As I went to put them in at the gym this morning I noticed that one of my earbuds had a lovely lump of wax in the hole! I know!
It has taken a while to get used to earbuds – I don’t like feeling ‘shut in’ (something I’ve written about here) and they require more hygiene maintenance than I appear capable of. As I worked out this morning, I thought about the different ways I have listened to music and latterly podcasts over they years…
When I was 17 I was given my first Walkman – a birthday present from the people I worked with at a market research company (my first properly salaried job). It was red and plasticky and had those flimsy headphones that 80s Walkmans had, the ones that went over your head and looked not unlike black powder puffs on your ears. If you think iPod headphones leak sound, these were like having ghetto blasters stuck to your ears, with the speakers facing out.
But I loved my Walkman. It gave life a soundtrack. It made being a teenager feel even more like being the star of an amazing film all about me me me me me than it did already.
I have two enduring memories of my early Walkmans (they weren’t built to last, I remember a pale blue one followed the red), both of them played at maximum volume. The first is of walking from the parental home to the Tube to go to work with ‘Get Me To The Doctor’ by Dead or Alive playing and being convinced I could hear someone shouting my name. This happened every time I listened to the song. The song, incidentally, was on one of those mixtapes that I used to listen to over and over again, where a certain song is forever linked with the one that came after it. I can never listen to ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’ by Soft Cell without expecting a Bronski Beat track after it. Or without being whisked back to being an overly made-up and backcombed teenager. I worked out after a while that there is a bit of the song where I think various voices are mixed together and which do actually sound like they are shouting STEVEN.
My other Walkman memory is of sitting on the Tube back to the suburbs and being asked by an old man (though probably 20 years younger than I am now) to turn my music down and of being totally affronted that someone would dare to request such a thing. Rolling my eyes I no doubt did indeed turn it down and pout sullenly all the way to Zone 5.
I’ve had headphones attached to some kind of music-on-the-move device ever since. After Walkmans came minidiscs, which were OK but not great to run with as they stuck if they were jiggled around too much. From minidiscs I progressed to the iPod. I was the first person I knew to get one – early versions were huge and expensive but carried with them a cachet that you just can’t buy anymore. Those white headphones, unseen anywhere ever before, gave you entry into an exclusive club – other white headphone wearers would see you and recognize you as one of their own. Knowing looks would be exchanged ‘yes, I’ve got an iPod too!’.
The iPod I now have has a broken screen – I know its layout so well I don’t need to see the songs, thankfully, and I use it once a week for doing sprint work on the treadmill. I keep it because it is an early version that doesn’t have a volume limiter so I can play trashy EDM and ear-splitting volume.
The Walkman was such a relief. Before that I holidayed with a large dictaphone type contraption (full-sized tapes) held to my ear. Loon!