What makes a music purchase bad? Should you feel ashamed of the dodgy discs you bought as a teenie-bopper?

We all bought enough crap in our tween years that if we’re to start feeling ashamed of it there’ll be no end to the collective guilt. The real bad purchasing lies in the guilty pleasure stuff and the “man, it made sense then, I was going through a tough time” discs.

In guilty pleasures my greatest sins have been in buying discs by girls I found beguiling in the bands they had fronted: Wendy James and Geri Halliwell.

Bad for entirely different reasons of course, Geri’s Schizophonic is bad by any measure. Appalling songs recorded with no panache. In no way could it possibly be described as anything other than appalling shite.

I think I’d convinced myself that she’d sound hot on record or something. I justify its purchase on the grounds that I bought it from a pawnbroker for $1.

Wendy, however, I stand by.

Now Ain’t The Time For Your Tears is bad album gold.

The songs were written by Elvis Costello, which implies a degree of quality that clearly isn’t present. The legend is that Wendy wrote to him requesting a song for her solo debut and he swept an album’s worth up from his cutting room floor, expecting her to pick one from the bunch.

She recorded them all and provided the man with some unexpected royalty beer money, albeit very little as the album stiffed on release.

It’s an endearing album. Wendy sounds like a pop starlet attempting to reinvent herself as a serious lyrical interpreter and realising as she does it that she’s not up to the task. I cheer her on every time I play it.

Crushing but endearing – a highlight is when she mentions Strummer and Jones and sounds as though she’s never heard of them.

Wendy was also a pawnbroker pick-up, I dropped a whole $10 for the disc. And I regret nothing. NOTHING!