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Phill Jupitus

How Ace Records Rocked My World - By Phill Jupitus

Part One - Money Well Spent

Being born in the early 1960s and subsequently spending my formative years in the 1970s placed me at a particularly fruitful point in the history of popular music. The Beatles were probably the first band I was aware of. But at the same time my aunt was grooving to the contrasting sounds of Motown and Blue Beat. It's not until I went to school that music became something that you could bond with friends over at the Friday afternoon 'disco' in the dining hall. Mrs. Perryman playing 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now' out of a robust pine gramophone player on wheels. The sham glitz and faux splendour of glam and prog rock provided a dense fog that was only cleared by the gale force winds of punk. Once the willfulness of the new wave had dispersed I was left with a bunch of much more interesting friends and started to hang out at Wendy May's Locomotion on a Friday night at The Town & Country Club in Kentish Town. R&B, Motown, Stax, Two Tone, Hip-Hop, Ska, Folk, Cajun, Punk, Pop... A dizzying array of music bombarded the senses. It's no wonder that the place got a mention in Nick Hornby's 'High Fidelity'. The floodgates had opened, and I started to buy music more out of a sense of curiosity and wonder. What follows are ten albums (in no particular order) that I purchased between the mid eighties and today, which you can find in the Ace catalogue.

Phill Jupitus has been appearing on the BBC 2 comedy panel show Never Mind The Buzzcocks since 1996. He was a regular radio deejay on GLR between 1994 and 2000, and was the first deejay heard on BBC 6 Music, where he presented the breakfast show for 5 years. Phill has also worked with the Blockheads and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and currently plays bass and guitar (separately) for the Idiot Bastard Band.

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Photograph by Andy Hollingworth

Selected releases