musery
Music is my guilty pleasure. I fell in love with it upon hearing a friends’ brothers copy of ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ by Placebo, I guess around 1998. That would have made me about 14, and I suppose that is the time when music becomes most peoples pre-occupations.
It set me on a trend of spending all of my time and money consuming music. I developed quickly a style of music I liked, and through obsessing over new releases and going to gigs managed to see a whole load of live acts before I left school.
I recall spending so many hours on trains and buses travelling to the extremities of England with my best friend to go and see a band who we might have only heard of via Steve Lamacq or John Peel that previous week. We would skip afternoon classes at school to go to places like Brixton, places which for a couple of kids from the midlands were alien and fascinating. We’d stand in lines outside of 50s designed venues talking to our fellow muso’s about the demise of the pumpkins, or the sheer brilliance of the current Idlewild long-player.
It was a lifestyle which I embraced, and which embraced me. There are few places where you have a sense of kinship quite so strong as during a quiet moment at a Radiohead gig. Where you and every other person in the room are in mind of their own individual sensory relationships to these songs. Like when you catch whiff of a familiar scent and you are taken back to a memory with which it is linked, a song can transport you to a place and time you otherwise would have no recollection of. ‘You don’t care about us’ by Placebo never fails to transport me to 2002, my friends bedroom in his Norfolk farmhouse, where it is raining lightly and the leaves of an oak are brushing up against the window and making a dull swooshing sound. ‘1939 Returning’ from The Crocketts wonderful ‘Great Brai Robbery’ album is eternally married with an image of me sitting at my desk in my parents house on Christmas day, a light sprinkling of snow having fallen that previous night on the field at the rear of the house. It was cold and I needed a haircut. Music is the photo album I never have to carry, and the commentary of my life.
I gave myself to music, ran a fan-site, joined a band, collected rare discs and spent ludicrous amounts of my own and my parents money on guitars, amps and microphones. Still, I could never pay back what it has given me in enjoyment, in solace and in friends. And here I am a decade on and I still greet a new Radiohead album with the excitement of a kitten chasing a wounded mouse. Should I ever grow tired of new music, I will be not much longer for this world.
