Music please (nothing at all to do with Fulham)

Proceed at your peril…

On Tuesday morning one of the kids who gets my train had his usual ipod session interrupted.  He’s a big lad, Michelin man build, an innocent looking face that’s half-surly and half-bemused.  Looks like he’d be nice to his grandparents.   He was interrupted by a young girl, about the same age.  She was tiny, but radiant, the sort of girl people like, no questions asked.  And the Michelin kid’s face just lit up.  He was nervous, moving his head a lot, looking at the floor, but really happy.  They chatted for a while before getting on the train, at which point I lost sight of them.  Nice, I thought.  He’s normally on his own in the morning, listening to his music like most of us. This interruption seems to have cheered him up no end.

That evening there was some sort of local dance team waiting for commuters outside the tube station.  They had music going to promote some exercise schemes, and a few of the girls were dancing with the public.  One man, about fifty, he was right into it.  He had taken off his suit and was twirling one of the girls around.  She was a blonde, like the girl from the platform earlier, but she didn’t look at all happy.  It seemed to me that the commuter was overdoing it, that he’d been given a free dance with a pretty girl half his age and he’d taken too much, as we often do when offered good things for free.  His blonde wanted the interaction to stop.  But on they danced, for all the time it took me to walk past them and cross the road.

Two different surprise blondes, both greatly appreciated by their companions, but one happy, in the moment, one wishing she could be somewhere else.   The music went off in the morning, but was on too long in the evening.

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“If life is a performance and I am not an actor, am I supposed to lie down and die?”

Bad teenage poetry, right?  Well no.  I was at university in the mid-nineties.  I had a television in my room, as I recall it was in a wardrobe covered in clothes.  The reasons for this were that I had not got the hang of hanging clothes up on hangers so kind of lobbed them in there, and that I possibly didn’t have a license, and campus regulations regarding TV licenses were ambiguous, so I felt a need to be prudent.

One night I turned it on after the pub and watched The Word.  Trash TV for drunk people.  But there was a new face, a mop haired guitar player, chugging guitars, bashful but with the voice of an angel.  It was Juliana Hatfield.  I bought her album.  I love it, she’s brilliant.   But underappreciated.

Once an indie darling, her records didn’t sell as well as her first major label (Atlantic) had hoped, so she found herself on the scrap heap almost as quickly as she’d made the big time in the first place.  A few self-made records have found their way to us since, but for all their brilliance, the magic of those 90s heroics has not quite been recaptured.  While the new records may be better, the listener is different: I was 18 and full of angst and stupidity in the 90s; I’m 33 now and I have no idea what’s going on, but I think I’ve moved on from the angst.   It does tend to lessen the impact of lyrics.  I can’t listen to a clever phrase now and think “yes! That’s me!” like I used to.  Perhaps this is why we gravitate towards other musical styles as we get older.  Perhaps stability in our personal life calms down the angst neurons.

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“You say the magic’s gone but I’m not a magician
You say the spark’s gone well get an electrician”

Indeed.  Sometimes problems are just there and can’t really be solved.  You just have to ride them out.  I’m reading Sidetracked by Henning Mankell at the moment, and Kurt Wallander, the main detective, has just reminded himself to let his thoughts breath, to be patient with them, to see what they turn into.  This seems wise to me.

Massive Attack vocalists include:

Shara Nelson
Tricky
Liz Fraser (from the Cocteau Twins)
Martina Topley-Bird
Sinead O’Conner
Dot Allison
Horace Andy

There’s some serious singing there.   Alright, Tricky doesn’t sing, he mumbles, but you’ll know Liz Fraser’s bits from Mezzanine, when she did Teardrop and others.  Martina Topley-Bird is the female vocal on Tricky’s unbelievable Maxinquaye album, and a solo artist in her own right.  Dot Allison isn’t what I thought she might be, but she wrote Tomorrow Never Comes, which is quite good.

In 2002 I had a bootleg Juliana Hatfield CD which contained this song performed live, and it was too moving.  Hade and I had just split up, my life was a mess.  I listened to this and felt even sadder.  Wallowed.  I had stopped listening to music before we broke up.  Afterwards I did little else.  What was I saying about a lack of angst?  Ha.  Nothing much changes I suppose.  Still a soppy bastard at heart.  And now – we’re back together – I listen to music all day at work, and during the commute both ways.  My ears are surely doomed.

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“What have I… What have I… What have I done to deserve this?

We live in a flat below a man whose musical tastes stopped evolving in 1989.  He listens to a lot of Duran Duran.  Sometimes he jumps ahead to Coldplay, but mostly it’s 80s crap.  It pounds through our ceiling, and usually we ignore it.  But the rule is that if I can make out what the song is (rather than just hearing an annoying bass-line) I whack the ceiling with a baseball bat.  Then he plods forlornly across the floor above and turns it down.

We’re constantly worried that he’s only doing this because *we’re* too loud.  I don’t think we are, but it is possible?  We need only to get out of bed in the morning and he turns his radio on.  Sometimes I get up in the night. His radio’s on then too, audible through the ceiling.  Luckily we sleep in a room which juts out beyond his flat, so in this one part of the flat we are guaranteed peace from his dirge, but still.  Why is he like this?

The obvious answer would be to ask him, to talk things through like grown ups, but we avoid him and he avoids us.  There have been too many baseball bat whacks now.  It would be uncomfortable.  The relationship is broken.   But still he plays Duran Duran too loudly.  Perhaps the music of Duran Duran means as much to him as the music of Juliana Hatfield means to me.  Perhaps he once loved a girl called Rio.  Perhaps he once had a goldfish called “The Reflex”.  Perhaps he’s just an idiot.

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I once listened to John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” all night on repeat during a Dublin thunderstorm.  It was a Friday and I couldn’t sleep.  It was like being transported to another world.   It required the rain to come at a special angle to really ram my windows.  It required thin windows for maximum ratter-tatter-tattering.  It required an inspired choice of CD and a strange life stage where nihilism and narcissism were at dreadful but quite enjoyable peaks.   I’ve never had that same feeling before or since.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

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As I type this Jim Morrison is warbling away behind me. “When the music’s over” he sings, “turn out the lights”.    Too true, Jim, too true.