So wrote Nietzsche but it started with Eddie Truman having a Bruce Springsteen Day. You know how that goes: you just have a yen, an itch that needs to be scratched and only total immersion in your music of choice can relieve that nagging thing you ache to express.
It’s never something you can actually articulate, unless it’s one of those that-time-of-the-night moments that only folk who’ve been on that journey with you can ever articulate. And even then, it’s usually alcohol/chemically-driven and leaves you, the next day, feeling embarrassed but strangely sated. A mission shared, a commonality that leaves us all feeling just that little bit more human.
People, places, events, battles fought, lost and won. In my case, a baptism of fire during the miners’ strike. A fiery, but naïve, Labour party councillor, ultimately to be expelled and then onto the heady days of Militant, the poll tax, Timex, Welling ’93 (which, for those of that were there, surely merits its own tour T-shirt) and always but never not least, the raging war that me and the Auld Yin fought to a bloody, wearied standstill over thirty-plus years only to discover something that even Shakespeare would struggle to capture.
But not just that. Love, loss, heartache, achievement. The steps to manhood. Family, kids and the shifting of perceptions and priorities that that brings.
But always the music. Always that. The soundtrack that benchmarks every significant moment that every counted for anything in a life that ever meant anything to anyone.
Salvation Army and brass band standards (ah, but there hangs a tale). The Boomtown Rats single, Rat Trap, followed by the purchasing of their album, A Tonic for The Troops. Stiff Little Fingers’ Alternative Ulster, The Clash and Tommy Gun and then Motorhead working my way backwards to Zep, Yes, Floyd, Cream and even beyond. To Leadbelly, the crossroads and Robert Jonson. Fast forward to the most significant artistic epiphany I’ve ever had: Marillion’s Script for a Jester’s Tear and Mahler’s ‘Tragic’ symphony. In the same year. Christ, the same life.
Thousands (literally) of pounds later and with now just two thousand albums to call my own and a lifetime of experiences that I hope/fear my own kids definitely/never experience and all human existence can be summed up thus: Music is a tie that binds. A mechanism by which we truly discover each other.
Metal? What’s more metal than the shred-tastic harpsichord cadenza in Bach’s fifth Brandenburg? You want thundering hard rock? Then look no further than Mahler’s funeral march in the ‘Resurrection’ symphony. Maybe staring into the abyss is you bag? Nae bother, try the Verdi Requiem and if you come through that try the 20th century’s most tortured and mortal of composers, Allan Pettersson and his soul-wrenching 7th symphony.
OK, go with Trance, Dance and Country. Disco, House and Indie. Whatever. The song remains the same. To make and to love music is to be human and in a world seemingly bereft of solidarity and humanity, music will see you though. Trust me. Been there. Still there…
As John Miles so emotively sang:
“Music is my first love and it will be my last. Music of the future and music of the past. To live without my music, would be impossible to do. In this world of trouble, my music pulls me through”
I’ve been Harry Paterson and you’ve been great.
Good night.