To Be Born Again

Salutations

It’s been a while since I’ve had the urge to write anything about music: somewhere along the way it became apparent to me that nearly everything I liked about the stuff was self-evident in the experience of it, and most of what irked me was present only in the discussion/analysis. It’s so much better to feel the sun on your face than to have someone describe to you what heat is like.

Nonetheless, in the last few weeks I felt the stirring of a long dormant impulse, provoked by a series of chance musical encounters. What follows is an attempt to get something off my chest, to order my thoughts and to transfer unto others the sheer voltaic elation currently coursing through my being. That latter point, of course, the only really good reason to write about music to start with – to take some of the joy it provokes in your heart and send it out into the world to see if it might multiply.

As always, I thank you in advance for your tolerance.

How did I get here? Well, this was this little kerfuffle over a thing called Covid-19. Ghastly stuff, kept a few of us largely housebound for the best part of a year and put paid to most of life’s great pleasures: hugging a mate, impromptu social events, new movies at the cinema, being able to travel more than a mile from your own home, having a vague sense of what life might look like in six months’ time. That sort of business.

It’s a task for others more deft than I to essay the pandemic’s depths. Suffice it to say: it was not a good time.

What I want to talk about here instead is how the pandemic ends, or might end. The sunny downhill on which we seem to currently be skipping, with many of our freedoms restored and our arms brimming with vaccine. Yes, yes – the Indian variant, the need for caution and so on. I grant you it all. But I’m on about the humanity, not the science. What it means to get all that living back, or at least to be on the brink of doing so; to see our friends again, to pursue our interests and to feel once more that great ecstasy of possibility.

If the last twelve months seemed, at its worst moments, like a prolonged gaze directly into the (or if not “the”, most certainly “an”) abyss, then what does it mean for us all to have stepped back from the edge? Perhaps most importantly, in this company, what might it mean for our listening habits?

I’m going to talk about five pieces of music that have stopped me in my tracks these last four weeks, why they had that impact and what it might all ultimately mean.

1. Chemz – Burial

One of the distinguishing features of life in the K-Hole of lockdown was a pronounced absence of the new. Sure, new music, movies, experiences and so on appeared, but it was a trickle, compared to the luxurious flood to which we’ve become accustomed, and there was a nagging sense that the good stuff was being held back.

What joy, then, to notice a flurry of activity from Burial, and really quite good activity to boot. The glorious, and aptly titled “Shock Power of Love” EP was a majestic appetiser, but it was Chemz that caught me off guard as I drove to football (football! With people!) one night.

The question has long hovered in the air: what would it sound like if Burial went Balearic? If he put aside the instinct to record music that sounds like it should be titled “Stabbed in Burger King” and instead refocused his powers for good, instead of evil? We’ve had small tastes of the possibilities on past EPs, but – for my money – Chemz is the closest he’s come thus far to recording something akin to an actual club banger.

Listening to it, alone, on that short drive to do something that makes me very happy indeed and which I’ve not been able to do much of these last few months, it made me feel that something glorious was once more within our grasp. That time had suddenly become unfrozen and that all sorts of new and exciting sounds might once more rain down upon us. It doesn’t hurt that the track itself is the aural equivalent of coming up on a particularly messy one.

Most of all, it got me thinking about the weeks and months ahead, and of how best to approach this bright new dawn. I mean, Christ – if Burial is making music that sounds this full of impetus, what does that say for how the rest of us should be approaching life?

2. La Bamba – Los Lobos

Bit of a back story to this one.

When I was a kid, my Dad didn’t want me or my siblings to learn Spanish. He didn’t speak it, Mum was fluent and he was concerned that on the playgrounds of the 80s, with the Falklands still a recent memory, it might not help his three sons camouflage their Argentinean heritage if ellos hablaron the lingo.

One concession to the language was made, however, in that Mum took her acoustic guitar and taught each of us in turn to sing La Bamba. There’s ultimately not a whole lot of Spanish involved, and if Richie Valens had to learn it phonetically, then we could too. It’s a happy childhood memory.

Flash forward 30 years and, some time in the dark depths of lockdown three, my own kids’ home schooling called for the youngest to learn the lyrics to a song. Clearly: La Bamba time. I spent several happy mornings with the two of them, perfecting their “arrrrribaaaas” and walking them through what the song meant, both generically and to me. I played them the folk recordings of the earlier versions of the song, we translated the lyrics together and I explained why, for my money, “yo no soy marinero, yo no soy marinero; soy Capitan, soy Capitan, soy Capitan” is one of the greatest lyrics anyone has ever written, and a call to arms if you’ll let it be. We talked about why this song is always played whenever we have a party, and how much joy it’s brought me down the years.

And then, suddenly, lockdown was over, and – finally – my parents came round to the house. There were hugs, for the first time in over a year, there were tears, and – in a moment of pure kismet, I swear – La Bamba came on the kitchen Sonos, and the kids began to sing along, and my mother watched them and cried her eyes out. Once the song ended she insisted on playing them Twist & Shout and decrying the egregious theft perpetrated by the Beatles (the words “grotesque cultural imperialism” may have been used; she never changes), but the moment itself was pure emotion, pure magic.

As I looked at the scene, I felt I heard the song again for the very first time. Something in the great cycle of life, in the connection between generations, rendered it momentarily new, and in this bright future, suddenly free of the most awful restrictions imposed on us, my soul felt ready to begin again, and to listen with new ears.

Afterwards, I reflected on what a glorious, fleeting gift that was – to hear that magnificent song, that has been making people jump and dance and shout for a century or more – and to hear it anew. It made me wonder for a moment if there might be some way to take all that we’ve been through this year and use it to wipe the slate clean again.

3. Kaneda’s Theme – Akira Soundtrack

I have missed the cinema. Oh god, have I missed the cinema. Specifically, I have missed the Prince Charles Cinema, London’s finest picture house and the scene of many of my favourite movie experiences. It’s been a real concern this year whether that glorious and fabled establishment would be able to stay afloat. But it has.

I have a group of friends who feel similarly, and so one of our first acts post-lockdown was to make bookings at the PCC, buy as much popcorn as we could eat, and enjoy the fabulous experience of watching an old movie on the big screen.

A quick aside here. The first movie I went to watch post lockdown was Michael Mann’s Heat. For 25 years, this has been my “in case of emergency” movie; the film i know by reputation to be a classic but which I’ve studiously avoided watching in the daft belief that it might be nice to have something really really good to look forward to. But one of the lessons of Covid is surely to gather ye rosebuds while ye may; in the face of all that’s happened it feels a little ridiculous to hold back an experience you suspect will be excellent, does it not? It’s a friend’s favourite movie, he asked me to join him, so I did. It was wonderful – what a great film, what a stupid pointless waste to have waited so long. What an idiot I was/am.

But I digress, because the second film back in was Akira. One of my top 10 movies of all time, a film that blows me away every time I watch it – the sheer level of love and attention that must have gone into it.

I’m sat there watching Akira, and the chase scene right at the start of the movie begins – Kaneda zooming around on that incredible, iconic bike, with his incredible matching jacket. Kaneda’s Theme begins to play. This incredible piece of music you would never have picked to play over a chase scene, all glockenspiel and low voices, but which somehow fits it like a glove.

There and then, magic happens, and the song (in the way only music can) contrives to catapult me back 30+ years to the first time I heard it, aged 11. And I remembered how Akira felt the first time; the astonishment that something this sublime could exist and that adults – adults! – could be capable of creating it. The warm knowledge that I was right at the start of a vast and seemingly inexhaustible trail of awesome movies, books, comics and songs. The sumptuous possibility of it all, almost too outrageous to bear. I thought back to that kid who hadn’t read Hamlet, or heard a note of Sam Cooke, or stayed up way past bed time watching True Romance, jaw on the floor, and I felt such a pang of jealousy. To have all that to come, and to kind of be able to sense it was coming; was I ever richer than in those moments? Probably: I never got that much pocket money. But you get what I mean.

As that thought receded, another pushed its was to the front of my disordered consciousness; why? Why does the first cut have to be the deepest? Why do we have to become numb to these pleasures? Why do we even allow it to happen?

So I sat and watched the rest of Akira, and made myself a little promise; that in this new, post lurgey* Elysium, I would attempt to treat each day as a fresh and unexpected gift. That I would take a moment to recognise that it was not and is not preordained that we could or can all leave the house to pursue our passions. And, most importantly, that being bored and jaded is always a choice. As is joy.

4. Leave (Get Out) – Jojo

In the days that followed Akira, I started to ask myself how best I could make good on that promise, and particularly whether there were any other areas where I might be denying myself a good time by sheer dint of over familiarity or ego. The answer came back to me fairly quickly: Leave.

Leave (Get Out) was released by Jojo in 2004. At the time, I heard it and thought it absolutely slapped, but I never admitted it to anyone. Why? Because Jojo looked about 12 years old and the song’s lyrical concerns seemed to be so squarely aimed at girls of a similar demographic that I simply assumed this was not for me. Not serious enough, not clever enough, and certainly not earnest enough.

Let’s be honest here: it’s a fucking amazing song. If the Neptunes had recorded it and Pharrell had crooned over it, it would probably be fondly remembered as a classic of the period. But they didn’t; Jojo did. So it’s largely (but not entirely forgotten). Plus, that melismatic vocal – oof. If only she sang like Dylan, eh.

I’d started listening to Leave in earnest about 18 months ago. Those who recall my postings on this forum will probably remember I was never particularly bashful about my listening, and was quite happy to sing the virtues of some utterly appalling music, but it took me a long time to get round to this one. Somewhere, deep in my psyche, this secret had been filed as guilty, and it took a little while to overcome that.

Obviously, once I returned to it, I discovered that it’s brilliant. The looped strummed guitar, the vocal (yes!), the background cries of “leave” and “now” between the bars, and most particularly that glorious, extended cry of “Get out” towards the end. All of it. It’s just a brilliant record.

Post-Akira, it’s time for me to really own the Jojo love. Life is simply too short not to publicly state that this thing is brilliant and overlooked; it makes me happy, and it might make you happy too. It’s the one song I’ve always resisted, for whatever reason. But resistance is futile, not to mention a little silly.

It’s also proving to be a sensational and much loved karaoke tune. On which note…

5. Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor

Over the weeks after Akira I tried listening to a host of classic songs as if they were new. I told myself that this whole thing is a second chance for all of us; there were lots of other ways the pandemic could have gone, and many of them would have been so much worse than this. We owe it to ourselves to wipe the slate clean and attack life with a bit of gusto, and listening afresh, living afresh, was part of all that.

Sometimes I managed it (the outro of the extended version of Purple Rain – pure goosebumps), sometimes not so much. Sometimes I was able to shed all the baggage and it was glorious. Most of all, I told myself to stop pretending there was music I “didn’t like”, because what’s the point in that sort of limitation, really? Why tell ourselves that particular story?

Obviously, when it didn’t work it didn’t work. I will probably never get Pink Floyd, although I do promise I’ll try again. Occasionally, it reconnected me with something brilliant that I previously felt I’d heard too much of (Jim Morrison’s voice), and once in a while I found myself doing a total 180 on tunes I’d taken against (Blinded by Your Grace pt 2). I enjoyed all of it; it was life affirming.

Then came karaoke. Oh god, how I missed karaoke during the lockdowns. I’ve said it here before, but there’s something primal about being in a dark place with your mates, arms around one another/in the air, singing and dancing and giving as few fucks as humanly possible, lost in music. If anything has changed how I listen to/experience music in recent years; it’s karaoke. There were times when I honestly wondered if we’d ever get it back….

But get it back we did. Last week the maximum half dozen of us got together, took our rapid covid tests and plunged into the welcoming bosom of Luck Voice to see if we could even remember how it all worked. We needn’t have worries; it was much like riding a bike – wobbly and unstable with people occasionally crashing disastrously.

Towards the end of the evening, someone stuck on Nothing Compares 2 U, and I found myself singing along with her.

Now, a couple of observations on Nothing Compares; obviously, not an easy song to sing. It’s pretty much owned by one vocalist and one vocalist only, and she nailed it so comprehensively that you’d be bloody mad to go near it. Even fecking Prince sounds a bit half arsed doing it, which tells a story.

The second thing to note is that it’s a song it’s night on impossible for any of us to hear properly at this stage. It’s so thoroughly over played (as with so many other records) that our brains just fill in the blanks – the surface of the thing has been rendered endlessly smooth and without feature by the sheer depth of our scrutiny.

So we began to struggle our way through it, and – as we did so – something began to click. Something of the act of actually singing this thing out loud enabled a momentary reconnection, a few precious seconds where it was Virgin and new. It may have been that we were murdering it so badly that it became an entirely different (and infinitely more unpleasant) song, but I’m not sure it was that. Instead, it took me all the way back to first contact: that glorious “will she make it” of the high notes, followed by exaltation as she does (over and over again). The absolutely perfect intonation of “tell me baby, where did I go wro-ah-oh-ohng” (glorious to sing, can it ever be sung another way?). Most of all, the gut punch of the lyric “all the flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard, all died when you went away”. The way she attacks that line. Holy crap.

As I sang along, I felt it all, all over again. Years of numbing familiarity slid away and the song revealed itself once more. It was born again. I was born again. Music: fucking hell.

And it’s not just Nothing Compares. There are hundred and hundreds of other absolute masterpieces out there, all of them dulled by repeated exposure. Many more still, if you want to expand beyond music. But if we can just find the right approach to them, or maybe the right frame of mind, they can live, breathe and jump again.

Perhaps, just perhaps, all this we’ve been through is an opportunity to take another look, as if it were your first, to listen (in the timeless words of George Michael) without prejudice and to discover once more the absolute magic that’s under our noses.

So it is that I reach my peroration and commend on to each of you an ideal that might see us take the best of what the plague year had to teach us, and to apply it to our listening, and indeed our lives, in a fashion that might uplift and enrich. To let go of the past, to treat the slate as clean and to regard each new experience as virgin territory, an unexpected and entirely delicious treat. To treat the new and the old just the same. To exalt in the “hey hey hey”s of Blinding Lights and marvel at the soaring vocal peaks of Unchained Melody, and to treat both alike. Just to dig it all, and not to wonder; that’s just fine.

There’s an image that keeps coming back to me these days, and it’s George Bailey at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, having taken a glimpse of the darkest timeline and latterly been returned to his own. George, stood in front of the Bedford Falls sign, arms aloft, screaming “Yeeeaaah”. George, sprinting through the snow; “Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Buildings and loan!”. That’s how I feel right now, most days. Merry Christmas to all of us.

This year, we collectively got a look at our Pottersville, and we were allowed to come back from it. Except it’s even deeper than that, because our Pottersville wasn’t an awesome, boozy party town with lots of neon lighting, sailors and fast ladies. It was a shitty disease-fest where you had to check government guidelines to work out if you were still meant to be hugging your kids and you never wanted to eat banana bread (banana bread!) again.

I say celebrate it all. Celebrate that peek at the upside down. Celebrate your return. Celebrate music and people and dancing and whatever else floats your boats. And celebrate it all like you’re celebrating it the very first time.

Love to you all, fuck Covid and everything about it, bar the lessons we learned along the way. Here’s to second chances and first encounters.

BL

*I recognise, of course, that we are not, strictly, post lurgey. This is poetic license, rather than epidemiological forecast. Likewise, my attempts to evoke joy herein are entirely without prejudice to the suffering and loss that I’m sure others have undergone in recent weeks or months. Herein ends the small print.

https://youtu.be/ggWyUEuGcWY

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