notions and realised there’s always someone with a more rare obscure record than you and it’s true today as it was back then. I wish I still had that UK first pressing.
