It must be the general mood I’m in at the moment but among the albums I’ve been sorting through in my never-ending organisation of my music library have been (last week) Hüsker Dü and (today) Bob Mould and Sugar. I originally got into Hüsker Dü back in in my teens in the 1980s when I saw their album Warehouse: Songs and Stories (so that must have made it 1987 when I was living in London). As I got hold of their earlier albums – Zen Arcade, New Day Rising and Candy Apple Grey – to my dismay I found that the band had split up. I remember seeing a copy of Melody Maker or NME not long after that with Bob Mould in a series of atmospheric black and white photographs promoting his new solo album, Workbook. The photos had that late 1980s/early 1990s styling that I found pretty influential at the time: a moody, austere Victoriana that evokes a sense of melancholic nostalgia for the present.
Workbook was an album that had a tremendous impact on me and I’ve been a fan of Mould’s ever since, finding that I seem to reflect the emotional journey he’s been charting in his music (albeit about 10 years later). Equally, Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü band, Sugar, has been on my playlists for – wow! – 25+ years. I remember being in a party in the back of a house watching a drunken guy jumping over a fire in the garden when I heard Changes for the first time. In my head these are fresh albums that only just seem to have been recently released. As Mould sings in Compositions for the Young and Old: “Things used to be so simple, long time ago / Now everything is so expensive and complicated”. And, as Mould ends the same song:
I hear the weatherman
He says “it looks like rain for a while
I guess I’ll have to stay inside
Make peanut butter sandwiches and cry.