Bands on the run

I've been on and off the road most of my adult life. When I was 21 I packed my bags and went to grad school in England. Bags consisted of some clothes, a racing bike and hifi. At the time, in the late 80s, I had a shitty combo unit – tape deck, radio, vinyl. My vinyl collection wasn't enormous – Clash, Zeppelin, Doors and some other random stuff.

We were poor students and mainly swapped cassettes – C60, C90. Up and down between Scotland and England on British rail with increasingly more sophisticated Walkmans.

Next time I hit the road in 1990 it was for the US. Bag of clothes and bike. I bought a combo tape deck, radio, CD player in Target. More cassettes and some CDs. Sisters of Mercy and god knows what.

Back to the UK where my CD collection expanded and I bought a Marantz CD and and Arcam amp then France. Bag of clothes, bike and CD combo. After a year I got my father to post the hifi “components” after a year.

More CDs. Bigger, better hifi. Sophisticated jazz, opera, death metal in the quiet seclusion of ones own home.

More travel, job seeking and fleeing from screaming kids. Early 2000s I got an MP3 player, then another, then another, an iPod Shuffle and finally a phone.

Hit the road and lived in Tokyo for 6 months. Wandering  around Shibuya listening to the Shuffle on a variety of in ear headphones searching for aural ecstasy.

So where am I now. A phone with a 64 gigabyte memory card and Bluetooth, noise cancelling over ear heaven. It might be a tad consumerist but it's the nearest thing to the buddhist void in a noisy train every Tuesday morning.