Blondie's Parallel Lines: Teenage Kicks Retro Style

Charity shops can be hit or miss for records, amongst the endless boxes of Val Doonican and Vera Lynn I come accross the odd album that could find a home in my record collection.

It's not all fun and games, I once unearthed a cover for a rare Hawkwind album with nothing inside.  I checked every other record cover there in case it was in the wrong sleeve.  I turned the shop damn near inside out looking for it, I then returned a few weeks later and went through the whole process again.  I never did find that record.

I did get a copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines, which is a great album by the way, for just 99p in the local Barnados though.  There is a cool documentary called Blondie's New York... and the Making of Parallel Lines, explaining how this LP captured a little bit of Zeitgeist of New York, carving new territory in the punk and disco worlds which had little respect for each other.

My copy came with it's own little bit of history.  Inside the sleeve I found several sheets of lined A4 - some darling from a bygone decade had written the lyrics for each track out carefully and placed them inside.  With the album released in 1978, the creater of my home made lyric sheet was not doing anything that I had not done myself 20 years later in the 90s.

I got a sudden flood of memories, from stopping Eternal's Just a Step from Heaven at the end of every line to write down the lyrics, to listening to the Top 40 on Atlantic 252 with my left and right index fingers carefully poised over the 'record' and 'play' buttons on the tape deck to try and get the songs whilst editing out the DJs voice.

I guess listening to music in your bedroom, feeling like the lyrics could have been written exclusively to suit your particular adolescent gripe at that time, is a quintessential teenage experience.

After breaking up with a childhood sweetheart, a friend of mine bought me Cher's Believe from Woolworths, because quite naturally my world had ended.  I played it over and over and over, then a week later with my world miraculously reformed, I got a new boyfriend and played Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses incessantly, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the house.

Check out the below inner sleeve from my copy of Deep Purple's 24 Carat Purple, where another youngster has graffitti'd the names of his favourite bands.  I particularly like that Led Zeppelin has fallen out of favour at some point and been crossed out with the word 'pants' scrawled underneath - ah the fickleness of youth!