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Insert Backbeat
Further evidence if any was needed that this place is winding down; it took me four attempts to get the login URL right, nevermind the login details.
It seemed strange to realise that I didn't recognise anyone in the UK top 20 chart. I can remember a time when my life was soundtracked religiously to Cat Deeley enthusing each chart position, the movers and climbers and watching the flashy videos. Music as visuals had more appeal to me and still does, which is perhaps why when MTV Europe rolled over and died and the corpse was raped by a thousand mobile phone icon and ringtone providers I still couldn't face picking and sticking with a radio station of similar cred.
Whereas for a while I was on the pulse, and then for a longer time after that I was discovering on my own, I have discovered that I am now a mainstream consumer of music in that when an anthem blasts out of an Intel commercial for instance I think "gosh, I wonder who that is" instead of branding the New Young Pony Club as insta-sell-outs. I have just ordered their album over Amazon because I want a physical copy.
The last album I bought, I bought because I had been lucky enough to procure tickets to their stadium gig. Have they become so popular since I first heard them on MTV that they now fill stadiums? Apparently so, I guess I dozed off at some point and missed their mid-sized fans-only gigs. The last stadium gig I went to was The Rolling Stones at Twickenham. Their final gig according to them. My mother told me the story of going to their final gig in the late seventies at Parc des Princes in Paris. They pretty much played the same set I think.
I used to consume music, now I hoard it and wear it out. There's more music on my portable device than I could listen to in a week and still vaste swathes of it goes unlistened to, its just there as museum piece. Yay, verilly did I own once upon a time the complete Shag Times, both LPs, and I have the mp3s to prove it. Whenceforth might the vinyls themselves have gone? Fucked if I know, they didn't last the millenium.
Speaking of the works of Bill Drummond, I received "45" as a birthday present, in which he speaks about recording Echo and the Bunnymen tracks in the same month that I was born. God that makes me feel old. And stale. I like the man in the same way that I like Alan Moore; they've both managed to do what I would like to be able to do but I shirk at the thought of going through the difficulties necessary to get there. My playlist throws up Primal Scream and I ought to feel Indie and maybe seventeen again, but I don't. I'm not looking to feel young again, I have just started to understand the look adults used to give me when I would say "you don't know who Suede are?!"
Through fortuitous coincidence I encountered a blast from the past, a track that opened an obscure Jude Law film called Shopping by the Sabres of Paradise and it was like finding a twenty quid note in a pocket of a jacket you haven't worn in years. It also produced the clinging desperation of a man who finds a piece of flotsam in an ocean far from home; yes, I know this, this is good music, surely? I questioned my peers and some glazed over and remembered student squats or shared flats somewhere and smelly pizza and weed, yes, they confirmed, that was good music. Nobody I know listens to chart music anymore.
Jan.22.2008