Ten - Pearl Jam

It's almost hard to remember now the days before YouTube, video streaming and the internet in general. Back in  1988, however, it was a different matter. For most music fans there were only two sources of music broadcast; Top Of The Pops (BBC) and the Chart Show (ITV). For me, these were essential viewing and kept me in touch with the music that I liked, or indeed would like. It also brought out the obsessive in me (yes again!). To make sure that I'd be able to watch the music videos and performances again, I taped these shows, as well as others such as The Word. It didn't end there.... I then edited the videos onto a master tape, copying the clips that I wanted to keep, and then updated my database.. err.. notebook, with the tape counter reading and a few salient notes. This went on for quite a while and in a relatively short space of time I had filled six video tapes - nearly 24 hours of music clips. Impressive.....

Then things started to get out of hand - we got MTV. My obsession couldn't keep up with the almost constant stream of music beaming to the TV. But I tried. Oh boy did I try. In the end I filled twenty one videos. Yup over 80 hours of music videos, TV studio performances, live recordings and interviews - and all lovingly detailed and recorded in my notebook.

Pearl Jam's 'Jeremy' was the first MTV recording that made it onto my video collection - and it went on to make several other appearances through the years. The start of our MTV era coincided with the Grunge movement and those early video contain a lot of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, L7 and the like. Of all the bands of that time, thought, Pearl Jam ruled the roost - Eddie Vedder was just way cooler than anyone else and their debut contains some top tunes; 'Even Flow', 'Alive' and the aforementioned 'Jeremy' to name but a few.

Incidentally I still have the videos and the notebook but since then I have made the jump to digital storage - you see they have all now been transferred to DVD and the notebook contents converted into a spreadsheet....I just couldn't help myself. As someone kindly informed me - I need a hobby!

Then things