Category Archives: Flotsam Jetsam

O.

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It never usually felt like the end, the close of another cycle, but this Autumn, the one after she’d gone, hit hard. I couldn’t blame her. God knows I’d tried but I really couldn’t. I fell too fast and too hard. And you had warned me that you wouldn’t, couldn’t. That if you fell, when you fell – you sensed that you probably would – that you’d descend gently, carefully. That you’d only just picked up your own pieces after last time you lost your footing and tumbled into something too quickly. It wasn’t that I didn’t listen but I couldn’t do anything about it. I went head over heels and figured I’d wait for you to catch me up. It’s a hard thing to fall like that, so suddenly, so violently, and to turn around reaching for the person who tripped you up, thinking that they’d be right there beside you, dusting themselves down, and to discover that they’re not. You were off balance but steadying yourself. I was splattered all over the pavement.

I’m not making excuses. I know that you could never understand how my feelings seemed to wither, just as this seasons’ leaves lay scattered like rust inflected relics of summer’s faded glory. And I’m sorry to wax lyrical. You never warmed to all that poetic stuff, early on when I was pouring my heart out. Or at least I didn’t think that you did but turns out the truth of it was that it did touch you, found a part of you that you’d locked up, stashed away so it was safe. I guess it was some of that stuff that helped you pick your way down to me. I took the short cut – pitched myself head first, head long into what I hoped was your heart. Knocked the breath out of myself in exhilaration. You were careful with what you considered precious. You were slow to love but it ran deep and left its mark – I was the wave, all crashing energy and pulled off my feet, and you were the steady, inexorable, relentless drop of water. My wave got us soaked but left no real mark in time. You etched yourself in stone.

But I was hurt. I was too exposed too soon and never understood your reticence. And you say that’s not fair and that I should grow up and that I should have waited and that if it was real it’d have lasted. And you’re right. But I was hurt and those feelings slipped away, silently stealing off into the night just as you were ready to take the final steps down to me. We should have held hands together and leaped. Or I should have taken your hand and we could have picked our way down slowly, together. Is that all love is ? Two people ready to fall at the same time, at the same rate ? It was too fast for you. It was too slow for me. By Autumn it was done.

And time forgets…

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And time, in time, forgets

Those misspent days,

Those might-have-beens,

Those regrets.

 

And time, in time, forgets

Those fragile steps

in sand. The hourglass turn, the crimson stain

Our last sunset.

 

And time, in time, forgets

Empire, edifice, our grand designs

Those temporary marks we made as

We placed our temporary bets.

 

And time, in time, forgot

That we were here

Were we here ?

Time remembers not.

When I grow up

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I’m three years in to this blog now and have sporadically produced an end-of-year round up of my favourite records at year end. Okay, I’ve done it once. This will make it twice. Two out of three ain’t bad as Meatloaf wisely attests.

There’s no getting past the fact that it’s been a dreadful year. The world has gotten uglier, more stupid, and less tolerant. Irrespective of your personal perspective on, say, Brexit or Trump it’s been a  year characterised by a dearth of reasoned, fact based, rational discourse. We are all a little poorer and democracy is ill served by a toxic environment where lies stand as truth and dissenting voices are shouted down as traitors.

In “normal” circumstances the dumbing down and drift (lurch) right of our politics would have been enough to tip this year into the debit column. And, sure, we lost some fine people too. Bowie, Cohen, Prince. How’d I get through the 42 records thing without room for any of them ? All of that marked 2016 as rotten. But all of that, personally, ended up being nothing.

I lost my mum this year. I’m old enough at 44 to have known her a long time. In brighter moments I take some comfort in that but it’s only been three and a half months and there haven’t been many brighter moments. I’ve written about loss and grief elsewhere in these pages and it has seemed an easier thing for me to access or articulate in the abstract. I have exhausted metaphors involving the sea or the weather but it’s interesting that they were the props I reached for. There is something vast and overwhelming about the loss of a parent, even as an adult, that means you reach for things equally vast. I’ve written about depression a lot on these pages as well and there’s some equivalence in the feelings but they’re not the same. I guess the symptoms present in the same way but the root cause is different. Mum used to read my words and I suspect they were a route in to her hearing from me, understanding me. I’ve never been a great talker. I don’t regret. I can’t change the way I’m wired but I hope (I think) that she knew me a bit better as an adult by reading my ramblings about records and my sporadic, random stories. I miss her as my best reader but most of all I miss her as my mum. She was the best one anyone could have.

So my three stand out records of the year (the year being when I experienced them and not necessarily when they came out) entirely reflect all of the above. First up, Marillion’s FEAR (Fuck Everyone And Run) deals in an angry, anxious reaction to the banking crisis, to changes in global politics, to a world in which divisions between rich and poor deepen and grow. It’s breathtakingly good. Broad in scope but personal and relatable, musically rich, technical but emotional. It won’t get much credit in the end-of-year lists because Marillion have long been abandoned by the mainstream music press but it’s a remarkable statement and a career high for a band that have already scaled a few anyway.

Second is Nick Cave’s “Skeleton Tree”. It was released after the death of his son (and partially written after that event, though not entirely) and is devastating. I’m not sure in any other year whether I’d have had the appetite to listen to Skeleton Tree very much. It’s too raw and too painful but I found it a conduit for my own feelings. A lot of stuff felt very trite this year in comparison to “real life” and this record was anything but.

And finally there’s Tim Minchin’s “Matilda” soundtrack/score and, in particular, the song “When I Grow Up”. The musical is an utter delight and I think I found its overtly clever lyrics a tonic in this post-truth year of all years. I’m well aware that the musical particularly speaks to me as a father of a smart, sensitive daughter and that I have become overly sentimental in my middle-ish age. However, “When I Grow Up” kinda sums up the year for me. On the face of it it’s a singalong call to be older, to get to “eat sweets every day” and do what you like – the imagined liberation of being an adult from a child’s perspective. Inevitably it’s more complex than that and I can’t listen to the song without feeling an extraordinary sense of sadness and pathos in the lines about being old enough to carry all the things you have to carry as a grown up, about being able to fight off the monsters under the bed when you’re a grown up. There are lots of markers of being a “grown up”. Formal ones like turning 18 or 21. Or informal ones like buying your first home or getting married or having children. Or losing your mum. I wish, I really wish, that you did get to easily fight off the monsters under the bed when you grow up and I really, really wish you learned to carry all of things you have carry but it’s not as straightforward as that. This year they all got a lot heavier. This year I got to be a grown up and I’d give anything to be able to be a child again.
Go listen if you’re so minded. They’re all great records although none will make the playlists at many Christmas parties. But it hasn’t been that kind of year.

Words nobody reads

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We are the words nobody reads,

The wounds you don’t notice because they don’t bleed.

We are the sentences you ignore, paragraphs you discard,

We are the hidden, the invisible, the scarred.

 

We are the words nobody reads,

Scratched and scribbled on pages, the messages you don’t heed.

We are the letters you never opened, emails you ignore,

We are the broken and damaged in search of a cure.

 

We are the words nobody reads,

The maddening march of madness our self chatter feeds.

We are the fractured fragments, the anxious and edgy lines,

We are the imperfect, something remiss between execution and design.

 

We carry our words unwritten and unread

But they shout to us within self-sabotaging minds: louder than peace.

On paper, untrapped, they lie benign and quiet,

Released.

You read.

The undertow

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You see the wave coming,

And you brace for its embrace.

Wedge your feet into sand, toes curled round sea smoothed stone

And stand before the swell and the break.

 

You see the wave coming,

But the impact still shocks.

And you rock, numb, breathless, on heels,

Taste salt on your lips and shake your eyes clear.

 

You don’t see the undertow.

 

Not as you’re drenched in the spray and fighting for balance and finding your footing and struggling to stand and

 

You don’t see the undertow.

 

You feel the undertow pulling and

Your firm footing starts sliding grain by grain away from your feet

And stones catch your ankles as they beat an urgent retreat

And you notice the pulse of the sea and your own staccato heartbeat

And the next wave is rising and rising and rising

And standing up to the first one, that short lived victory,

Now just feels like defeat.

 

You feel the undertow calling

And it whispers to let it seduce you

To enfold you in its eternal and endless depth.

 

Siren’s don’t always give warning.

 

We are home now

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It resumed, as befits a great love affair, on a hot summer’s night. Not quite the Valentine’s anniversary that would have knitted together the last twenty three years perfectly but after so long what’s a few months between old lovers ? It resumed in London. Leicester was a hazy memory of long fringes, short sleeved tee-shirts over long sleeved tee-shirts, and long afternoons in bars stretching into longer nights in clubs and watching bands.

She brought her mates again. They’d not been together for a while but the easy camaraderie and friendship was still there: a little gang against the world, like all the best bands. I turned up alone. She was still cool, confident, talented and sassy. And now she was wise and warm too. I was no longer growing out a haircut turned bad. After several missteps from our first encounter I’d settled on something suitably respectable: greying, sensible, unremarkable. I probably should have had a better sense of who I was by now. Maybe I did. Some days I’m not so sure. She was from Boston, Mass. I was from Amersham, Bucks. Twenty three years ago it probably wasn’t meant to be and I guess now that will never change.

Earlier on this blog I wrote about seeing Belly in Leicester back in ’93. You can read that here: https://42at42.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/you-cant-change-the-unchangeably-untogether/. Last night they returned to the UK for a series of reunion dates and, spoiler alert, it was glorious.

As I wrote then there are some bands that you just get. They’re playing at relatively small venues – this isn’t a cash in tour by any means – but they’re all packed out with devotees who probably never thought they’d see them again. I’ve rarely seen an audience so on side with the people on stage. Everyone who was there gets them. There’s just something in those circular, dreamlike, chiming riffs and something in those vocal ticks and trills and something in those lyrics – man, those dark and twisted and beautiful lyrics – and something in those shout along melodies and choruses. They were woven into the fabric of my 20s and I can trace the stitches back across the last twenty years. There are parts of me that those songs spoke to, still speak to, and always will.

We got the singles. “Feed The Tree”, “Gepetto”, “Now They’ll Sleep”, “Super Connected” (a riotous version: they pack more of a punch than I remember). There are a few sound problems but dynamically they were always a tough band for an engineer to pin down: from the quietest whisper in the ear to a roar and back again inside of a verse and chorus. But you know what ? It didn’t matter. We got some lesser known gems, brilliant versions of “Spaceman” and “Thief” (this post’s “we are home now” borrowing its refrain). We got most of “Star” and we got most of “King”. The songs from the latter, in particular, came across really well – a wonderful “Judas My Heart”,  a delicate “The Bees”, a joyous stomp through “Red”. We got two new songs and they offered huge promise although given Tanya Donelly’s solo and recent collaborative songwriting that really wasn’t a surprise.

There were several on stage references – mainly from bassist Gail on usual hilarious form – to reliving the 90s but the thing that struck me over and above everything was just how well the songs had weathered. They don’t sound especially like a stuck-in-the-90s band; that just happened to be when these songs first surfaced. I’m hoping they decide to surface some more now that they’re back playing together again.

Finally, we got “Stay”. Writing about the performance in ’93 I described it as a soaring, spine-tingling, heart-bursting-out-of-your-chest kind of song. I wasn’t wrong then and time has not dimmed its power. Emotionally it was a curious evening in many ways – a revisitation of people we used to be, catching up with ourselves and remembering some former, formative versions of ourselves. Mostly it was a straightforward expression of joy. “Stay” stopped me in my tracks just like it did all those years ago. There’s all sorts of personal reasons why hearing T sing “it’s not time for me to go” cut me to the core and that was the moment, right there at the end, that Belly had me in tears. I’ve a long and distinguished record of crying at concerts but this was the strangest mix of happy tears for what had been and sad ones for some things to come.

Then they were gone. If falling in love, all those years ago, was about possibilities and being at peace, then rekindling that love was about all of the things that love is really about: constance and comfort and fun and feeling like you’re home. Oh, and singing fragile ballads but also rocking like bastards.

We are home now.

Purple

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It came in a rush that you couldn’t stop.
An outpouring from every fibre, leeching out of your skin.
An out-poring.
A creative rainbow burst of words and sounds and shapes and rhythms…
…and they called you a genius. And you shrugged.
Is a genius just someone who comes to the world unfiltered, raw, unaltered, and pure ?
…and they called you a virtuoso. And you shrugged.
Is it virtuosity to breathe ? It came as naturally – as easily – as breath.
…and you stopped calling yourself anything at all. And I guess you shrugged.
Why wear a name when you’re in the business of transcendence. Right ?
When you live in the rush that you can’t stop.
When it’s pouring and pouring and pouring from every pore.
When there is no gap between the art and the life and the life and the art.
When you’re bursting with words and sounds and shapes and rhythms.
They’ll remember your name. Whatever it wasn’t. Whatever it was.

Then came the morning

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It’s too early for record-of-the-year proclomations but what the hell.

I spent the best part of a year writing about 42 records and concluded nothing more dramatic than the fact that savouring and appreciating moments was kind of important. A realisation that, for me, music has quite often been a short cut to that: a life hack to suspend thought, banish anxiety, and mainline emotion. It seemed like a hard won lesson, worked out over 40 odd thousand words, and one that I’m guessing wiser folk than me have had sussed for some time. A hard won lesson but one that bears refreshing.

Saw The Lone Bellow at the 100 Club last night. I love the album they put out this year – also called “Then Came The Morning” – and also love their self-titled debut. They’re both exceptionally well crafted slices of whatever we’re calling folk-country-Americana these days: you know, music involving lots of variously numbered stringed instruments. Music that, in the past few years, has moved from being a niche concern to something of a serious mainstream proposition as a genre. So much so that, inevitably, there’s a fair amount of by-the-numbers records being released – country even seems to have spawned its own Dallas-esque TV soap in “Nashville”.

The Lone Bellow make their way through the audience at the 100 Club – got to love those venues where the only route to the stage is through your crowd – and launch straight into “Then Came The Morning”. It is obvious within the first four bars that it is going to be a special night and that they are a special band. You can’t fake heart or soul or guts and from first note to last the band are, for want of a better word, real. There’s no artifice. Whether they’re ripping the place up through “Heaven Don’t Call Me Home” or breaking everyone’s heart on “Marietta” or inspiring a hushed audience singalong at the close of “You Never Need Nobody” all of it is anchored in something true.

They’ve got technical chops to die for. I was literally laughing at how absurdly good a singer Zach Williams was last night. First song, utterly slayed it. And then the three part harmonies kicked in and progressively his bandmates, Brian Elmquist and Kanene Pipkin, get their chance to lead a song and laughter dissolves to mild hysteria as it transpires that all three of them are equally good. Individually sensational and together stunning. But it’s not the technical prowess that elevates them beyond the mass of acoustic country-tinged bands working now: it’s the heart and the energy and the passion. Something ineffable.

It is, I guess, slightly hackneyed to talk about music in spiritual terms but on the other hand perhaps there’s good reason why the two often slot together. Spiritual in the broadest sense. In the horizon expanding, inspiring, uplifting, purging, foot stomping, chest beating, heart stopping, life affirming sense. On those terms something spiritual happened in a famous, pokey little club on Oxford Street last night. In very simple terms it was a moment that made me glad to be alive.

Brilliant, brilliant band. Go see them if you can. Buy the records if you can’t. And shortcut yourself to some of those moments worth savouring. That’s all there is.

Lies, damn lies and statistics: this blog in 2014

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.