In The Beginning When I were a wee lad I had a personal stereo. That’s a tape cassette player running on AA batteries. I loved it. It was great, though it would be many years before I could afford a real WalkMan. Then I had a MiniDisc player - I missed out portable CD players completely - and a while later I owned a few iPods. Then, like a lot of other people, I just put a few albums on my phone, and then, well, thought ’let’s just stream!' ...
Since my ‘youth’ I’ve listened to the music, spoken word and read books written by ‘punk’ vocalist Henry Rollins. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. For his Black Flag days, I’d go and listen to their ‘Damaged’ album if you just want to sample one. For his spoken word, I’d say ‘Boxed Life (1992)’ is best, but him reading his own book ‘Get in the Van’ is also excellent. The book itself is very well written, with some excellent illustrations by punk artist ‘Raymond Pettibon’. Notably the book contains some of the gorier things he saw on tour with Black Flag which are missing from the double-CD spoken edition. ...