Until very recently, if you asked me for the single most important musical moment in my life, I would have emphatically pointed to the first time I heard Paranoid. I was 9, and it was on a compilation tape I’d bought from Publishers’ Book Clearance on Lord Street in Southport. Before hearing it, I was quite content with multi-artist compilations and my dad’s collection of classical tapes (I was emphatically not allowed to play his records!); but when the 2 minutes and 53 seconds had elapsed I knew I had to hear more by these ‘Black Sabbath’ characters. And so over the next few months I would go into Southport town centre whenever I had a fiver; head to Andys Records (sic) and grab myself another album on tape. I can still remember the order I bought them in, and the feeling of disappointment when I’d purchased them all (or all the Ozzy ones at least), and I repeatedly leafed through the pages of The Great Rock Discography* searching for other bands who might give me the same buzz. Unfortunately, Vanilla Fudge and REO Speedwagon didn’t quite live up to expectation- but my insatiable appetite for discovering music had begun.
Yet there’s another moment- some four or five years before I heard Paranoid for the first time- which has had a far greater aesthetic resonance throughout my twentyfive years. It didn’t change my musical life; it helped change the way I see the world.
It was a car journey with dad, and we were driving past the petrol station in Claregate, Wolverhampton. He put on a tape I’d not seen before, with a blue cover which featured a photo of some men in white running across a beach. I initially mistook the strange noises contained on the tape for the sound of passing cars, but it quickly dawned on me that it was the ‘music’. I was horrified, but was soon rapt.**
The music, I soon discovered, was the soundtrack to a film called ‘Chariots of Fire’. To this day I can’t really find words to explain the feelingit gave me (and still does). Eerie? Melancholy? Ethereal? Haunting? Sublime? Alienating? I don’t know. It’s relaxing, in a sense, but it also makes me feel utterly alive- it’s not a vapid womb-regressive chillout ‘vibe’ by any stretch. I feel utterly alone- even on a crowded train- when I feel it; and yet I feel utterly alive.
Perhaps it’s a flipside of Nietzsche’s ecstatic, horrific embrace of our irrelevance- an aesthetic that also animates (and sometimes paralyzes) me.
Above all it’s a beauty- and it’s my ‘favourite’ kind of feeling: I crave it far more than I crave ‘joy’, or ‘happiness’ (outside sex, the only time I really seek feelings of intense joy is when I improvise collectively or go to Molineux and long for a goal- but even then I enjoy watching passages of play unfold almost as much).
Much of the music I listen to articulates this feeling to me in one way, and much of the music I listen to most frequently (epic45, EL Heath, Mercury Rev, July Skies, Tim Hecker, GY!BE, Silver Mt.Zion, Slowdive) expresses this feeling. Sometimes it’s explicit (as in July Skies) and sometimes the sounds act as a metaphor for- and thus amplifies- my feelings (as with Tim Hecker, who may be trying to get at something altogether different for all I know). This track, from epic45′s Drakelow EP, is up there with the best of this kind of music.
Vangelis became a firm favourite on car journeys with my parents- replacing The Yetties (!) as the music I most frequently nagged for. It allowed even the most banal countryside to take on this magical, sublime quality and I felt as I was the only person alive: a feeling amplified by the arrival of my first Walkman (you can hire the model I used to own as a prop for a mere £15). To this day, I adore long journeys- particularly by train- with a good pair of headphones and an iPod filled with wordless music which I can use to colour, enhance or shape my relationship with the landscape as I pass through it. I retain an immense amount of joy and hope in the social function of music- something I’m particularly keen on exploring through improvisation, which I do through playing with The Exploits of Elaine and in my forthcoming book for Zer0 on the politics of improvising music. But paradoxically, I also love to ‘wall up against the social’, as kpunk would have it and retreat into my own OedIPodal world.
Sometimes this ‘walling up’ produces truly transcendent moments. I remember, for example, when I first felt what I would now articulate as hauntology. It was driving through Brownhills/Chasewater, and I was listening to Chariots of Fire on my walkman. We stopped at some traffic lights and there loomed the ruined hovercraft racing stadium. I have a number of memories of passing this in the car as a child- but it’s indelibly bound up with Chariots of Fire in my mind: the ghostly synths perfect for this crumbling ruin which had once contained so much happiness and- in the shape of the hovercrafts- so much utopian promise for the future (the stadium was demolished in 1998, but I can find no photos of it online. In my memory it was a huge colisseum; the size of Wembley. It wasn’t, of course).
Such a sensibility may well have (indeed, probably would have) developed anyway had I never heard Vangelis: my childhood love of railways lead to an interest in abandoned/mothballed railway lines, for example. And whilst I find music often enhances- or provides a gateway- to such experiences, it can also hamper (if I can’t find the right music for the mood); and sometimes it’s wholly unnecessary. A walk on Titterstone Clee, for example, needs no colouring. But that’s for another blog…
*I sometimes wonder what’s happened to Martin C. Strong- author of the Great Rock/Metal/Indie/Psychedelic/Sixties/Seventies/Eighties/Nineties Discographies since the dawn of the internet. It was clearly his life, and they are now- sadly- utterly redundant. Were I a twee indiepop type, I’d almost certainly write an EP about him. Perhaps each song as a different band, with fake discography entries for each of them.
**Memories are notoriously unreliable, of course. I think I remember this incredibly clearly, but I may well be wrong. The tape must have been in the middle of a side for me to hear the ‘car noises’ first (which are in Eric’s Song, I think), and dad never left a tape unwound. I may well have heard Chariots of Fire a number of times prior to this remembered occasion, though I’m fairly certain this is the first time it really registered with me.
Tags: hauntology, Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Chariots of Fire, Vangelis, The Great Rock Discography, Brownhills, Chasewater, epic45
Funny how music from car journeys has such a profound effect in youth. My dad used to drive me back and forth from Manchester when I was having a number of operations and consultations. I remember my dad hammering the Pet Shop Boys album Actually and Michael Jackson’s Thriller but most vividly I remember the Walter/Wendy Carlos soundtrack for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. The title track and Timesteps in particular had a deeper effect because I remember being frightened by them, I used to associate the title track with a werewolf like monster coming after our car with the crash in the song sounding like a howl. That fear was thrilling and I don’t think my dad ever realised that it had that effect because I always enjoyed that sensation and in a quiet sweat. There is an element of transformation to those days too as my hands, ears and throat were being operated upon and shapshifting. Such bizarre memories.
For years after into my teens I craved music as weird as Timesteps, at the time electronic music seemed the only way to find this creativity, mainstream rock and pop on TV and radio seemed so formulae and disinteresting to me at the time. Metal or anything heavy (bare in mind I thought Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman was really heavy when it hit the chart!) I didn’t like it heavy back then, the darkness had to be more paranoid than menacing.
As I didn’t get exposed to any other weird music I used to hum along to new tunes I’d created in my head all the time when there was no music being played in cars. Something I still do in my creative process, if I could hook my dreams to a machine I could record so much wonderful and ambitious music that’s often much harder to create with my own hands.
Children are rather captive audiences in cars. I’m sure dad loved playing me his favourite music, though he got thorougly fed up of me moaning whenever something that wasn’t Chariots of Fire or The Yetties was played.
Perhaps I’ll have to learn to drive just so I can do the same to my children.
My other car memories are of Test Match Special.