Music can be incapacitating; it can drag you down. You have to be constantly vigilant. You just have to open the window to hear the sound of human blood boiling: nasty pop-Trance (incidentally, when did that term come to mean Ian Van Dahl and not Hallucinogen or the Goa/Psytrance acid mentasms? I mean specifically? No, really, I'd like to know...),spazzy Rasmus (worst band ever?), dead-eyed Usher twirls...
There are tiny U2 viral strains just waiting to rip through our bodies, nanobotic claws that pull on our hearts and can make us tune into The Cranberries.
And the thing is, people escape. It is very possible.
Bloggers have their vices, their guilty pleasures - psychic embers of a life that could have been, snuggled up to Huey Lewis or The Corrs - but most seem to have escaped the trap. Yeah, you get blips across the web - even the normally lucid boys and girls at Dissensus keep getting the occasional Phil Collins jag - but mostly, you spend any time blog browsing and you get the impression that these people are out there because they know they've escaped from something they can't quite put their finger on, something intangibly solemn, a musical string of soul-destroying dementer breath, just hiding out around the corner...
And then, as I wrote my Steve Ovett post (see below), it occurred to me that there must be a band that helped me through this transition, a song or an album that acted as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole through musical history that allowed the non socially sanctioned sonic detritus that I eventually learned to love in...
But what was it? Maybe Bauhaus, always a laugh trying to get Stigmata Martyr played at Preston Comprehensive youth club; maybe The Cure, especially the weirdness of The Top (Goth chic gets everyone at the start of their journey but try insisting on playing it as a 13 year old on the soccer team tour bus - Crowley's rites never had it so easy); maybe digging deeper back towards The Specials or The Jam, even The Style Council (it pains me how much I hate Weller now, pains me that I know there's more than a hint of some awful Freudian flick about my hatred)
And that Prince Valiant haircut... urgh. It really hurts.
But then I remembered what the real answer was. The first 'indie' band that was really mine all mine, the only one that no one I knew was interested in, or even knew about, the one which I can hold to my chest and say without even a shadow of a doubt that it's my proudest ever musical purchase:
I bought this on the strength of a record voucher, a mostly black cover, a cool name and some decent haircuts ("a little bit Fun Boy Three, a little bit oooh Bananarama" - twin heroes of mine at the time).
I'll write about it sometime. Right now, I'm gonna put on some Shitmat and thank my lucky stars...
The question, boys and girls is this: how did you escape?
4 comments:
I reckon via a little plain paper cover 7" copy of 'Upside Down' from Ugly Child Records in Walthamstow.
As a seven-year-old, my fourteen-year-old sister got me into 'the lunatics have taken over the asylum'. It's still up there. Mind you, that was the same year she gave me her hand-made boy-george doll complete with plaits and pork-pie hat - because she was over it, and inspired me (even though I was seven I'm still embarrassed to admit this) to stand up the back of the classroom mumbling 'another brick in the wall' whilst my fellow students sang 'ga-lumph went the little green frog'. Strangely I still sing 'ga-lumph went the little green frog' to myself now and again, but 'the wall'? Uh-uh. I was seven, I was lost.
Hum..i just posted up a short something about it...but it is very embarrassing...!! :-/
How did I escape? Cabaret Voltaire, via Max Headroom. It's all been thoroughly documented here:
http://gutterbreakz.blogspot.com/2003/11/richard-h.html
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