A Place in the Sun was always one of those sunny-day pop-punk records. Of course, the sun has now gone into hibernation until March, but this record can make me forget that. My friends and I loved it when we were 16, and my emotional attachment this LP remains to this day. I imagine most people would write it off as a shitty, late 90's pop-punk record, and without my fond memories of it, I probably would too. I wonder what I'd think of Lit if I heard them for the first time now.
I remember the first time I heard A Place in the Sun, and it was sometime towards the end of secondary school. There was a period when we all borrowed the few cds we each owned from each other and one day after school I was my friend Chris' house seeing what cds he had that I could borrow. He had an album by Lit that he'd borrowed from Johnny, and a Limp Bizkit album he'd got from someone. I hadn't heard either, but went for Lit. Even in the weeks that followed I knew I'd made the right choice in dedicating half a cassette to Lit (even cassette space was limited back then). I heard the Limp Bizkit album at some point and didn't think much of it. Luckily, even in the nu-metal haze of 2000, I wasn't into Limp Bizkit.
Around the time we were sitting out GCSE's, my friend Paul's older brother was selling off his entire cd collection at £5 a pop (he'd recorded them all onto MiniDisc, a move I'm sure he came to regret). My job in Sainsburys' afforded me the option to buy a whole bunch of these albums and I picked up A Place in the Sun, along with a lot of RATM and Smashing Pumpkins. It was a pretty sweet deal. Four years later and I was in Oxford visiting some friends. We decided to head out and try to find some record stores. It wasn't a very fruitful trip, but we did find one second hand place and I picked up a copy of Soundgarden's BadMotorFinger for £9. The shop had an offer of any two records for a tenner, so I went back, had another dig around and found this slightly dog-eared copy of A Place in the Sun. For £1 it would have been rude not to. The vinyl was pretty filthy, but it now plays with only a few pops.
There's not too much to say about the music. It's catchy pop-punk that I've been playing for many years. There's no point listing the highlights, because they're all equally fun (although the lines "You make me come / You make me complete / You make me completely miserable" on Miserable still feel like they deserve a mention!) I had a read about Lit on Wikipedia whilst writing this, and discovered that the drummer died four years ago. I also discovered the band is still going. I never bothered to check out any of the other Lit albums, because I was perfectly happy with A Place in the Sun. Chances are, without those fond memories of listening to it at 15, it would've just sounded like shitty pop-punk.
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £1 second hand
Bought: Oxford
When: 22/01/05
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
