What did they listen to in the common room at your school?

Inspired by that other thread about TOTP.

I am old so we had a record player in our sixth form common room. People would bring in records but when I left in 1983 there was only two 12"'s left. Blue Monday and The American by Simple Minds.

Lynyrd Skynyrd

When the plane went down, there were black armbands abounding.

Mind you, when it was up to me, it was "New Rose", "Oh Bondage" and "Egyptian Reggae" notably.

Our school got rid of the common rooms about a year before I was in the sixth form. I think cos people used to smoke & drink in them or something.

Allman Brothers, Sha Na Na, Mud, Gong, Monty Python, New York Dolls, "December 63".

Massive Attack and Jane's Addiction are all I can remember.

Early U2 and Talking Heads mostly.

I think I nearly caused a ruck by trying to put on the Clash's Combat Rock, ha ha.

Of course, come the next year's influx into the 6th form, suddenly it was all EW&F and La Belle Epoch for GODS SKAE!!

Rush

Acid house. Morning break was mad.

Then the Cool Kids (tm) discovered hardcore and it was all, like, Minor Threat and SST stuff. The graffiti on the chalkboard got ridiculous - a Black Flag logo got changed to Pink Flag got changed to "Chairs Missing was better..."

god was it a shock to get kicked out of that school and end up at the local state school where they listened to nothing but Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. HELLO IT IS 1986, NOT 1972.

I couldn't do it, I got a GED and got the hell out of there.

Bad Brains and Metallica and N.W.A. and Talking Heads (also circa 86 ala Kate, but it was a private Episcopalian high school in Kentucky)

Yes, Genesis, Hawkwind, Motorhead, Pink Floyd, Throbbing Gristle, Human League, Ultravox, New Order. I was a bastard and CONTROLLED the record player for 2 years. I remember someone putting "All Right Now" on and I took it off and put "Wind and Wuthering" on in its place. Hissyfit ensued, but I was bigger than him so tough shit. I believe that 25 years later, there are people who still bear some kind of grudge against me for what I subjected them to @ break time and dinner hour.

ha ha, mine was a private Episcopalian high school in upstate NY!

acid house/techno stuff, all the time. anyone trying to play anything else would get their tapes smashed. lovely people, the ravers.

Queen, The Cult, JaMC, Husker Du, Elvis Costello, Madonna are what I can remember. Basically Heavy Rock/80s Indie-ish stuff/Pop/Pre-House dance stuff. We used to fight over it a lot but not usually in a mean-spirited way.

Rage Against the Machine. Over and over again.

Husker Du! Yeah, they were big at my high school, too.

the kids who ran the snack bar also ran the stereo, so we mostly got Red Hot Chili Peppers/Led Zep/Lenny Kravitz. though there was the afternoon when my friend Tommy played 'Surfer Rosa' on his walkman, run through his bass guitar amp. it was the first time i ever heard that record, and it has never sounded better - muffled, distorted, distended and insane.

There was a constant war between the grungers/metallers and the junglists. This was 95-96. I was squarely on the metal side at the time, though I love that era of jungle now. Very occaisonally some girls would get control of the stereo and stick on some MJ or new jack swing, to universal sneers from the two larger tribes.

Eminem, Radiohead, Marilyn Manson, KoRn, Dr Dre, Buffy OST

Once I remember, I got a bunch of Magazine 7"s, when I got into them. the record player was one of those stacker ones. I put the whole lot on in one got. Then when they'd all finished playing, I took the stack od singles, flipped them upside down, and played all the b-sides too. Haha, what a fuckwit I was.

I didn't really do too much in the way of dating till I'd left school, amazingly enough.

HI DERE I MAKE MUSIC CAN YOU PLAY A PIXIES RECORD THROUGH A BASS AMP - now that is one thread we haven't had yet.

Trip hop
Brit pop

Public "everybody should listen to the music I like and then you will be magically converted to it" battles are one of the worst things about being 16.

They are also the best thing if you win, and you chase out the stupid hippie seniors who want to listen to nothing but Buffalo Springfield and shit. :-D

Of course some of us never leave that phase behind *cough* ;-)

Yeah, winning the 6th form common room music war when I was 17-18 made me the coolest fucker on the planet in my mind back then, but I look back on it now and it's so so sad.

We had a 6th year common room and a ghettoblaster (1989-90). I seem to remember lots of U2, INXS, Simple Minds, Guns n Roses ,Bon Jovi and a recording of the top 40 chart that someone always made on a sunday.

I dunno; I really kinda thank the common room music fascists for really broadening my mind and getting me to listen to a lot of stuff I never would have encountered in my existence otherwise.

I mean, in 1983, when I started at that school, my fave bands were, like, Duran Duran and loads of crap synthpop and Styx - bloody STYX FFS - until I was exposed to other stuff. After all, I listened to nothing but classical music until I was about 11 or 12 when Vangelis and Billy Joel were my transition drugs to pop.

OK, I went through a phase of being really embarrassed about Duran Duran and apologising for liking them and even denying them for fear of losing face. But I grew up and got over it and expanded back into reclaiming my love of pop music.

I'm really kind of grateful to those music fascists who took control of the stereo - it was an important part of my musical education. I dont' think I'd have known who Husker Du - or certainly Wire - were, otherwise.

At my FE college we had a jukebox. I remember Gwen Guthrie "Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent", Oran Juice Jones "The Rain", Prince "Girls and Boys", Salt'n'Pepa "Push It", Alexander O'Neil "Criticize". I donated my own copy of "Sheila Take A Bow" to that machine!

sounds pretty great

Oh and I forgot, I was one of the first to get a cd player, so any CD's I got I had to tape for people.
SO I provided the U2 tapes that were played there.
My mates Hot City Nights tape was popular in the common room.

Indie did not exist at my school in 1989. It was all chart pop fans or stadium rock fans.
Summer we left school some got into Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. A year later (i had moved to Hamilton and was back visiting a friend for a week) and everyone was into Grunge or Dance music.

The people with lame taste at school were the biggest Pearl Jam fans.
It was hard not to go off Pearl Jam because of that but then those people complained they went to weird and thankfully i dont come across those people anymore.

Technotronic. A lot.

I never won the battles. I would come in early put on Forces of Victory or..ahem...Rainbow Dome Musick and then wait until one of the upper sixth came in and said something like "Hey what's this?" - and of course being terribly keen to please I would leap up and say "actually it's Steve Hillage, it's supposed to be relaxing..." only to be interrupted with "Well, it's shit...".

My greatest achievement was managing to keep Vulgar Display of Power on for a whole four tracks. There were only about three of us into metal that heavy. I had a rather over-ambitious plan to hit em with some Carcass one day, but it never came to pass alas.

i don't understand this question

It was probably Madchester plus the rock canon. I remember that on the morning Thatch was ousted, our cliched Mr Bronson character - elderly, war hero probably, tory obviously, generally an ok guy but prone to fits of anger - stormed in and ripped off whatever was playing, spluttering something obviously specious about us not being allowed to play music.

i don't understand this question

― gabbneb, Tuesday, October 7, 2008 5:15 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

Didn't go to school?

didn't have a "common room"

sixth form common room: Dodgy, whatever was on MTV, Aphex Twin and Saint Etienne. and Eat.

What gabbneb said. A British thing I think.

Maybe the closest thing we had to a common room was the lunchroom/cafeteria but there was no music there.

I forgot Krush "House Arrest" and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk "Love Can't Turn Around"!

nirvana, pearl jam, sundry awful britpop. almost every time i tried to put something on it got turned off EXCEPT this one awesome time when, for once, a few of the musicians were hanging out in the common room, i put on erykah badu, the lame nirvana fans made their usual moves to turn it off and then this guy who played jazz piano (a couple of years older than anyone else, so he had authority) was like HOLD UP erykah is amazing.

so most of the time i hung out in the common room of one of the girls' houses even though it wasn't really allowed, and we listened to lauryn hill and tlc and madonna.

We never had a stereo in the common room but me and one other dude listened to Tool and Kyuss quite a lot, one earphone each kinda thing

I'm amazed they let us have a stereo in the common room given that we couldn't eat crisps (!) or play cards. But they did, and the lads in the corner hogged it and played Offspring and Greenday.

We didn't have a common room but when we skipped class in 6th year to smoke weed the folk in my classes who I hung with (mainly middleclass and male) would listen to Beatles, Stones, Dylan, the Doors Kinks etc. They hated hip-hop and anything more strident than the Who was verboten.

Technotronic. A lot.

― Roberto Spiralli, Tuesday, October 7, 2008 1:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

So you were the common room DJ then?

A technotronic tape was always on in ours too. We were the first year to get our own room. After the mess we left on the walls with rude drawings and stuff (under the film posters that had been put up) , I'm surprised the year below got it. They were far crazier.

I remember Bowie's Let's Dance, Joy Division (one guy wrote a sort of love letter to the late ian curtis on the board. we all guessed who it was); my mate Scott with his Who and Rush tapes; another friend played his Outdoor Miner single on white vinyl.

Didn't have a common room, but the kids that were into music mostly liked bollocks like the Alarm, NMA, the Cult, the Wedding Present, U2, the Mission... bag'o'shite the lot of it.

Roberto never answered the wifeys question.

Hair metal mostly... Guns & Roses, Poison, Motley Crue.

I would attempt to counter them with Swans' Holy Money, Psychocandy and the VU's I Heard Her Call My Name. None of which lasted more than about a minute and a half before being removed.

sublime and beastie boys

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41PGEDAHPCL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://hitparade.ch/cdimages/stardust-music_sounds_better_with_you_s.jpg

http://www.mbgtop40.com/top100s/1999/believe.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wMob%2BFf8L._SL500_AA280_.jpg