The Golden Age of European techno passed me by originally. I was still only listening to the music that I had listened to since I was teenager – rock, new wave, new romantic, heavy metal, etc. Then there was the 1991 holiday in Kos where the techno hits that had passed me by were on heavy rotation.
One of them was Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic, a Belgian group. When I came back from Kos I wanted to collect all the tracks that reminded me of the holiday. It was always tremendously difficult to find singles that had finished their chart runs. There would be unsold copies in shops, but these would diminish over time (the only exceptions that I found were the Virgin Megastore and HMV on Oxford Street, but they were not places that I visited often). My favourite independent store, Compact Music, was particularly not good for this – it was far bigger on albums.
The upshot of this was that I had to buy plenty of albums to get the tracks I was looking for, and I had no patience so I bought them as soon as I could. This was after spending a lot of money on the holiday while we were away. I spent nearly £50 a day (given you could get a main meal for about £6 and breakfast for £3 it shows what I spent on beers and souvenirs and a round for 5 of us was about £3). This actually led to a situation just before payday in June where I was so broke I could not even buy a round of beers (though neither could Dave or Andy) – for the first time since school we pooled our money to get a round. This was when we were trying to work out whether we could get away again later that summer. Our plans for a cheap week in Greece ended up as a week at Andy’s parents’ farm in Wales – I decided that was not what I was looking for and bowed out.
I bought the Technotronic album and completed my acquisition list (bar Bizz Nizz). Surprisingly the album is actually really good, not just the singles and filler. This is my favourite track by Technotronic. Tough.
Five Miles Out 