Category Archives: 42 records

The start point for 42@42 – 42 records for each of my (at the time) 42 years

The weirdness flows between us

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32. Freak Scene – Dinosaur Jr.

We showed off to each other back then. Goofing around, throwing ridiculous shapes on the dance floor, conjuring ludicrous puns that, over time, became impenetrable in-jokes, and just enjoying each other. Not, you know, in that way. Okay, sometimes in that way, but mostly it was entirely rated PG stuff; occasional moments of mild peril and sexual references. As Supergrass would later put it: we were young, we were free, we kept our teeth nice and clean. It’s unsurprising that my self penned follow up – I am middle aged, I have responsibilities, I have ground my teeth down to such an extent that I displaced my jaw – has never troubled the charts.

We were 16, going on 17, and weren’t skipping around a summer house in Austria on the brink of war trying to impress a young Nazi boy. But we were interested in the sound of music (boom, and indeed, tish). Specifically we were all starting to share a love of what you might generally term indie music; some gravitating from an earlier goth phase, others from heavy metal (an odd mix of US hair metal and New Wave Of British Heavy Metal), and some feeling the benefit of older siblings passing down people like The Smiths. Irrespective of how we got there we all arrived at a place where a shared love of Nirvana, Pixies, Muses, Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, and a host of others became something that both defined us and soundtracked our late teens and early 20s.

We, of course, was me and my friends. A small but perfectly formed gang; smart, funny, at ease with each other, if not always with ourselves. I’m probably romanticising it across the years. I’m sure there were times we had terribly dull conversations and just sat around fretting about our A levels but that’s not how I remember it. In my head now it was all either hilarious, wise cracking bon mots or very earnest, deep discussion about matters of great import. We knew we weren’t the cool kids but convinced ourselves that, because we knew that, it actually made us the cool kids anyway. We were cool because we weren’t cool but we knew it. Make sense ? Not really but it did at the time. Looking back I think we were pretty cool. If I was 16 again I would want to be friends with us.

And I would want to spend my nights at the Kandi Klub. I imagine that every major city in the UK, around the late 80s and early 90s, had its own version of the Kandi Klub: what might loosely be described as an indie rock nightclub. Somewhere for the people who felt a bit out of place everywhere else to go and feel slightly less out of place together. Later in my life I frequented Rock City in Nottingham and Sector 5 in Leicester but the Kandi Klub in Bristol was the place I called home. It was our weekly stage (literally so if it was being held in the Thekla) and where we played out our friendship.

History hasn’t recorded what anyone else thought of those kids that turned up every week and spent their time alternating between dancing very seriously – shuffling feet, head down nodding, fringes falling over eyes – and then appearing to take the piss out of it all – the star jumps, the hands on hips head shaking, the watusi. If it had I’d like to think it would mention how much fun they were having. Was it fun in that slightly self absorbed way that only teenagers can really pull off ? Yeah it was but we were slightly self absorbed teenagers so…

There’s a long, long list of songs that I associate with those regular trips to the Kandi, whether it was ensconced at The Studio or The Bierkeller or The Thekla, but the one that was guaranteed to get me on to the slightly sticky dancefloor was “Freak Scene”. It was probably one of those songs that used to get slipped in fairly early in the night, before DJ George got into the bigger “hits” from people like Nirvana and The Wonderstuff. There were a bunch of songs that occupied that part of the night that I latched on to and still love: stuff like the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up”, Buffalo Tom’s “Velvet Roof”, Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing”, Pulp’s “Babies”, and probably a couple of Mudhoney tracks. As it was still early the dancefloor might be empty, or virtually empty, but we’d bounce out there regardless and throw ourselves into that aforementioned head down shuffle of a dance.

For the three and a half minutes of “Freak Scene” everything would fall away. There was the song, the sensation of moving, and that was it. Or almost it. I was self conscious enough, I expect, to be aware of the fact that I was dancing and always enjoyed the odd mixture of doing something that felt quite private in a public place* – it was effectively an outward expression of my internal relationship with the song. If you’d seen it you might, mistakenly, have seen it as a tall, spotty kid wearing a black tee shirt dotted with pieces of washing powder visibly picked out, shining, under the blue neon lights rather ponderously swishing his hair around. It wasn’t that. It was an outward expression of my internal relationship with the song. I admit some of that outward expression required that I slowly step from side to side and possibly clasp my hands behind my back. Don’t judge me.

You need places that feel like they’re yours when you’re that age, hovering uncertainly between being a child and an adult. Places and people. Territory that’s yours, where you’re free to work out who you might be. The Kandi Klub was part of my territory and if I had the chance to do it all again I’d be back there in a heartbeat with exactly the same people: my friends.

 

*this will be the only thing I did that “felt quite private in a public place” that I ‘fess up to here…

Take the long way, ‘cos I like the view

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31. Take The Long Way – Po’ Girl

There’s a dull ache where my prostate should be and I’m sat in a car I don’t own, in the car park of an anonymous industrial estate on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, a town that seems to be comprised almost entirely of outskirts. I’m waiting for an all day meeting that I’d rather not attend; my expectations are for a painful few hours of corporate jockeying, career eyeing obfuscation and the uncomfortable small talk that only a group of people that really don’t know each other, despite spending every day together for the past three years, can muster. Look up inauspicious in the dictionary. There will be a picture of me in a Vauxhall Astra, eating a double bacon and egg McMuffin, on that industrial estate.

I had spent a good few minutes trying to manoeuvre the car between the white lines that had been marked out for parking. They’re set at an odd angle – perhaps 70 degrees – and are just marginally too narrow. As I’m first to arrive I can’t line up next to an already parked vehicle and, for reasons that now escape me, I had decided to reverse in. Trying to fit between the lines. As I repeatedly try to position the car this feels a lot like one of those free metaphors that life has been throwing at me of late.

I had not been looking forward to this day. Its purpose was for a small group of us to discuss team objectives, in the absence of a head of function, away from the office which, in the grand scheme of things, shouldn’t be cause for concern. Except I’ve been in this play before. Almost exactly twelve months ago: same meeting room in the same industrial shed with the same task to be performed under the same circumstances – no head of team, let’s sort things out. Only twelve months ago the casting was different and, specifically, I had been shunted from understudy to something approaching the lead role. Now I wasn’t even sure if I qualified as understudy.

That day a year ago had, briefly, felt like a fresh beginning. I’ve dealt with my redundancy elsewhere but this had been the point at which I felt like I’d found my way back to some kind of approximation of my previous job; my previous status I guess. I was sharing the responsibility for the running of the day, the running of the team, with someone else but it was close enough. I was back doing what I knew I could do, building a happy and productive insights team.

I was sufficiently emboldened that day to take a risk. The team were dealing with the departure of their “head of” – in retrospect maybe I was dealing with it more than they were, I’m not sure. It was someone I had a lot of respect for and was bitterly disappointed to see him depart and, again in retrospect, it surfaced a lot of memories about how I had left my previous job. So I decided to risk opening up to my colleagues, sharing what was supposed to be my own personal story of dealing with change. I stopped short of a full confessional, complete disclosure of my struggle with mental illness, but there was enough there for people to fill in the blanks. I guess it was intended to be a rallying cry, an illustration of how people can come through traumatic events and stay strong. There’s some irony. It was definitely intended as a show of strength: a sense of resolve and fortitude from what might, ostensibly, appear a place of weakness. It was about empathy and understanding and letting people know that there was someone there for them – my far less eloquent version of this “down in a hole” clip from The West Wing. If you believe the corporate text books it was intended as an overt piece of “authentic leadership”. It was definitely authentic.

And then it all went wrong. Not literally then (people didn’t start throwing things and booing – they may have wanted to…) but over the next couple of months. A series of ordinarily manageable events piling up to a point where they became unmanageable; like dropping enough pebbles onto a hillside until, eventually, it dislodged a boulder, and then the whole thing came tumbling down. Then we’re into panic attacks and adrenaline and cortisol and pills and counseling and all of that stuff.

So back in the car park, a year on, I have all of that in my head. Returning to work after my sabbatical has not been without its challenges, my subconscious seems keen to cling to the fact that I’m back in an environment where I melted down. It’s well intentioned with its occasional prompting – “hey, this is a bad place for you, I remember what happened, I’m going to stimulate some chemicals for you to encourage you to get the fuck out” – but not terribly helpful. I understand the theory of it all but unpicking it in practice – rewiring it – is hard. And this particular car park, outside of the particular meeting room I’m about to go into, is a major crime scene to revisit. If I wasn’t back on beta blockers I imagine I’d be accelerating hard back down the A5 right about now.

I have a playlist that I use for my commute to work. It is, imaginatively, called “car”. Admittedly that isn’t as strong as my Motown playlist – “Good Lordy, It’s Berry Gordy” – but on a par with most of my naming conventions (for example: “new” for, er, new stuff). It was on whilst I sat in the car thinking about the upcoming meeting, set as it usually was to play on shuffle. Sometimes life chucks you a rubbish metaphor about trying to park between the lines whilst you’re wondering where you fit in and sometimes it throws you a bone. Po’ Girl’s glorious reflection on enjoying life’s journey – because that’s the only point to it all – “Take The Long Way” shuffled its way on to the car stereo.

This song was always on the list for inclusion in the 42. I didn’t necessarily expect that this odd tale of mid life crisis would be my route into it but there it is. In some respects it might have been more obvious to pick a moment in my life that was so perfect that it stopped me in my tracks; a moment in which it’s almost easy to understand that this is a moment and that’s probably all that life is, a succession of moments. The sun setting over the ocean in Lanzarote. My wife appearing at the end of the aisle on our wedding day. Sitting holding my new born daughter in the hospital. First kiss. Playing live music. Sex. Any of those would be easy to isolate as moments in which it feels like you can express what life is about. But you don’t get that many of those. What you get are a few of those and, in between, long, long stretches of sitting in car parks – metaphorically, not literally. Unless, of course, you’re a car park attendant.

So it has to be on the list because I utterly adore it, I adore the melody, I adore the vaguely incongruous mix of country and folk and hip hop, but most of all I adore the sentiment. That reminder to be mindful, to savour experience – the journey and not the destination – and that life is not something you’re working towards, it’s something you’re doing. Right now. To steal wholesale from Annie Dillard: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. All of that time sat in a car park, sat in a meeting room, is life.

It would be too neat and tidy if I told you that in that moment I understood everything I wanted to do with my life. If it was a film I’d have probably driven off, or better still, walked off, casually chucking the keys to a car that wasn’t mine over my shoulder. Maybe deliberately leaving the car parked across the lines first: you see what I did there ? But I don’t (sadly) live in an Aaron Sorkin drama and whilst walking off into a Milton Keynes sunrise might have been glorious for a while it would have been swiftly followed by a dawning realisation that I got responsibilities now.

It was enough, for now, that it reminded me to be present. It was enough that it got me back into that meeting room and got me through that meeting without gasping for air. Right now there are days when that is enough: that is a good day. That won’t always be enough because, how we spend our days and all that, but right now it is.

Hard times come and hard times go

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30. Wrecking Ball – Bruce Springsteen

“You’ll probably look back and think this was the best thing that ever happened to you”. If you ever find yourself talking to someone that has just lost their job, just been made redundant (what an appalling turn of phrase that is), then take it from me, don’t fall back on telling them that it might turn out to be a great thing. However well intentioned. Give them some time. Give them some empathy, some sympathy even, but don’t dismiss the awfulness of it in that sentence. Let them work through just how shit it is before you start up with the platitudes. And believe me it’s shit.

Just over three years ago I was about to leave the office late on a Friday afternoon. I knew my company was struggling – it would have been difficult not to know as I was responsible for understanding UK consumers, the market, and how we performed in that context. UK consumers were on the floor, the market had finally run out of technology innovation that had propped us up and kept customers spending, and even the weather had turned against us – the preceding Christmas wiped out in a flurry of snow. I also knew that something was going on. It was nearly the end of the financial year, which is often when these things happen, and I just had a sense that my time might be up. I’d been in the organisation for 13 years, part of the furniture, and was pretty well plugged in to all of the usual rumour, conjecture, and gossip that flies around a business. I wasn’t the only one that had suspicions.

I was due to be in Leeds the following Monday evening, invited to speak at a market research event, and so I stopped by my boss’ office to float the idea that I might just go directly up North rather than come in to the office. On reflection I think by this point that I already knew. I was just trying to fish for some kind of confirmation. He clearly didn’t want to give anything away. Presumably there had been some kind of agreement internally to “not spoil everyone’s weekend” and he was cagey. Eventually I somewhat bluntly asked him if I needed to be in the office on Monday morning. Yes, was the response. He knew what he’d just told me. I knew too.

Knowing is one thing but being directly confronted with it is another. It seems vaguely laughable now but there was a ridiculous mistake made over the weekend – the one that presumably was not to be spoiled. Meeting invites went out to various members of the Marketing team, ordered in a particular way (if you were near the end it was good, near the start was bad), on the Sunday, evidently with the intention that they’d be seen as everyone came in on Monday morning. Under normal circumstances we weren’t the type of employees that left our Blackberries alone all weekend, let alone in a time of heightened tension about our future prospects. So various of us saw the invites on the Sunday, saw the run of people summoned to the same room on the first floor, and drew our own conclusions.

I held it together until the Monday morning. I was in early as usual and one of the first people I saw was the new HR head, a woman that seemed to have expressly been brought in to do unpleasant work. She was well suited to it. There are lots of things, looking back, that I’d do differently if it all happened again. One of those things is that I wouldn’t have pleaded with her quite so desperately to tell me what was going on, only to be stone walled. I get why. I understand the professional obligation, the need to treat everyone the same, the requirement to protect the company’s interests and not say anything that might compromise the process. I get it but it’s utterly dehumanising. I wish I’d not said a single word to her. That stone walling, along with many other parts of what became “the process”, reduces you to the status of a line on a spreadsheet somewhere. You don’t really exist as a person anymore in the eyes of the organisation. You finally get to understand that age old Finance gag that directly rebuts HR’s “people are our greatest asset” line: people, on any balance sheet, will always be listed as a liability.

I didn’t have to wait very long for my meeting. It transpired that I wasn’t the only casualty in my team and so they needed to remove me first. To this day I deeply regret that the fate of the rest of my team was taken out of my hands, particularly as one of them was away on maternity leave at the time – but redundancy is no respecter of that. The ones that survived this cull all left within three months anyway; the writing was on the wall and I’m glad at least that I recruited and worked with people (great people) that had enough nous to bail out when they could. I don’t remember all of the details of the meeting; I just remember being very, very angry. In a bizarre way it almost helped that I didn’t particularly get on with my boss, it gave me a focal point for my rage and scorn. He didn’t necessarily deserve it, we were just different people, but that was where I directed all of my negative feelings.

The official line was that I was in a period of consultation – a month – as my role had been deemed redundant. That’s always the distinction: it’s the role, not you personally, that is redundant. The business doesn’t need that role anymore. It’s not a reflection on you. It’s not personal. Except, of course, it couldn’t be more fucking personal. The role doesn’t pay your mortgage. The role doesn’t give up its time and energy and emotionally invest in a place, in the people that work there, in the work that it does. The role doesn’t have to go out and find a new role: it’s redundant. You, of course, do. And you, of course, are inseparable from the role and are the one that is really now deemed redundant. Don’t ever let them tell you it’s not personal.

“Don’t go to Leeds”. I remember he said that. Told me – not unreasonably I guess – that I probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to drive for three hours and deliver a presentation on engaging businesses with customer insight. At my very best I’m not good at being told to not do something. Sheer bloody minded stubbornness is not necessarily my most appealing character trait but there it is. I wasn’t anywhere near my best. “Don’t go to Leeds” was like a red rag being stuffed in my face and, in that moment, I would have crawled on my hands and knees through broken glass to sodding Leeds and delivered that presentation just to spite him, spite the company I’d given 13 years to, and to try and retain some sense of myself as a professional, employed, person.

I went to Leeds. Delivered a great presentation to the good folks of the Northern branch of the Market Research Society. Didn’t breathe a word of what had happened until afterwards when I couldn’t keep a lid on it anymore. I think they were a little surprised. I was exhausted. It had been a pretty draining day.

I was one of the lucky ones. That’s what I tend to tell myself now. The business I left folded a couple of years later, collapsing after a private equity buy out that, whilst difficult to prove, looks a lot like it was designed to close the business and walk away with a profit. Some people made money on a business that failed: none of those people were the ones that worked there. So I was lucky because I got paid off. I more or less walked straight into another job too. But I don’t remember feeling particularly lucky sobbing in the toilets at the office when it all got too much during that month of “consultation” or when I pretended to be working from home because I couldn’t tell our child carer what was going on or when colleagues I’d known for years – had worked directly for in some cases – couldn’t bring themselves to have any words for me. You find out who your friends are I guess. For every person that suddenly seemed unable to even look at me there was another who would take me out for lunch. For every process and policy demon in HR there was others who, in simple terms, put the human back into human resources (they know who they are). I was particularly touched by the generous spirit of my research agency network who, without exception, were wonderful at a time when there was genuinely nothing in it for them beyond being decent people – I couldn’t commission any work for them anymore.

About a year after I went through the redundancy Springsteen released “Wrecking Ball”, an angry riposte to the banking crisis induced recession and consequent human cost. Inevitably it’s the record I have co-opted as articulating my powerless anger about what happened to me and about the subsequent collapse of the business I worked so long for. It’s a big fuck-you of a record, especially the title track (the video at the start of this post); a giant musical middle finger extended to an abstract set of bankers who dealt in abstract trades that had anything but abstract repercussions. For me it’s more straightforward: you got rid of me, I’m not going to let it beat me.

I walked away – or more accurately was made to walk away – from my job with a decent chunk of money and didn’t need it to tide me over until I found another one. But there was a cost. My redundancy wasn’t the only thing that tipped me into depression 18 months later but it was undoubtedly one of the things. It was almost like a bereavement and I don’t think I’d worked it all through until I took my 6 month sabbatical some 30 odd months after the event. Some of it is still probably working its way through now. And, as I say, I was one of the lucky ones; I didn’t have to bear the financial cost as well as the emotional one. I have nothing but empathy and respect for all my former colleagues who had to deal with both.

So, no, even in retrospect I wouldn’t say that it turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened” although in a roundabout way it was one of the triggers that made me write again so perhaps, eventually, I’ll look back on it differently. For now it’s still a big old wrecking ball that clattered through my life and the dust from the damage that it caused is still settling.

May you one day carry me home

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29. Oh My Sweet Carolina – Ryan Adams

There was an incongruity to it, the contrast between the man shuffling on stage, unkempt hair, scruffy, and the surroundings. He almost looked lost, a tiny figure sat with his guitar, a piano to one side, accompanied by a cellist, dwarfed by the Royal Festival Hall with its capacity to house an orchestra; a vast open space purpose designed (not entirely successfully) to accommodate sound and music.

With scarcely a word or barely so much as a glance at us, the audience, he began to play, picking out the opening notes to “Oh My Sweet Carolina”. The expectant chatter that had broken into appreciative applause as he’d made his way on to the stage died instantly. There was a collective holding of breath as he began:

Well I went down to Houston and I stopped in San Antone
I passed up the station for the bus
Was trying to find me something but I wasn’t sure just what
Man I ended up with pockets full of dust

The words exhaled softly, quietly into the microphone, fingers methodically working the neck of his guitar. He seemed lost in it, oblivious to us, absorbed in some personal meditation on homesickness and another of those tales of a lost soul looking for a way back that country music does so well. We were lost in it too, the audience given over in a kind of reverie, astonishingly still and silent and rapt.

So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane
Bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of ‘caine

Just voice and guitar was holding us, the entire room transfixed. I’d seen him do this before, first time I saw him play was at the Lyric in Hammersmith, a pokey old theatre with maybe a hundred of us there. He’d been a little difficult that night, almost affectedly pulling open note books, propping them up on his music stand, puffing on endless cigarettes, ignoring the crowd despite the intimacy of the venue for the first half of the set. It was either someone extremely insecure, stumbling through stage fright, or someone desperate to project their cast iron credentials as an artist. Perhaps it was both. The set was largely made up of the songs from “Heartbreaker” which is such a bruisingly honest and raw record that I guess it might not be easy to lay yourself that bare on stage, particularly on such a small stage with nowhere to hide. Whatever it was something magical happened that night when he played “Come Pick Me Up” and he and us in the audience softly seemed to find some catharsis in its bitter lament to betrayal. It was the first- but not last – time that I thought he was absolutely the real deal.

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go ?
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

I’d seen the other Ryan Adams too, the rock n roll version. In those early stages post Whiskeytown, solo, it was as if he wanted to be Gram Parsons and The Rolling Stones at the same time; a one person embodiment of the Exile sessions both in terms of music and lifestyle. Just before “Gold” broke in the UK I saw him at Shepherd’s Bush Empire backed by a full band – a full band purpose built to replicate that early 70s Stones sound, or even a country leaning E Street Band. It wasn’t quite Dylan going electric but there was definitely a mixed reaction in the crowd – in particular the saxophonist divided opinion, filling in the harmonica parts from both “Heartbreaker” and “Gold” with horn. I loved it but then he was riffing on two reference points – in Springsteen and the Stones – that I adore so it was easy for me to hear it all as a straight extension of his country (or Americana if you insist) roots into R&B and rock and roll. For others it was apparently some kind of betrayal or sell out – the purity lost in chasing some notion of being a star. To me it just looked like he was going where his muse took him and having a ton of fun. By the close he had everyone pretty much back on side, closing with what became his famous cover of Wonderwall, which eventually even the song’s writer, Noel Gallagher, acknowledged was improved in Adams‘ reading of it. Again, I left, convinced of his genuine greatness.

I ain’t never been to Vegas but I gambled all my life
Building news print votes I raced in sewer mains
I was trying to find me something but I wasn’t sure just what
Funny how they say that some things never change

“Gold” and “Heartbreaker” were huge records for me in the early 00s as was, latterly, the two parts of “Love Is Hell” (another painfully beautiful record, so raw it’s practically an open wound). In particular “Gold”‘s lead track “New York New York” will always place me driving home, picking my way into West London from Hertfordshire, skirting Heathrow, on September 11th, 2001, anxiously and acutely aware of the eerily empty skies above me. It was chance, of course, that Adams had recorded an open love letter to the city that had become his adopted home, chance that repeated as the video for the track was recorded four days before 911: the entire film features Adams playing the song with the Manhattan skyline as his backdrop, the Twin Towers dominating every frame. It became a song of defiance and will always be lodged in my memory in association with that day alongside Springsteen’s “My City Of Ruins”.

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

Back in the Festival Hall I am experiencing something akin to a religious awakening. I don’t think I’ve taken a breath since the song began, haven’t moved a muscle, as if changing anything – the slightest disruption – could shatter this fragile, delicate piece of music. It sounds like a direct expression of the deepest, saddest longing I’ve ever heard and he’s creating it right in front of me.

For me Adams never quite touched those early heights (or possibly depths) again but, in a way, I’m glad. His early work speaks of such overwhelming pain and unhappiness that I suspect the alternative path his life might have taken – alternative to continuing as a respected singer songwriter, settling down, cleaning up – would have been for his life to end. If there was a likely candidate to join “that stupid club” along with Kurt and Jeff and Jimi and Janis and Jim then he was it. I’m glad he didn’t and I still greatly enjoy his music. Perhaps it’s not quite as personal to me now as it was but he still has the capacity to floor me – witness the more recent performance of “Oh My Sweet Carolina” with Laura Marling filling in admirably for Emmylou Harris that you can find here. It is a fabulous thing indeed.

Up here in the city it feels like things are closing in
The sunset’s just my light bulb burning out
I miss Kentucky and I miss my family
All the sweetest winds they blow across the South

Memory is imperfect. Funnily enough one of the themes in writing this particular series of posts is that I believe that specific songs are strong anchors of a certain time and place, strong signifiers of what I was experiencing and feeling at the time. It’s possible to hear a recording of “Oh My Sweet Carolina” from that night in November 2002 at the Royal Festival Hall – you can stream it here if you’re so inclined or you can read closer-to-the-moment reviews of the gig here and here. It’s interesting how many details were wrong in my memory. In my first draft of this post he didn’t acknowledge the audience at all before playing – he actually directly spoke to us. I’d forgotten the cello completely. The song does play out to silence but it’s not quite as instant as the version in my mind (it’s still pretty impressive for a London audience who, often times as not, seem to love their own conversation as much as what is happening on stage).

The spirit of it is right though. The intensity of a moment in which he conjured something breathtakingly, heart achingly beautiful; a tender yearning for the safety of home. All delivered by the unassuming, slightly dishevelled man playing, stripped back and exposed, in that grand and imposing space.

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home
May you one day carry me home

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything is broken… phew, for a minute there I lost myself…

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28. The Bends / OK Computer – Radiohead

Me and Radiohead go way back. We first met when they were supporting, believe it or not, The Cranberries at Leicester University who were touring off the back of “Linger”. I’d like to believe that I had my finger so firmly on the pulse that I was only there because I’d been tipped off about Radiohead but I suspect it was more that I went to pretty much every gig at the University that year. Sometimes this unearthed a gem (Maria McKee) and sometimes it didn’t (T’pau). In this case it did both. For avoidance of doubt The Cranberries were not the gem.

So the first time I heard “Creep” was at that gig. It’s impossible to recreate now as the song is too entrenched in memory but that first time that Jonny Greenwood’s guitar went into spasm, that stab of distortion into the chorus, was a real jaw dropper. It was visually arresting too, him hunched over his telecaster, slung low, face covered by his hair as it fell forwards, and then this twitching, violent slash over the strings and a burst of white noise erupting. The wannabe rock star in me took copious notes. The only thing I actually pulled off was the telecaster. Maybe the hair.

I also distinctly remember the first time I heard “Paranoid Android” I was stuck in traffic on the outskirts of Liverpool, making my way there for something related to my job at the time working for Boots – back in the days when radio got first play of a song. It’s still vivid for me because the song was astonishing on first listen: those snaking, sinewy verses, tense chorus that hints at some terrible future peril (in so much as it is a chorus) before the build into the off kilter solo and gorgeous break down into the defeated, resigned “rain down” section. It’s still astonishing now. Whisper it but it’s kind of a prog record although I don’t recall much of the cooler-than-thou indie press reporting it as such at the time.

Shortly after that I eagerly purchased “OK Computer” on its day of release – a Monday lunch time mooch around either HMV or Virgin (as was) or Selectadisc in the centre of Nottingham was very much my routine then. That evening I lay on my bed, put my headphones on, closed my eyes and listened to it straight through. It was an event. I sort of miss the days when a record release was an event for me. There was something almost ritualistic to it. The album didn’t disappoint and its over arching themes of a vague pre millennial anxiety and sense of displaced unease resonated strongly with me at the time; echoes of that sense still resonate strongly with me now.

The record sandwiched in the middle of all of this – post “Creep”, pre “OK Computer” – was “The Bends”. Released in 1995 it caught me post graduation, recently moved to Nottingham, trying to figure out what to do with myself. It also largely sound tracked the disintegration of two relationships that were important to me; both of which I can look back on now with fondness but these songs are forever attached to their messy ends. In many respects both records are associated with a time of unhappiness, or at least, a time of uncertainty. In that period I had no idea what I wanted to do (plus ca change…), was clinging on to the idea that old relationships might still work, and gradually became separated from most of my friends who were largely living (and living large) in London. I was scraping by in a job I didn’t really want, sharing a house with people I didn’t really know, and spending any money I did have on train fares to the big smoke. It’s not really a surprise that two albums, more or less book marking the beginning and end of this time in my life, that major in themes of alienation, listlessness, torpor, and a twitchy anxiety should have been so important to me. I probably should have spent three years sitting in a back corner of The Salutation reading Camus. I didn’t. I think I spent it sitting in one of the five homes I had during that time watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s angst, Jim, but not as we know it.

In 1997 they headlined Glastonbury. I was, by that point, a regular festival goer and had enjoyed the previous few years in blazing sunshine at Reading, Glastonbury, and the short lived Phoenix festival near Stratford. Had enjoyed the sun so much that for Glasto ’97 a small group of us decided to arrive at the festival site on the Wednesday (it usually ran Friday to Sunday) to soak up the atmosphere, chill out, have a little mini holiday. It basically threw it down for five days, the site turned into a swamp, and we spent our time turning bin liners into makeshift rain coats: it was miserable. Somewhere in amongst the mud though Radiohead closed the Saturday night and it was possibly the finest live performance I’ve ever seen, certainly in the top three. There was an intensity to it, and in the reaction of the audience, that happens rarely and very rarely for me at an outdoor gig. There was a real buzz around the festival ahead of their performance as “OK Computer” was pretty well cemented as album of the year and it turned into one of those very special events, almost a shared communion, between audience and band. Quite a bit of it is on YouTube: here. Inevitably it doesn’t convey the atmosphere – the palpable electricity in the air – but there’s a sense of the intensity.

There’s a bit at 18.30 on that BBC clip which I remember clear as day when Thom Yorke asks for the stage lights to be turned on the crowd: somewhere in that heaving throng was a 25 year old me. I watched that headline set on my own. Surrounded by thousands of people, obviously, but alone. I was at Glastonbury with a bunch of friends but I deliberately took myself off to watch that performance by myself. I had a strong sense that it would be a deeply personal experience for me and, in some respects, an intensely sad experience. Sad might be the wrong word. It would be  – and was – a deeply emotional experience, a space where those songs would connect directly to feelings that were tucked away, hidden, and give them expression. It was a year or two characterized by loneliness and I knew that the songs that would make up their set would speak to that. I remember I wanted it to be a private experience – laughable as that seems in the churning throng – but I wonder now why I wanted it to be private. I wonder now whether I might not have been better off watching it with my friends, telling them I wasn’t happy, and sharing it all.

Within the next six months the relationship I was in was over, which was better for both us, I left my job in Nottingham, and started again in London.

……

That bit about “maybe” pulling off Jonny Greenwood’s look / hair. I didn’t. I was that skinny then though. Thems were the days…

Walk tall… or baby don’t walk at all

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27. Incident On 57th Street / Rosalita / New York City Serenade – Bruce Springsteen

I was recently tipped off by a friend that Springsteen was making most of his current run of shows available as official bootlegs for the princely sum of £6. Given that most of his current shows are running to three hours or more that’s a pretty fair deal. At a point in his career when he could be forgiven for slowing down, or even stopping following the deaths of Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, Springsteen seems as alive, more alive maybe, than he has in the last twenty years. The loss of Federici and Clemons has prompted a shuffling of the E Street Band’s line up, its ranks swelling with the addition of a full horn complement, string section on many dates, and Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine on guitar – as if Nils Lofgren, Steve Van Zandt, and Springsteen himself isn’t a stellar enough line up already. The current band is phenomenal. Of course, it always was.

The Brisbane show on the current tour features a complete run through of “The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle”, Springsteen’s second record, and the one that prefaced his eventual break through with “Born To Run”. I am a massive fan of that album and it contains my favourite run of three songs straight on any record: the whole of side two covering “Incident On 57th Street”, through “Rosalita” and finishing with “New York City Serenade”. None of the songs clocking in beneath seven minutes but none of them outstaying their welcome. Springsteen was never this – excuse the obvious lift – wild again, rushing headlong into a myriad of musical ideas, embracing styles, trying anything and everything (virtually all of it working). All he learned gigging the Jersey shore is here. All his influences sucked in – Dylan, Van Morrison, jazz, latin, R&B, gospel, straight up rock and roll – and spat back out across three songs that are almost heroic in their ambition and scope. There is more invention here than most artists achieve in their lives; Springsteen crammed it into twenty four minutes.

I adore “Wild, Innocent…” for its sheer hubris. It’s a young man’s record, before age and experience reins in some of its excess. Ten minute jazz rock work out ? Yeah, why shouldn’t I do that ? “West Side Story” ? I could reimagine that. If I’m going to serenade New York then why not nod back to Gershwin with a dramatic, classical piano intro ? All of this, eventually, was tightened up, compressed and finessed, onto the record that became “Born To Run”, every note worked and worked until it was perfect, but I don’t think he could have gotten there without stretching out on the sprawling “Wild, Innocent…” first.

So, for me, the Brisbane show is telling. A much older man revisiting a young man’s record and, arguably, his most diverse record musically. For the most part it’s a pretty straight run, not quite a direct recreation of the album but not far off (which, don’t get me wrong, takes some serious chops to pull off). Then, towards the end of “Incident On 57th Street”, Springsteen launches into the climactic solo and something magical happens. It begins in very similar style to the record but then he finds a gorgeous new sequence, a series of intricate, melodic runs that aren’t there in 1973. It’s a really small moment but it lifts the whole run through of the album for me, beautiful evidence that his creative spark is still firing forty years later. Not for the first time he moved me to tears – happy tears – when I heard it. It’s like a thirty second salvo against fading away into old age, not just because technically and physically it’s a pretty astonishing piece to play, but because he’s still finding new things and creating new moments.

It’s a measure of my love and admiration for Springsteen that I believe I could run a list of songs, in parallel to this one, filled entirely with 42 of his records. Perhaps that’s an idea for another time. He deals in songs of joy, songs of pain, songs that demand you get up and dance, songs that ask you to sit down and reflect. There’s shade and light and tears and smiles. Fear, hope, truth, anger, remorse. And redemption. Almost always redemption.

In short all human experience and life is here. All of my life is here. It’s no accident that last year Springsteen inspired a documentary film – “Springsteen & I” – which specifically deals with people’s – his fans’ – relationship to his music. If his music touches you (and I accept that he’s an artist that doesn’t resonate for everyone) then he connects in a way unlike anyone else currently working, arguably ever working, in rock music. I use “rock” music as lazy shorthand for the eclectic stew of rock, pop, jazz, latin, soul, folk, country, blues, hell-pretty-much-whatever, that characterises his songs over the past forty or so years. I’d originally written some of this post immediately after the Dylan one (here) as there’s common ground between the two and Dylan was a hugely important influence on Springsteen. I buy the argument that without Dylan there would be no Springsteen, certainly not as we know him, but I don’t buy the argument that Dylan is the greater artist (in so much as I buy that any artist is “greater” than another, it’s not really a competition). The fundamental difference between them I think is that Dylan has no interest in being understood whereas everything Springsteen does is about making a connection, about finding a way for the themes in his songs to be recognised.

So here’s what I take from those three songs now: the willful naivety of youth and its capacity to get stuff done, just for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and the fact that age and experience needn’t deaden that capacity. Play them and walk tall.

……

This post ended up being a little light on Rosalita – officially the most fun you can have listening to a song ever – and New York City Serenade. I doubt I’d do them justice so here’s some links to just go listen to them:

Roaslita from 1978 (I think it’s ’78 anyway)

New York City Serenade from 2013

Here is a sunrise… ain’t that enough ?

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26. Ain’t That Enough ? – Teenage Fanclub

“What will you do ?”. That was the most common question and, no doubt, “what did you do ?” will be its echo when I return. I took six months out from work, six months sabbatical, and the question was always the same: what ? Sometimes people would cautiously venture into      “why ?”, wary that they were poking at something evidently personal, but it was much less common. Generally the safe question was “what ?”.

My answer was almost always the same, a vague “spend some more time with the family”, and something about getting to know my daughter’s school better. Those things were true but, six months ago, I don’t think I genuinely knew exactly what I was going to do. My answer always seemed to engender a very slight sense of disappointment in whomever had asked the question. Only very slight but just discernible. As if the answer everyone wanted to hear was something that, on the face of it, seemed more exciting: I’m going to travel the world, I’m going to base jump off the Sears Tower, I’m going to swim with wild dolphins, I’m going to write a book. And whilst those things sound great (apart from the base jumping thing, never a good look with vertigo) and I would genuinely love to do at least one of them that was never what six months out was about for me.

Some people knew I wasn’t in a great place when I decided to take the time out: this will give you some time to think they would offer gently. That wasn’t what the time became about either. Time to think has never been something I’ve been short of: it’s how I’m wired. I take Descartes to heart. I think, therefore… What had steadily crept up on me though was the old cliché about the mind being a wonderful servant but a terrible master (some more eloquent thoughts on which can be found here from David Foster Wallace via the wonderful Brain Pickings). Six months off didn’t give me a chance to think – it gave me a chance not to.

So the answer to “what…” ended up being this:

Four days a week I walked my daughter to school. Every single time it was the best twenty minutes of my day. We walk exactly the same route but she finds something new every time we walk it: a patch of snowdrops, a skip in someone’s front garden, the moon visible in the morning sky. She talks, babbling excitedly, and I listen to all the small things that are important to her – who is friends with who, why Scooby and Shaggy always have to be the bait, what she is going to play at school that day. We pretend a lot. I spend a fair amount of time being Max, her imaginary little brother, or the owner of Biscuit, an imaginary cat (obviously she is Biscuit), or someone from Star Wars. We practice spelling and she indulges my game of weaving that week’s words into the conversation seemingly by accident – “look at those flowers, what a beautiful purple…. Oh, purple – that’s one of your words, how would you spell that…. ?”. She indulges it with a roll of the eyes but indulges it nonetheless. She asks me questions that veer from the simple to the profound – what happens when people die ? why does Anakin turn to the dark side ? – and I answer as best I can. That Anakin one is pretty tricky, there’s certainly not enough in Attack Of The Clones or Revenge Of The Sith that convinces as motivation. Then we arrive at school and I watch her skip happily into the playground with scarcely a backward glance.

I cooked for my wife every week. I’m no one’s idea of a cook but every Thursday I tried to create something from scratch (my definition of scratch is quite loose). Tray baked fish is my specialty which has everything to do with the fact that it involves throwing everything into one dish and putting it in the oven. Presented rustically is what it would probably say in the review. Dolloped might appear in the same sentence. The point of my culinary misadventures wasn’t really about being any good, it was about investing time and effort and thought into the person I value above all others, the person whose empathy and support effectively gave me the gift of six months off: my wife.

I cleaned the house. I did the ironing. Went to the supermarket. Did all of the mundane, ordinary things that needed doing. I enjoyed them, enjoyed the routine, found value in the tasks in contrast to the lack of value I had been finding in my paid work. I don’t doubt that some of it was novelty, that some of it would become dull in time, but I didn’t reach that point. I actually remember thinking as I was cleaning the toilet that it felt like a better use of my time than the previous few months at work had been and if that isn’t a sign that you need some time off then I don’t know what is.

I took my daughter to swimming every week, sitting in the over heated local baths and watching her plough up and down the pool. I took her to ballet, dropping her off and then retiring to a local café with my notebook whilst she and her peers stomped around and occasionally stood in first position (presumably to distinguish what they were doing as ballet rather than just running about and randomly leaping). I chatted with the mums (and dads – but it was mostly mums) and the nannies and felt like I became part of a new community of people.

I bought a bike and started cycling. I won’t be troubling Bradley Wiggins any time soon but it did enable me to discover, on one of my meandering rides, that there’s a llama farm in the town where I live. If I’d been minded to write a diary of my sabbatical months then “Llama Farmers Of Suburbia” would have been in the running for its title. “Zen And The Art of Llama Farming” perhaps. I also took up a pilates class and discovered another new community of people. Mostly a community of middle aged ladies who routinely put me to shame in the strength and flexibility stakes. Still, not only can I now see my toes but I can also touch them without displacing something in my spine. All that stuff about exercise being good for depression ? It’s all true.

And I wrote. I didn’t write a book but I did find a way to start. I wrote 40,000 words. Some of them were quite good words and sometimes they were either preceded or succeeded by other quite good words. Rarely, a sentence would emerge that wasn’t half bad and a couple of times I think I nailed a paragraph. I discovered a lot about writing in the last six months but chiefly I discovered that the important thing – for me – to do is just to do it. Irrespective of any aspirations I might have to write a novel or make a living from writing the most important thing is to do it. Turns out it’s a part of me, an outlet for expression that is as critical for my emotional health as getting enough fruit and veg is for my physical health. Initially I grappled with writing in a public space (like this blog) given that I wanted to deal with some issues personal to me but it turns out that’s important to me too. Comments, words of encouragement, some recognition, however small, have all been hugely important to me. And deeply appreciated. If you’ve ever taken the time out to read any of this then thank you: it’s a slightly astonishing thing to me and means a great deal.

One of my stock responses when asked about my sabbatical was to say something like: “I can’t afford a Porsche and a ponytail really wouldn’t suit me so I thought I’d better have some time off instead”. A jokey acknowledgement that all of this might look a bit like a mid life crisis manifest. It didn’t answer the question as to what I was going to do nor, indeed, why I was taking the time. It was a light hearted deflection. I didn’t have a plan for the six months and, now at the end of it, I don’t regret that; I have no sense of having “wasted” time. Quite the opposite in fact. What I did and why I did it ended up having the same answer and it turned out that my vague “spend some time with the family” that I reflexively settled on before the sabbatical was right.

Experience some time might be better phrased. Experience some time, be present in those moments and not lost inside myself, and appreciate the truly important things in my life. Of course there’s been a certain amount of taking stock and a regaining of perspective as well; I’ve had time to not think but me being me there’s inevitably been some thinking. I had lost sight of what mattered to me and some time has helped bring that back to focus; my family have helped guide me home, guide me back to myself.

This morning, on the walk to school, my daughter was beside herself with happiness at the first signs of Spring, birds singing, flowers budding, and the sun in the sky. It wasn’t the first time in recent months that I’ve found the irony in life chucking me another free metaphor (watching Disney’s Frozen at the cinema and having way too much empathy with the lead character’s emotional repression and resultant disaster was my personal favourite) and I’m sure there will be ups and downs to come – there are as many winters as there are springs after all. But those moments are enough. They might be all there is. You probably all knew that anyway, I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. Teenage Fanclub had it right all along.

You know the deuce is still wild

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25. Tumbling Dice – The Rolling Stones

The point of the 42 is not to rate things and, as a rule, I fight shy of reckoning one particular record as “better” than another. It usually strikes me as a false comparison, like saying tomatoes are better than cucumbers, or red is better than green.

I will make an exception here.

“Exile On Main Street” is the greatest rock and roll album ever recorded. It is. I’m happy to discuss it but, to paraphrase the late, great Brian Clough, we’ll talk about it for twenty minutes and then agree that I’m right. Or I’ll just play you “Tumbling Dice” and four minutes later we’ll agree that I’m right.

There has been a distinct lack of swagger in my list of records so far. Plenty of late night navel gazing, plenty of bottom-of-the-glass laments to what might have been and plenty of reflective moments of sobriety. You can stack the previous 23 records in all their contemplative angst ridden glory up against this and it redresses the balance on its own.

This is swagger writ large. It’s savouring the taste of draining your glass and not staring mournfully at the bottom of it but sliding it across the bar for another. It’s sexy as hell and, for its duration, will convince you that you’re sexy as hell too. It’s suss and street smarts and it’s never going home at the end of the night alone. Burn your copy of “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway”. Buy this record, play it often, and let it arm you with its unshakeable confidence.

This is my favourite Friday night song. It’s my job interview song. It was my yes-I’m-going-to-call-her song. It is guaranteed to get me onto any dance floor irrespective of the deteriorating state of my surgery sodden knees. Moves like Jagger ?  You better believe it. Doesn’t matter if you don’t ‘cos the magic of this song is that it makes you believe. Honestly I suspect that I look like a constipated, arthritic peacock when I sashay around my house to this, hips shaking, hands clapping, head nodding in a strut. I suspect that’s the reality but I don’t believe the reality. I believe the myth this song creates for me. I am a dancefloor god made flesh when this song plays. This – and follow these links, they will make your life better – is me. And this. Maybe even this.

There’s a whole lot of stuff I could write about “Exile…”. The villa in Nellcote. Tax exile. Marianne Faithful. Gram Parsons. Recording all night in the basement and sleeping all day: the sunshine bores the daylights outta me indeed. It’s a great story – go read about it, Robert Greenfield’s “Exile: A Season In Hell With The Rolling Stones” is as good a place to start as any. But a detailed and sober analysis of this record – of this song in particular – just isn’t in keeping with the spirit of what it does for me. There’s no thinking. It’s all feel. (Now we’re paraphrasing Bruce Lee).

This song works in the gut, in the feet, especially in the hips, and the only thing it asks your head to do is nod appreciably. It’s the exact opposite of everything Marillion are about from the last post. Try having sex to a Marillion record. Those time signatures are all wrong. Try having sex to “Tumbling Dice”. Notice the difference ? Now try “Ventilator Blues”. Oh my god. Charlie Watts sliding in just behind the beat. That’s the best sex you’ve ever had in your life.

You can’t blame the Stones for everything that happened after this record. For Aerosmith. For hair metal. For Dogs D’Amour. I don’t even really blame them for becoming the corporate brand that they are now – would be interesting to know what Keith would have said to you if you’d told him in 1972 that he’d wind up playing a caricature of himself in a kids film about pirates because one of the other pirates was modeled on him. I imagine he would have – as in my all time favourite Keith clip on the internet – chopped the mother down.

You can’t blame them because once they were the best band on the planet. I’ve long since frozen them in time and the Stones exist for me as their ’69-’74 incarnation. The one that makes me move and makes me feel more alive.

Keep the rest of my life away

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24. Fantastic Place – Marillion

Marillion are probably the least “cool” band in the UK. Certainly the least covered in the mainstream music press these days considering the size of their fan base. I suspect they don’t care and more power to them for that. They were a big, big band for me as a teenager, presumably hooked in by “Kayleigh” in ’87 (some fine hair in that video) and then going backwards into the first two albums, “Script For A Jester’s Tear” and “Fugazi”. I don’t actually remember my route in but it must have been via the singles from “Misplaced Childhood” – they were probably the archetypal “handed down from older brother” kind of band but I didn’t have an older brother. I do vaguely recall liking a girl called Hayley at around the same time and I’m trying hard to suppress a memory of changing the chorus to “Kayleigh”* to fit my unreciprocated love. Sadly, a recurring theme of my teenage years. The lack of reciprocation, not the changing of lyrics to the chart hits of the day…

To fully immerse myself in this post I decided to listen to all of their studio albums, in order, up to and including “Marbles”, from which “Fantastic Place” is taken. That’s 13 records. It took me a couple of days and I did cheat a bit on day 2 when I had to listen to something else just to break things up. What struck me was the disconnect in my head between the two versions of Marillion – with Fish, with Steve Hogarth – and the reality. Fish era Marillion was the one that I grew up with and I was still a fan during the transition as Hogarth became the vocalist – in fact, the only line up I’ve seen live was with Hogarth round about “Season’s End” and “Holidays In Eden”. I still think of the band’s output as split roughly equally between the two singers but in actuality Marillion has long ceased to be Fish’s band. Albums with Fish: four. Albums without Fish: thirteen (counting the “Less Is More” acoustic re-workings album).

I lost track of the band just after “Holidays In Eden”, the second post Fish record. Listening back to it now it has its moments but it’s a little polite, particularly for my tastes back in 1991 when I was in thrall to fuzzed guitars and singing wasn’t singing unless it was a cathartic scream for understanding. Ironically the follow up, “Brave” is a fine record – a concept album about a girl found wandering on the Severn Bridge, unaware of who she is or how she got there – and I should have given it more of a chance back in ’94 when it came out.

There’s then a run of five albums between ’95 and ’01 which I’d never heard. This run also marks the point at which the band moved away from a traditional record label model for recording and distributing their music towards an ahead-of-its-time version of fan funding. I don’t know if they did it first but Marillion were certainly doing Kickstarter before anyone had even heard of Kickstarter. There’s an interesting Tedx talk from Mark Kelly (the band’s keyboardist) on crowdfunding on the band site: here.

Hearing these records for the first time, in sequence, was an enjoyable experience. A few songs popped out straight away as warranting further attention and “This Strange Engine”, in particular, as a complete album is one that I will go back to. Marillion don’t tend to write immediate songs though so repeated listens often repay; it’s music to sit and soak in rather than stuff to stick on in the background while you’re doing something else.

Those five take us up to “Marbles”. About three years ago I had noticed that a friend (who had been a fellow Marillion fan at school) had been listening to a couple of their songs that were unfamiliar to me – via last.fm, the marvelous music-meets-stats website (my profile is here). This piqued my curiousity and I found the songs on a streaming site. One of them would have been “Neverland” which I immediately fell in love with and subsequently ordered the album direct from Marillion.com. Who says streaming services don’t work ? Artist royalties is perhaps a debate for another time…

“Marbles” is a wonderful record. Built loosely around recurring themes of madness, escape and the loss of childhood innocence it showcases the band at its best – I think it’s their career highpoint (although “Clutching At Straws” from the Fish era is also a brilliant record). Those recurring themes, eagle eyed regular readers of this blog will have observed, are like cat nip for me but they wouldn’t be enough on their own for the record to resonate. Sometimes, for me, like quite a lot of what you might term prog, Marillion can lose the balance between a song and something that extends for its own sake. Sometimes the sounds don’t seem to be going anywhere. That never happens on “Marbles”. Never happens on the 13 minute opener “The Invisible Man”, never happens on 12 minute closer “Neverland”. And even never happens during the 17 minutes and 57 seconds of “Ocean Cloud”. Everything here, every note on this record, is perfectly judged, immaculately played, and serves each song. There’s nothing extraneous which is no mean feat given the length of the album.

There are four or five tracks on the record that I really love, particularly the stellar closer “Neverland” (well worth your time, linked on the Neverland reference above) but “Fantastic Place” is the one I have taken refuge in more times than I care to remember. Sunk into it and let it spirit me away. A song about escape that I use to escape.

As is becoming a recurring theme in this list my relationship with the song doesn’t rest on a literal read of the lyrics although there are themes here which resonate, notably about opening yourself up to somebody (say you understand me and I will leave myself completely; I’ll tell you all I never told you, the boy I never showed you) and the idea of release from everyday life (take me to the island, show me what might be real life; put your arms around my soul and take it dancing). This song, for me, is all about how it builds. It’s similar in some ways to where we started, way back with Warren Zevon and “Desperados Under The Eaves” – a self contained journey from disillusionment to the potential of something better.

“Fantastic Place” is a slow burner, from the muted, subdued opening – Hogarth almost murmuring the verse – through choruses that progressively grow in scope musically; it swells like a wave building until finally breaking into the bridge. That section as the bridge lyrics run over into the guitar solo (say you understand me and I will leave myself completely, forgive me if I stare but I can see the island behind your tired, troubled eyes) is breathtaking. It’s not rare for a song to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up but it is rare for the same song to do it, in the same place in the song, every single time I hear it.

Then we’re into Rothery’s gorgeous solo (his playing throughout “Marbles” is exquisite) before the song just continues to soar through to its close. Hogarth’s vocals on this track are also worthy of special mention, particularly in the very final section where he pulls off a performance that’s technically spot on (in so far as these ears can tell such things) but that wrenches something genuine out of his guts. I deliberately posted a live version at the top of this as it’s worth watching Hogarth perform it and his reaction to the song as it finishes – he is utterly lost in it and it’s a touching moment seeing him almost return to the room, back from wherever the song has taken him.

There is a magic in this song, a transformative, transportative magic. Strong enough to make up the word transportative and strong enough to carry me away when I need to be carried away.

* Given that Fish allegedly wrote “Kayleigh” about an ex girlfriend called “Kay Leigh” I think I’m in good company. She’ll never guess, Fish.

Here we are now, entertain us

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23. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana (The Spam Ducks / Brian Clough)

I know, I know. Too obvious, right ? Well, I kind of agree but it’s not on the list, not entirely at least, for the obvious reasons. It’s here as much for the, ahem, spirited cover version of it that I was once involved in as it is for kicking in the door to the mainstream for a slew of US alternative bands in the early 90s.

There’s a whole host of musical “scenes” that I could lay claim to have been part of. Part of in the sense of associating with, using as a badge of identity, rather than literally being part of obviously – there isn’t about to be a big reveal wherein I announce that I was actually the bassist in Buffalo Tom. Any of the following would have just about fallen into my later formative years:  Madchester, acid house, the tail end of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (sort of), glam / hair metal, and stretching it a bit, C86 if I’d started early and Britpop if I’d started late. Whilst there were bits in all of those that I loved at various stages, including a long infatuation with Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” which baffles me now, I never really felt like I belonged to any of them. For me it was all about the explosion of primarily American bands that emerged in the late 80s and early 90s playing, for want of a better term, alternative rock. Key reference points would include Pixies, Throwing Muses, Belly, Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Buffalo Tom, and Pavement, as well as people like Teenage Fanclub, Ride, and The Wedding Present from the UK.

At around the same time – 1990 to be precise – I began to learn to play the guitar. Play probably isn’t the right verb. Work would be closer, for both me and anyone unfortunate enough to be listening. I learned – in those heady days before any of us had the internet – via correspondence with a friend who used to send me little chord diagrams in the post, gradually progressing to a sort of rudimentary tablature. He’d gone on to University, along with most of my school friends, whilst I waited another year to do fun things like retake a couple of exams and have knee surgery. That year did give me the time and inclination to pick up the guitar though so perhaps these things happen for a reason.

I think the first song I could vaguely bash my way through was “My Favourite Dress” by The Wedding Present but playing guitar also meant that I could begin to relieve myself of vocal duties in the finest band ever to emerge from the villages of the South Gloucestershire area. I’ve relived the glory days of The Muppets elsewhere in this blog but they were not the first band I was a part of. No, that honour belongs to The Spam Ducks who later morphed into Brian Clough. Not literally.

The Ducks / Clough had various line ups over a period of a couple of years but was principally the result of the friendship between three of us – Ian, Russ and myself. Those are their real names. I feel they should shoulder as much responsibility for this as me. The band was an excuse for us to mess around and entertain our friends – we would periodically put on a show at a local village hall. On very, very rare occasions we convinced ourselves that we sounded okay. We had a certain ramshackle charm perhaps, often depending on who we’d persuaded to play drums (never underestimate the power of a good drummer to make a bad band sound okay). I think we mainly did it to make each other laugh and, on that score, we were the greatest band in rock history.

As none of us could really play that well we ended up having more of our own songs than covers; we usually couldn’t play the covers. Song writing involved someone coming up with three chords – some variation on D C G proving especially popular – and someone else turning up with a set of lyrics. I say lyrics… Quite often I think a good idea for a song title arising from something we found funny was then stretched out beyond the point of absurdity. So our set typically included: “Washing Machine On My Mind” (it’s tough on dirt, it’s not kind), “Soap On A Rope” (sitting in my bathtub, it’s not a tin one), “Fishfinger” (genuinely with no adolescent sex-gag connotations – it was about fishfingers that you, you know, eat), and “Alan” (Alan, I’d rather drink a gallon… of beer… than have you near…). “Soap On A Rope” was actually a pretty good little punk song.

When we did venture into cover versions it was typically something by The Wedding Present which was helpful in that a) most of the songs were three chords, b) the vocals don’t require much by way of singing ability, and c) no one in the audience really knew the songs anyway. That all changed when we decided to take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, one of the biggest songs of 1991 and so called anthem for Generation X. So how did we approach Kurt Cobain’s sarcastic, contradictory call for teenage revolution ?

We did it sat in large, high backed armchairs with Ian reciting the lyrics in a bluff Northern accent (part Mark E Smith, part Python Four Yorkshireman sketch). There may have been an odd call and response element to the “hello” “hello” bit leading into the chorus involving waving. It is fair to say that we made the song our own. I think Kurt would have approved. If Bill Drummond had done it people would have called it art.

That was one of our last performances and who knows what we might have gone on to accomplish ? We were definitely branching out into experimental territory – we had supported ourselves at that gig as The Living Carpets (stolen entirely from Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer) and performed the theme song to children’s TV show “Heathcliff” with large pieces of carpet taped around our heads. I guess to an outsider it would have looked like kids making a godawful racket, full of in jokes and nonsense but for us it was just hugely fun. Part of the point, as well, was to provide some entertainment for our friends – even if sometimes they got to laugh at us rather than with us – and hopefully we managed a little of that too.

I don’t listen to “Teen Spirit” very often anymore. Don’t listen to “Nevermind” much to be honest – time hasn’t been kind to the production and I think “In Utero” is a far superior record. For a long time though Nirvana were really important to me. It sounds kind of sad but I can strongly recall hearing the news about Cobain’s death and I was affected by it. That was still no excuse for spending a couple of years trying unsuccessfully to ape his hairstyle though. To everyone that witnessed it: I am truly sorry.

When I do listen to “Teen Spirit” now I tend to remember Russ struggling to switch his distortion pedal off, hear Ian bellowing “hello hello” like he’s Graham Chapman at the start of the Spanish Inquisition skit, and see a group of old school friends staring at us in a mixture of amusement and bemusement. It makes me smile.