A Love/Hate Relationship
I don’t know about you but to me it happens in towering peaks and sheer, cavernous troughs. Sometimes, wholeheartedly believing I’m this tiny integral cog in a beautiful golden music making machine, I’m amazed that words and tunes I hear in my head and those others hear in theirs can somehow be crafted and shaped from notes and syllables into actual songs and stories that people who’ve never even met you would go out of their way to hear. A bizarre thing is music; subjective and massively personal yet at the same time inclusive and all-encompassing.
Remembering with goose-pimples precisely why ‘The Masterplan’ means so much to me and then realizing that it means something completely different to millions of other people, many of whom will probably hate it, and wondering if someone somewhere will get even a tenth of that polar feeling from a song that wouldn’t exist if my band or someone else’s hadn’t spent their own time in a dingy little room working out how to play it.
A tiny ripple in a pond that’s full of them, all bouncing off and reacting to each other, in a pattern that wouldn’t be the same were it not for each and every one. At these times, usually around the five or six pint mark, I feel honoured and privileged to have been given this love of an artform that, in terms of natural selection, is wonderfully pointless. I pick up Big Bertha, my cheap and cheerful Jazz bass with a jaunty flick and cannot wait to play to the next empty room full of nameless, despondent faces sunk deep into the shadows.
Other times, when there’s this stifling knot-stomached melancholy over the obvious futility of it all, I wish the whole business would just leave me well alone. What the holy fuck am I doing with my life?
I speak to people I went to school with and they have well-paid jobs, kids, life experiences and a mosaic of stamps in their passports. I should grow up, get a proper job, learn how to drive and enjoy being able to afford cars, mouse-less flats, TV’s with working buttons, bank account balances without a ‘-‘ before the value, a suit-and-shirt-day with fresh crisp clean pants, watches, decent haircuts, gym memberships, ISAs, holidays, fiancés and engagement rings, a first step on the property ladder, colour patterns, a modest yet grossly ostentatious wedding, barbequeues, university trust funds, choose life, choose a mortgage, choose patio decking and dimmer switches, choose Saturday Night TV, choose JML, choose a garden shed etc etc.
All these thoughts hit me at once; a life I’ve never had flashing before my eyes. Careering into my mid-twenties with nothing but an ill-advised partially-failed degree in a subject I loathe and a frankly cataclysmic overdraft to show for it. An uneasy feeling in the diaphragm. A sleepless night.
There IS such a thing as the ‘mid-twenties crisis’, I’m sure of it, and it can hit hard. I expect there’s a similar crisis every half a decade or so from now on and, unless you’re one of the lucky few to be plucked from obscurity into the spotlight and be able to earn a living at this weird little hobby, it’s just a question of how long you can last. The guitarist in my old band upped tent and went travelling, selling all his instruments to be able to afford the ticket. It absolutely broke my heart to see but it must have been much worse for him, the poor little scamp. But he’s choosing life, and a person can never be begrudged for doing so.
Jarvis Cocker was 31 when Pulp released Common People, so his patience more than paid off. But look at those poor bastards Anvil, scrimping and saving to record each album in the hope that the next one would be The One, right through to their fifties when some fella with a camera comes along and does make them famous, just not for the reasons they wanted. What about all the rest who weren’t even this lucky? All these thoughts occur in a trough, where I can completely fall out of love with music for all the toil and woe it causes me. I can go weeks without listening to anything but the radio at work or playing my guitar for more than five minutes at a time. These are quiet times, full of nothing but stout-faced determination to improve myself in some profound way, making my mother proud and earning me enough money to purchase goods and services in the traditional manner that constitutes Trade. But then something happens.
Always something different, but always something nevertheless. A new song heard on a friend’s iPod, a band you randomly come across, a gig of which you weren’t expecting much turning out to be a fucking blinder, a tune popping into your head, it could be anything. The buzz of music, be it listening to or playing, creeps back up my spine. And before you know it I’m right back where I fucking started, spouting pretentious meandering bollocks about magic and ripples in ponds, off my tiny tits off adrenaline playing to eight people in a sticky-floored hovel somewhere. Because that’s why people love music: the buzz. So what if it’s sounds corny, it’s the truth innit. No matter how big a trough I’m in, that buzz keeps coming back. Perhaps it dwindles over time, picking off the stragglers as they lumber through their years, leading them to another chapter in their lives so they can look back in middle age at photographs of themselves thinking ‘what the HELL was I wearing, I honestly thought I’d be famous’, leading their children to rebel against the squares their parents eventually became and propagating the whole cycle for yet one more revolution.
Maybe the rest never lose the buzz but find it in covers bands, or become Anvil. Whatever, we’ll just keep doing it until we get bored.
Posted In Features, Apr 15 2009.
Words - Luke