I think I must have been about eight years old, visiting my grandparents, when the youngest of my mother’s brothers introduced me to real music.
And I have such strong memories, even now, of lying on the carpet (a hideous ’70s concoction of browns and oranges, occupied by heavy, dark wood furniture with green and beige fabric) looking at the cover of Houses of the Holy and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with those naked children climbing up the rocks. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were loads of kids running around outside, but somehow I was completely mesmerised by this strange music. Up until then, I’d only ever been exposed to ’60s and ’70s pop (and pap!) but this was alien and strange and very, very different.
It started off conventionally enough, apart from Robert Plant’s curious voice and the fact that the music was somehow better, more interesting than anything I’d ever heard.
And then there was this melancholy, wistful song. I’d heard any number of corny “slow songs” but this was just … different. It wasn’t cheesy. Everything was just so clear, so foreign to my young ears. But so bewitching.
And whereas I’d normally have moved off to do something different, I stayed and listened to the whole album. Track after track of something that grabbed me. I didn’t get tired of it.
But while there are some great tracks on the album, one stood out for me above all the rest:
It was scary. A song had never scared me before. I was freaked out. Sitting in a room with the doors open to let a breeze run through the house, sunlight streaming in through the windows and my mind was filled with snow and cold and terrible dangers and fear and dark Norse deeds.
Eventually the album finished and I did go run around outside.
But something changed forever that day. Houses of the Holy made me take music seriously, it made me realise that music could be something other than a background noise.
There are other Zep albums I like more, there are albums by other artists I like more, but I can’t remember where I heard them the first time.
Houses of the Holy will always be special to me, because it was the first time I really listened to real music.
I was sort of lost, well, not lost, but in a new job, in a new town (a New Town, in fact), in a new country, and I was still young, so that I hadn’t yet developed antibodies to the concept of novelty, whether in people, or in things – I still had that curiosity about other things, about the outside world, a curiosity, I find, that diminishes with age (I’m not proud of this), and so when this guy, Andrew, said to me one day – I know a band you would like, I didn’t react, as I would now, with a sort of weary – Oh? and an expectation that I wouldn’t like the band; instead I said – Oh? Who are they?, and felt touched that this random stranger in my new work environment should have been sufficiently interested in how I appeared to him, that he tried to link what he saw with the music he liked to listen to.
When will you realise that it doesn’t pay to be smarter than teachers, smarter than most boys? Shut your mouth: start kicking the football.
I should explain that I am rubbish about music in general, and pop music in particular. My earliest musical passions were twofold – sneaking into the Front Room to dance to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (there, I’ve said it) and also to listen repeatedly, until it wore out, to the home-made recording I’d made of the theme tune from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, direct from Radio 4 onto my monophone radiocassette recorder (it’s called Journey of the Sorcerer, that one, by the way).
If they knew what’s going on in her life, what’s going on in her life, there would be a documentary on Radio 4.
Well. So the bootleg CD labelled Tigermilk was taken back to my tiny flat in Bow, and I put it on, and listened. A voice of distinctly Scottish ethereal beauty filled the room.
I was surprised; I was happy for a day, in 1975. I was puzzled by a dream, that stayed with me all day, in 1995.
The band are Belle & Sebastian, and the singer (and writer) is Stuart Murdoch. He is a genius, an under-rated genius, a lyrically and musically gifted, insightful and beautiful man. Those opening lines come from The State I Am In, a line that appears not just in the chorus but in my favourite verse. I won’t do this often but I’m going to quote it in full:
The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard.
He took all of all my sins, and he wrote a pocket novel called The State I Am In.
And so I gave myself to God – there was a pregnant pause, before he said – OK.
Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks & Spencer; they don’t seem to mind.
Why did that song get so under my skin? The rules of this blog require us not to mention politics – good idea – but I hope I don’t break the rule if I let out a secret, which is that almost every article I’ve ever posted to the ConservativeHome website began its life hidden somewhere inside this song. Sometimes I label the pieces explicitly – there are posts of mine called The State I Am In, or Puzzled By A Dream – but whether articulated or not, the melancholic phrasing of this song is the leitmotif of most of my words (the others come from a passage in Iris Murdoch. Having only two sources of inspiration is somewhat limiting for a someone who wants to write, but we are what we are). This obviously has nothing to do with party politics, nor even necessarily with the subject matter of the songs (I’ve never given myself to God; unless my very existence does so, and the pregnant pause has now stretched to beyond forty of your Earth years).
It’s a combination of the melancholic tunefulness (I almost don’t want to analyse this too much), with Stuart Murdoch’s early predilection for describing broken or circumscribed or otherwise limited lives, usually (but not always) female lives, and often, on those early albums, in a locale that I could instantly recognise – the Castle Hill, the Byres Road:
Anthony, bullied at school. Get your own back, now you are cool. Or are you scared?
Yes, Stuart. I was scared, nearly all of the time. Scared of how I appeared to other people, scared of how they would react to me (lots of pregnant pauses). Only huge acts of will and energy kept the outer shell intact and the brazen face presented to the world. But sometimes, when I was young, and alone (in every sense): oh, the state I was in.
Now this is hardly a particularly singular experience. And there are songs of great joy from Belle & Sebastian also. But the defiance of a life lived against the will of the others – albeit sometimes with unfortunate consequences (Lazy Line Painter Jane) spoke to me so directly it quite nearly freaked me out. It felt like the guy was in the room whispering in my ear. How could he see inside me so clearly?
Well. Time passes. The state I was in became a markedly happier place. A memory that will stay fresh throughout my life is the night that Keith took me to Somerset House, on a sunny evening, and we watched Belle & Sebastian sing all their beautiful songs, as the sun went down over the Thames. But you carry that wistful egg, that loneliness nugget, somewhere deep within, I think, for always, if it finds a home inside you at a critical point of your youth; and the contrast between the joy of having my man stand behind me, as the singer whose songs I love took to the stage in front of me and began to sing – I was surprised; I was happy for a day, in 1975 – was too much. I broke down and cried. For my father, I finally realised; for my father who died just before I went to the New Town, and who I’d never be able to introduce to Belle and Sebastian, or to Keith, or to anything in my life again. How I miss that man. He would have loved Stuart Murdoch’s songs.
I’ve heard that the one sense which brings back memories more quickly and vividly than any other is smell. The immediacy with which an odour can hit you and remind you of an old friend’s washing powder can sometimes take you aback.
But I’ve always found that music can affect me in a way that nothing else can. Sometimes it only takes an opening swell or a few lines of lyrics to take me back years and make me think of people and places I haven’t thought of in as long.
I suppose this is because I have always soundtracked my life – since you’re here I would guess many of you do too. Most things I do, whether it is my boring commute or playing poker with friends, will always be accompanied by music.
A few years ago I would have been embarrassed to use this as an example but, as I enter my early to mid 20s, no longer. Linkin Park were, like most people my age, a fairly big part of my musical upbringing. They were catchy but edgy in a way I thought was quite startling at 12.
The simplicity of this song always stood out to me. But it took a while for me to realise that the song was almost all one riff varied quite/loud. When I realised my first thought was “that sucks” shortly followed by “that rocks”"
The songs from Linkin Park’s first album remind me of playing Perfect Dark on my Nintendo64, it accompanies killing stuff made out of pixels quite well, give it a go.
But I also remember being on my friends bedroom floor underneath his bunk bed being amazed that there wasn’t any swearing on the album, after listening to a lot of Papa Roach I thought it was mandatory.
Of course there is a flip side that makes me feel more ambivalent about the unexpected memories that music can bring back. Some things I would rather forget at the moment.
All I Need from Radiohead’s In Rainbows is a beautiful song, but one I rarely listen to these days.
It reminds me of many evenings spent doing the washing with my old housemate. Not noteworthy except for the fact I was besotted with her and she knew it and wasn’t interested. Boy, was it wasawkward in that house.
But like with all songs, memories layer up on top of one another because in the end we did get together and one got to see Radiohead at Reading in August. But now we’re not together, so this song reminds me of about the best and worst 24 months of my life and all in a few minutes.
For a lot of reasons she’s the sort of person it would be best to forget about now but this song, and dozens other, ensure I never will. For a whole host of reasons I am grateful for that even if it is painful from time to time when my iTunes is set to shuffle.
This is what I love about music: I am utterly and totally incapable of not reacting to it and that’s why I’m so excited about writing here.
Posted by bellagerens 
