What’s in Your Fridge is where the Straight asks interesting Vancouverites about their life-changing concerts, favourite albums, and, most importantly, what’s sitting beside the Heinz Ketchup in their custom-made Big Chill Retropolitan 20.6-cubic-foot refrigerators.

On the grill

Phil Western

Who are you

Phil Western, music maker, live sound technician, recorder of sounds, treatment centre counsellor in training, sometimes grip on-set, student, and Portland Hotel Society employee.

First concert 

Rod Stewart, 1976, Pacific Coliseum. My mom and stepdad took me and Rod kicked soccer balls into the audience. I asked why the guy in the row in front of us was "smoking a match"

Life-changing concert 

I was 12 or 13 when Bowie played three shows in Vancouver—the first was at B.C. Place with Peter Gabriel and the Tubes, followed a month later by two shows at the Coliseum. I went to all three shows thanks to my parents' generosity and I discovered Scary Monsters in this weird store in North Vancouver that rented (yes, rented) vinyl albums, and my life kind of changed at that point. The late '80s and early '90s were great for shows too—MBV at the Commodore, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays, Butthole Surfers, the Pixies at A&B Sound with about 80 people, Spectrum, Guided By Voices—the list goes on and on. Mixing Faust live was a highlight for me too.

Top three records

This is impossible.

Brian Eno, Thursday Afternoon  I was a teenager and my friend Tim Hill had pointed me toward Eno's ambient stuff and I picked this up when I bought my first CD player. It was only released on CD because it's one track, 61 minutes long. I used to have this thing with it where once I put it on I couldn't bring myself to stop it so I had to commit to the whole hour. Just a beautiful piece of ambient music. Hard to say why this one cut so deeply but I find it deeply moving.

The Fall, Hex Enduction Hour/Slates  I've played the Fall for a lot of people over the years and it's not everyone's cup of tea but I can't get enough of them. Especially the first bunch of albums. Grotesque and Dragnet are great too but to me this LP and EP are the band at the peak of their powers doing something that sounds completely unlike anything else. Sloppy yet sophisticated and hypnotic and repetitious in a good way. 

David Bowie, Low  I wanted to mention so many albums. I've done those lists on Facebook where you throw 15 favourites together and that didn't seem like enough to cover the spectrum but I've settled on Low because for me it's a perfect album. A masterpiece, really, and it lives in a space of its own. I don't know how many hundreds of times I've heard the thing and I still get a thrill out of it every single time. The exact same principle applies to White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground which is as close to a perfect album as I can imagine.

All-time favourite video

Captain Sensible, "Wot"  So the Captain is going mental because the pile-driver man outside his building is making too much noise. For some inexplicable reason he leads a parade of lookalikes of British notables through the hallways before knocking Adam Ant down in the lobby and then getting flattened by the pile-driver man in the back lot (replete with cardboard Captain cut-out prop). I watched it on Betamax after recording it on Soundproof in the '80s. My 3 year old daughter can't seem to get enough of it either. She watches it on YouTube.

What’s in your fridge

"Frozen" yogurt tubes, which seem to be a staple of my daughter's diet but which I haven't dared taste.

Hershey's chocolate syrup which will never be consumed and was bought to mask the taste of oral antibiotics (again, for my kid) but it didn't work. She wasn't fooled.

Two red jacket potatoes that have sort of gradually become testicular in appearance because I never seem to get around to using them for anything.