REFOUND SOUNDS

Back in the late 70′s Britain was in the throws of a musical revolution, and those thirsty for new aural experiences listened to maverick BBC DJ John Peel of a weekday evening.

At that time, my school friends and I, being caught up in all the excitement, would come to school singing whatever musical phrases had stuck in our heads from the previous night’s Peel show.

I clearly remember walking along the river on the way home from school one day singing ‘Alphaville‘ to my friends as we ambled along, horsing about, the only word I remembered from a particular song.

It wasn’t really a typical punk song – it was slow, relatively complex, and was sung in a suave, disaffected intellectual voice and contained bizarre but intriguing lyrics.

I must have forgotten about ‘Alphaville‘ as soon as Peel stopped playing it, and when I started buying records shortly afterwards, it didn’t feature in my purchases.

I think I’ve relayed this story once before in a blog entry, but it bears repeating as a prelude to further musical anecdotes.

Fast forward sixteen years to 1994 and I find myself in a friend’s apartment in Hiroshima, Japan, leafing through his voluminous CD collection.

I find some albums by a band called ‘The Monochrome Set‘ which immediately rings a bell. I borrow them, and like what I hear. Perhaps a year later, a new compilation by the band appears in a local CD store, and there it is – ‘Alphaville‘ at last, and it sounds just as good as it did all those years ago.

 

Now, last year saw two further rediscoveries at an even greater distance in time.

By 1979 I’d begun saving my pocket money and going in to the nearest city, Bath, to frequent Cruise In Records, an exciting ramshackle cubbyhole filled with the kind of underground vinyl I was after. One of my earliest purchases was a four-track 7″ EP on the wonderfully-named Sofa Records (tag line : ‘part of the furniture’) by Midlands band The Shapes.

This ensemble, minor by any standard, quickly vanished without even releasing a full-length album, but their slim oeuvre was unusual in its comic themes and featured the stellar bass playing of the improbably-named Brian Helicopter.

 

Stand out tracks on the EP were the parenthesis-heavy ‘Wot’s for Lunch Mum (Not Beans Again?)’ and ‘(I Saw) Batman (in the Launderette),’ tongue-in-cheek ditties revelling in their small-town Britishness and rightfully garnering the moniker ‘punk pathetique.’

I tried unsuccessfully for years to find out if this gem had made the transition to CD, but to no avail until a couple of years ago Brian Helicopter himself appeared on the web with an amusing history of the band and a CD collection of the their output. Last year it was finally in stock on Amazon and so, after a staggering delay of thirty-two years, I was once more reunited with the sounds of Leamington Spa’s finest.

Many of us are likely horrified when we hear the melodies of our teenage years, and nostalgic value aside, cringe at the pap we were obsessed with. Not me, though – immodest though it may be, I can honestly say that I had impeccable taste even in my early teens, and virtually everything I listened to then has stood the test of time.

Another tune that had been stuck in my brain since 1979 was a little number called ‘Paint it Black’ by an all-girl ensemble entitled ‘The Mo-dettes,’ who despite the connotations of the appellation, were not mods at all but purveyors of quirky pop, again with a stellar bass player.

 

Such were my punk credentials that I wasn’t even aware until many years later that ‘Paint it Black’ was actually a cover version of a tune by a well-known sixties outfit called ‘The Rolling Stones.’

I never bought ‘Paint it Black’ or an earlier single called ‘White Mice,’ both heard frequently on John Peel in 1979, something I’d regretted, as the band vanished without trace after one album, and until very recently barely a footnote in punk’s pantheon was to bear witness to their short existence.

I remembered them again last year when a friend ‘acquired’ some dubious digital transfers of these old songs, but before I listened to them, a quick check on Amazon revealed that their oeuvre had finally been unearthed and given a belated CD release, much to my joy. I ordered it immediately, at the same time as The Shapes album, and was again blown away by the quality of the songs I had waited so long to hear again when the goods duly arrived in the post.

So there you have it – good things come (back) to those who wait.

 

Some songs are so meaningful and evocative not only of a sentiment but an era, that being reunited with them after more than three decades only confirms the strange hold that music has over the lives of most of us.

Right, I wonder if ‘The Door and The Window‘ ever made it into the digital realm?

PROLONGING THE NOW

Time is a strange commodity.

Our watches tell us it’s ticking away at a standard rate and that it’s a constant, although anyone familiar with physics knows this is wrong, and it’s just a construct to keep us all in place at our shitty jobs.

Incidentally, I just heard today that in an experiment involving neutrinos at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the speed of light was observed to have been surpassed. If true, the implications for physics, and our entire understanding of the universe may have to be radically altered…

But back to time.

Do you ever feel that time is so ephemeral and so speedy that you are hardly able to grasp a hold of events as they shoot past?

I feel like this when I’m on holiday, which lends a strange otherworldly air to the whole experience.

Let me explain a bit more.

Normally we don’t really notice the passage of time in our daily humdrum routine existences. We know we’re fatter than we were a year ago, and with less hair, and we aren’t earning as much money, perhaps, but on a day to day level we can’t easily detect change and can get a handle on things because there is an illusion of stability.

But in a way, nothing exists. I don’t mean this as a pessimistic manifestation of existentialist angst, but think about it.

The past has gone, and is just a ghostly memory which will fade, and the future hasn’t happened yet, and so doesn’t exist.

That leaves us with now. This is the only point at which we are experiencing things directly, the only point which is ‘real.’

But if you go deeper, you find that this point of real life is minuscule. If you try to pair it down with a temporal scalpel, you could say that one second ago is the past, and the next second will be the future, leaving a tiny window of now. But you could keep paring this down infinitely until you find that there is in fact no ‘now‘ at all, just the intersection between two unreal states. That’s quite a disturbing thought, isn’t it?

In our normal lives this kind of thing doesn’t matter, because what we did last week pretty much resembles what we’re doing this week, and chances are it will be virtually the same as what we get up to next week.

So there’s an illusion of stability and permanence brought about by the repetitiveness of everyday life, which dulls our awareness of the march of time and the ephemeral nature of all things.

On holiday it’s different, though…

It’s been eleven days since I returned from a three-week trip to France and Portugal.

Now I’m locked into a kind a stasis in which I go to bed at 4:30am, get up at noon, go and hang out in a cafe for a few hours, go back home, listen to some music, cook, watch DVDs, process photos, read books – everyday precisely the same routine, a lethargic torpor partly caused by extended jet-lag but also a desire to try to prolong this stretch of time before the horror of going to work starts again.

When I was in Europe, however, I was experiencing new things every day, changing my location frequently, meeting new people, and the whole thing shot past at a velocity which seemed so high that it was hard to keep a hold of anything.

I took to jotting down the events of each day in a little notebook, because if I didn’t, I had the feeling that they might vanish, leaving no trace of their existence.

Sometimes this feeling of temporal velocity and my inability to construct a wide enough ‘now‘ upon which to build a stable vantage point led me feel that the events passing before my eyes were not real, and actually appeared somehow ‘thin‘ and distant.

I felt like an observer watching someone else’s film at high speed, that my connection to the surroundings, the people and events was so tenuous that I couldn’t tether myself to them sufficiently to make them real.

And indeed, in recent years when I return home from extended trips I always feel as if I had never actually left, and only my photos prove that I was really there (and the enormous hole in my bank account, of course).

It’s for this very reason that I deliberately try to force myself to enjoy every new vista in quiet contemplation before picking up the camera.

So many people on holiday are snapping away that paradoxically, their very attempts to preserve the moment actual heighten their inability to connect with and experience it in any real sense, adding to the feeling of its unreality and ephemeralness.

How sad then, that it is the mundane repetitiveness of everyday life that keeps us grounded and lends our lives a sense of stability in a sea of constant flux, rather than the spontaneous adventures into new territories which are gone in the blinking of an eyelid, leaving faint traces of a fantastic ‘otherness‘ to be chased after in daydreams like a rare butterfly, always just out of reach…

‘Prolonging the Now‘ – well, that sounds like a great song title to me, but it’s also something to strive for in making the most of life.

Just as a Buddhist acolyte seeks to transform his insights into a permanent state of satori, so should we be looking how to deepen our connectedness with reality in order to heighten experience.

However, it has just occurred to me that some people might argue that it is precisely those repetitive rituals of daily life that should be cherished and enjoyed since they are the only realities. ‘The more you travel, the less you see‘ kind of thing.

As Hitchcock might say (Robyn, not Alfred), these are all very much late September kind of thoughts….

SALMONELLA SANDWICH vs THE ROMAN EMPIRE

How do you like to spend your weekends, dear readers? Personally speaking, I like nothing better than to writhe about on the floor, weak as a kitten, in a pool of my own effluent. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Let’s rewind back to last Friday to get things in their proper perspective. Now after work I find myself in the company of Williams Nerd the Elder and our banter comes around to the question of memory, and more pacifically, the lessening of it as one is dragged screaming towards dotage.

What better way, then, to see if us Old Uns still have it than by challenging each other to a staggering feat of memory the like of which would make proud the Homeric bards of the Pelopennessus or the brothers of the cold North chanting Kalevala against the long dark watch of the night. Thus it was that, both being fans of Roman history, we did challenge ourselves to commit to what little memory remains to us, the names and dates of the reigns of the first sixteen Emperors, and yes, you are right, there is far too much ‘of‘ in this sentence.

Nerva the Nose - Forgotten Roman Emperors No.32

Later that night I was to be found in the galley, chef’s hat upon my pate at a jaunty angle, mug of Mount Gay rum in one hand and a huge meat cleaver in the other, preparing the evening repast whilst trying to grapple with Galba, negotiate with Nerva, calculating my Caligula and marking down my Marcus Aurelius. Ae you serious? Tiberius?

Now all of these mental exercises got me a tad distracted, and it was at this juncture that two small items in your Humble Narrator‘s regimen were neglected, with, as it turned out, disastrous consequences. Pay attention, dear readers, and learn from this sad tale of culinary mishap, gastric mayhem and bacterial proliferation. For having chopped my chicken, I failed to wash my cleaver and turn my board before preparing my lettuce and tomatoes, and thusly are we come to a salad replete with fine specks of raw pullet.

Now, as you should know, uncooked chicken and the human intestine do not a happy couple make. When wed, they have a tendency to bring a pair of unwanted guests along on the honeymoon. The first of these made his appearance felt around 3am, when a speedy liquid release was required from the lower portals, if you get my drift. Bright and early next morning came Lady Projectile Vomit and her cheery attendants, insufferable stomach cramps and all-pervasive debilitating weakness. Huzzah!

Now, as I ran to the khazi crying tears of pain and wondering which end to put over the toilet bowl, I did at first think I had contracted the dreaded influenza, which would have been mightily ironic, since just the night before I had been waxing lyrical on the subject of the all-conquering Tamiflu jab I’d had to ward off the dread malady. But no, later eye-witness testimony to my kitchen gaffes and the relative short duration of the unpleasantness (3 days) confirm it as nothing less than a dose of the old salmonella.

Some salmonella, yesterday

Well, that put paid to the three day weekend, and also any attempts to begin learning the Romans. In fact, I completely forgot about it until mid-week. Now your Williams Nerd had been citing various fancy-schmancy methods for memorising things, but you know what? I had the names all down in an hour and could slot the dates in about twenty minutes later, et voila (or whatever that would be in Latin).

Now the modern trend in education no doubt eschews the learning by rote of lists of things, and I too was of the same opinion, but suddenly having this chronological framework internalised allows me to make sense of the whole period. Think of it this way: imagine you’re in Tokyo and you only ever use the subway. You become familiar with some of the locales where you emerge, but you can never get an appreciation of the layout of the whole city without actually walking it on the surface. See?

So there we are. Now go out and learn pi to twenty decimal places, but don’t let it distract you from the harsh microbiological realities of the kitchen.

Professor Pieface