Pepper Penny - Ruth and Martins Album Club

Martin Fitzgerald has spent most of his life daydreaming about music and has drawn the following conclusions:

Nicos pronunciation of the word Clown is the worst thing to have happened in the 1960s

Bryan Ferrys dad seems like a lovely man

The only good songs about cars were written by The Beach Boys

The plot of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight by The Jam makes no sense at all

Therell never be a musician with a better name than Fab Moretti

Martin Fitzgerald was born in London and currently lives in a convent in Nottingham.

With special thanks to:

Andy McCrorie-Shand

John Moore

Paul Roberts

Harinder Singh

Stephen Wall

Chris York

This book is for my mum, who never once told me to
turn that racket off!

Dear Reader,

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Towards the end of 2014, I finally signed up for a Spotify account and suddenly, in my house, I had access to the biggest record collection in the world. I no longer had to make choices and carefully consider which albums I should buy or where I would put them in an alcove of shelving that was already straining under the weight of previous purchases.

I could listen to anything all via a tiny device that I held in my hand.

So, with the world at my fingertips, I obviously chose to listen to Cassadaga by Bright Eyes.

Bright Eyes had long been a blind spot for me and whenever I thought about rectifying this it seemed I was trying to catch up with something that had long since passed. Loads of my friends loved them, indeed swore by them, and that level of devotion intrigued me. Yet Id opted out and decided that my life could do without this ultra-cool American band that made at least seven people I knew giddy.

Until I pressed play on an iPad while I was in bed.

Fast forward three weeks and Im now the most enthusiastic Bright Eyes fan of 2014. So much so that Im angry at the people, the so-called friends, who have let me wait so long to discover them. I approach Ruth, the most enthusiastic Bright Eyes fan I knew in 2004, and berate her for leaving me in this position:

Ruth, why didnt you just sit me down ten years ago and make me listen to them?!

And thats how it started.

Initially Ruth and I were just going to make each other listen to albums that wed both missed and then have a coffee at work every Wednesday to discuss our findings. Then we thought wed document it and, about twenty-three minutes later, we had an online blog called Ruth and Martins Album Club .

The final piece of the jigsaw was when Ruth said, No one really cares about us, lets get a guest each week and make them listen to albums instead. She then went further and decided that I was going to do all the work while she offered encouragement in between drinking gin and listening to Bruce Springsteen.

What started out as a small project between friends and some journalists we knew then took on a life of its own. Before long we were inundated with emails from a whole bunch of people who had found us online and wanted to be forced to listen to albums. We never actually met any of them, wed just send a list of albums by email and ask them to pick one. In the case of Ian Rankin, I think I sent him about forty-seven emails because hes genuinely heard everything apart from Madonnas debut.

In the main, the guests were people who were famous for other things but had a passion for music that their writing hadnt found an outlet for. Without planning it, that became an important factor for us we were always keen not to be taken over by music journalists or become part of music journalism. We advised all guests to be personal in their writing and provide us with their own specific take on an album and their reasons for having avoided it. We werent interested in reviews from a distance for albums that had been previously written about ad nauseam we were interested in what that guest thought about in the time and place that they were encountering it. I think, looking back, this kept the project fresh and prevented us falling down a variety of nostalgic trapdoors.

The intros I wrote to each album also took on a life of their own.

What began as a 300-word piece written in bed snowballed into 2,000 words that were heavily researched in the five days before the last edition went out and the new one was due. I was reading a book a week and trying to sift through the story to find the little gems that interested me stuff like The Jam leaving the studio at 6 p.m. every night so Paul Weller could watch Coronation Street . Or the fact that Flavor Flav was originally only in Public Enemy on the strength of his your mum jokes.

Again, more than anything, I was conscious not to rehash old ground. I wanted to try to give a freshness to these stories that sometimes focused on the minutiae that interested me, rather than the legacy and context that didnt. I also wanted to approach them with a sense of wonder and a lack of cynicism, to take the story back to the pre-fame days of the artist and chart their development.

In total, we produced eighty-one weekly editions between January 2015 and July 2016 from Elvis to Kendrick Lamar and all sorts in between. Weve included twenty-three of those editions in this volume, a cross-section of music from the last fifty years, and had a special illustration produced for each one.

Some guests loved albums and some guests really hated them, but it was all done in a spirit of it doesnt really matter. Because it doesnt. This isnt 1,001 albums you should listen to before you die, a sentiment that has always puzzled me. This is more about the reasons why people opt out and what happens when you force them to opt in.

Oh, and its about the stories too.

I hope you enjoy them.

Martin Fitzgerald

April 2017