Part Ten

Riding the Nostalgia Train

December 18, 2009

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As I put finger to key this December morning, the race for the Christmas No.1 is in full swing. It’s a two horse race: in the first lane, jogging along at a nice steady cantor, is Rage Against The Machine’s anarchic ‘Killing In The Name’. In the other is Joe McElderry’s ‘The Climb’, a tedious Miley Cyrus ballad nabbed as the winner’s song for contestants of The X Factor. This somewhat hotchpotch selection is down to a Facebook campaign by Jon Morter, who – in a manner reminiscent of last year’s campaign to get Jeff Buckley’s version of ‘Hallelujah’ to the number one slot instead of Alex Burke’s – is urging as many people as possible to download ‘Killing In The Name’ so that it might outsell the favourite. The irony of borderline fascistic regulation on this scale using a song that contains liberal use of the words “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” has not been missed, but Morter says he’s aware of it, and simply states that it’s “very apt”. The Rage track is at time of writing a couple of furlongs ahead of its rival, but ‘The Climb’ is waiting for the steroid effect of its CD release to kick in, and I suspect that come Sunday evening there will be no need for either photo finish or steward’s enquiry. It’ll be McElderry’s victory all the way and there is almost certainly very little we can do about it.

I say McElderry’s victory, but it’s really Simon Cowell’s. The identity of the actual winner in each X Factor series is fundamentally irrelevant, because the show has never been about creating distinctive, unusual music stars – it’s a karaoke competition with phone voting. It’s another way of lining Cowell’s back pocket, and has been since day one. If Nigel Lythgoe’s Pop Stars did at least allow us to glean some sense of sanitised, heavily censored knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes when these manufactured pop bands are constructed, it’s safe to say that the novelty had long since worn off by the time Cowell started up the X Factor juggernaut in 2004. Everything about the show – the phone voting, the competitions, the CDs and MP3 sales and live shows – is about making money, and it’s been this way ever since Steve Brookstein. Even the previous incarnations of the show have had the same commercial bent, and it’s ridiculous to claim that the obsession with bringing in the cash – perhaps more discernible than ever in the 2009 run – is a new thing.

Cowell and his cronies maintain that The X Factor is about giving ordinary people a shot at the title, but like doing tequila slammers on a budget, one shot is all that you get: a year or so of glittering stardom, and then it’s platinum-or-bust. The moment sales dip, the label drops you (in the case of Michelle McManus, this resulted in a small earthquake) and your future career is no longer relevant, as by this time the suited executives and the public en masse have usually found another object of affection – most of the time it’s that year’s winner. The show, all others like it and the ‘careers’ that the victories generate stand as the televisual equivalent of fast food: cheap, curiously satisfying in the moment and quickly attained, but lacking any real substance – and it isn’t long until you want another helping, usually with a slightly different flavour.

My other half and I gave up on the show two years ago, after the tediously dull and completely ineffectual Leon Jackson was granted victory over Rhydian Roberts in a clash of the saps. Our decision to refrain from watching the 2008 series was made simply out of boredom: every series was nigh on the same, from the heavily scripted and sneakily edited ‘auditions’ (in which hopeless wannabes are assured off camera that they are going to be brilliant, before being sniggered at by four millionaires) through to the tedious, overlong boot camp / private audition scenes, featuring long, drawn-out shots of worried contestants lounging by the ocean while Simon debates with Sinitta and we’re informed on at least thirty-five occasions that “the waiting is the hardest part”. (We know that; we have to endure it with you.) Then the live shows, which bring a new definition to Zoo TV, given that most of the cattle-like audience members were off getting a pie when they were dishing out good manners: every negative comment is roundly booed and jeered, as the obsession to say nice things about obviously crap acts who are nonetheless “trying their hardest” or “fun to watch” reaches its grizzly zenith.

The sense of public anger at the continual presence of Jedward was perhaps the single biggest controversy of the 2009 series, as Simon himself – their most outspoken critic, at least on camera – ducked out on an obvious chance to eject them, thus prompting a flurry of angry forum posts and poorly spelled text messages, as well as a stream of articles in the tabloids (and even a few in the broadsheets, who really ought to have known better). It was clear, fans and opponents of the show alike exclaimed, that Simon wasn’t interested in artistic integrity or talent – he was only out for the money. By keeping Jedward in the competition he’d generate more media interest, and more people would watch the show. This point being made, the armchair politicians would then retreat back into their dens, happy that they’d brought such a stunning revelation to our attention. Everyone else nodded, sighed and said “Yes, we knew that”.

The point is that people have notoriously short memories, and anyone who maintains that Jedward’s presence caused The X Factor to jump the shark this year has obviously forgotten Chico. Or the Conways, who were brought under Cowell’s wing only to be ejected by them himself. Or the MacDonald Brothers, who managed one decent performance out of eleven. The finalists are typically manufactured so as to create a plethora of personalities: the lovable, doe-eyed twenty-something, the working mother who wants to support her children, the cocky but talented young man who is heading for a fall, the insecure teenage girl who blossoms over the course of the series, and at least one group who everyone hates. Such a mixture makes for compelling, almost pantomime-like television: the judges know from those preliminary auditions exactly who they want to go through, and they fix it so that it happens, thus keeping the ratings up and Simon’s supply of caviar well stocked.

My mother has discovered The X Factor for the first time this year, and is experiencing it with the same level of enthusiasm that Emily and I had when we started watching back in 2005. Love or hate it, the show is well-crafted, superficial but rewarding Saturday night entertainment: it’s karaoke, but karaoke with panache. There are many points of irritation – the excessive use of particular records to introduce contestants; the swooping, wind machine-heavy introductory videos; the emotional montages about hardship and trauma (dedicate a song to a dead relative and you’re guaranteed to go through that week); the drawn-out pauses before winners are announced; the manipulative editing; the way that every single highlight is showcased at least three times before we actually see it properly, thus vastly diminishing its effect; Louis Walsh’s diabolical maths (you can’t go over a hundred per cent, Louis, you just can’t) – oh, and the fact that the same established canon of crowd-pleasers are used in every series, which means you’ll get at least one ‘Without You’, one ‘My Heart Will Go On’, one ‘I Will Always Love You’ and a bit of Scissor Sisters thrown in for good measure. The more you watch the show, the more you notice these things, and I think that by our third series (and The X Factor’s fourth) we’d more or less got it down pat, which meant that any sense of novelty had long since been eroded without a trace.

While it lasts, though, it’s great fun, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that it needs to be anything else. My mother tells me that she heard someone on the radio the other week lamenting that the music industry these days was dead in the water, and that The X Factor was representative of this: we were bombarded with plastic pop and soulless slush and nothing good was out there. This is not only overwhelmingly negative, it’s not even close to true – and even if it were, you can’t blame it solely on Cowell and his champagne-drinking buddies. There has always been crap music, and there have always been unconvincing, soulless performances from artists who were clearly phoning it in, and there have always been saccharine-drenched ballads, and (here’s the big one) manufactured pop groups are nothing new under the sun. It’s just that we don’t choose to remember it that way.

As an illustration, let’s think about the concept of Greatest Hits albums. A band who’s in it for the long haul might release three or four studio albums and then a compilation of their best work. Typically, this will include the singles from the albums – work which generally represents the best of their career thus far. Now, flash forward a decade or so, when the band are older, wiser and have survived a press backlash after some poorly-received stadium gigs, the departure of their bass guitarist and the untimely (not to mention grizzly) death of at least one drummer. They’ve also released a spate of new albums, including a live compilation, and a few single-only tracks. The time is ripe, they decide, for another greatest hits compilation.

At this point they could do one of two things: firstly, release a double CD which contains everything from the first compilation, a handful from each of the subsequent albums and one or two live tracks. Alternatively, they could opt for a standard length CD, possibly a little longer than the last Best Of, that contains a chronologically broader but qualitatively more exclusive selection – in other words, taking out some of the weaker tracks that fleshed out the earlier compilation and replacing them with stronger material. For example, years after releasing the two-disc Red and Blue sets, The Beatles were able to produce an eighty-minute compilation that consisted exclusively of number one singles (although at least a couple were intercontinental). Subjectively, you could argue that their number one songs weren’t exactly their best work, but that’s not the issue: the more you have, the easier it is to cherry-pick.

My point is that if you’re going to look back at the music in a past decade, it’s going to be relatively easy to pick out a substantial collection of great tracks and say that music today pales in comparison, because you’re consciously ignoring the dross. There have been plenty of compilations of great sixties / seventies / eighties music that is collected and they all include the same records, because they’re the ones that sold – and why would you fill a compilation with bad songs, unless you were Keith Chegwin? It’s easier to ignore music of poor quality the more you’re able to distance yourself from it chronologically, and this has the effect of making us believe that the only music we used to listen to was great music. But if bad music is all around us now, that’s nothing new.

All too often I see this on Sunday mornings. The church we attend is evangelical in spirit and leans towards the modern for its worship choices, concentrating predominantly (although by no means exclusively) on material from the last ten or fifteen years. Occasionally they will delve heavily into retro, with almost entire services dedicated to Graham Kendrick, but for the most part we use an established canon of Stuart Townend and Matt Redman and various other names that will probably mean nothing to anyone outside the bounds of organised Christianity. Townend in particular produces catchy (if frequently derivative) melodies with clear, memorable lyrics that are eminently suitable for wedding services, being as they are Church Songs For People Who Don’t Do Church.

There are, however, a whole bunch of new songs that are picked up at that year’s Spring Harvest and Soul Survivor and other annual religious gatherings. Some are good. Many are not. The ones that aren’t are lost in the mists of time and never sung again. However, it can take years for this to happen. We generally sing them a few times until we realise that they have no staying power. Elevation to ‘classic’ status does not happen overnight; it is a fallacy to describe anything as ‘iconic’ until it’s been around at least – ooh, twenty or thirty years, and you can’t really measure the true worth of any sort of art until you can judge its effectiveness years after the moment. And we also need to remember that there are plenty of third rate hymns that are hundreds of years old that we no longer sing because they’re not particularly good. We’ve simply forgotten they exist, or we never knew about them in the first place.

I accept that there are standards, but it’s nonetheless very easy to dismiss contemporary art – whether we’re talking about music, literature, cinema or painting – as cheap and superficial compared to the classics. It’s a tempting, but ultimately unreasonable comparison, rather like weighing up an episode of Neighbours against a Noel Coward. Because time erodes, we assume that what we remember of decades past is all that is left, which is undeniably false. Instead, humans come equipped with an in-built filter that enables us to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles – or through ash-tinted ones where we need to. There is seldom any middle ground for the nostalgic, nor is there any for those who choose to shun history: they see their pasts as alternately beautiful or horrible, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

Brian Matthew is a prime example – Sounds of the Sixties has been going since I was in secondary school, and shows no sign of slowing down, but while the programme showcases plenty of great songs, popular and obscure, from what is typically viewed as the nation’s favourite music decade, there is also a fair amount of rubbish. This is largely because there needs to be: even with the wealth of material from which Brian can select his two-hour Saturday playlist, there are only so many times you can hear ‘Norwegian Wood’ without lighting a few small fires yourself. It would be easy to compile a list of classic songs – the sorts that grace every sixties compilation known to man and which are staples of every wedding disco, pub quiz and Spot The Intro trivia game known to man. But it would get deathly dull, and so Brian frequently thumbs through the back catalogue for the lesser-known artists: the one-hit wonders, the unconventional covers of well-known tracks, the album fillers and all manner of other things. The result is a show that is always interesting but not always very good: it’s nice hearing the obscure stuff, and I welcome the variety, but at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning you sometimes find yourself wishing he’d dispense with the Johnny Mathis and just play some Led Zeppelin.

Besides, anyone who thinks that the older stuff was unilaterally better than the new has never listened to ‘Deck of Cards’. Or ‘The Deal’. Or Bobby Goldsboro’s insufferable ‘Honey’, in which a syrupy lover laments the passing of his wife, supposedly from cancer or such but in all likelihood a death that was faked in a last-ditch attempt to escape from his insufferable droning about trees and puppies. Or Paul Anka’s ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’, an active celebration of nausea, mood swings and fatigue (epitomised by Anka’s “I love what it’s doin’ to ya”) which even gets in a passing reference to abortion. Or anything by Phil Collins. The worst part is that many of these records are held up as classics in their own right, albeit of the so-bad-it’s-great variety. Wouldn’t it be more honest to just concede that they’re all shit?

Perhaps the biggest complaint of contemporary music is that it’s dull and tedious and offers nothing new, but dull and tedious records are as old as the hills – it’s just that no one remembers them. If you tune in to Classic FM you’ll find an unimaginative and highly predictable playlist of works that regularly grace commercials for M&S, and every classical compilation on the market. Seldom will you hear any Penderecki or Stockhausen. But more to the point you will also miss out on the thousands of more obscure works by lesser-known composers, the ones working parallel to their more famous contemporaries, but who eventually drifted into obscurity because they were generally derivative or uninteresting. Typically, these pieces now end up on Associated Board exams for graded instruments, alongside occasional more famous works by Mozart or Grieg. The same thing happens in pop: there have been a great number of second-rate works over the years, but they’re only ever played on Sounds of the Sixties.

Too often, nostalgia is just an excuse to ignore the issues of the day by maintaining that everything was better. I’ll admit that there have been peaks and troughs of creativity, and that something like Sgt. Pepper could never be recorded today in the sort of drawn-out, experimental six month hubbub of creativity that originally spawned it, because studios no longer work that way. I accept (and lament) that genuine rock and roll behaviour seems to be on the wane, and that we no longer get stories about notorious drummers choking on their own vomit, or throwing pianos into swimming pools – these days we’re supposed to be outraged by Mariah Carey’s rider demands, or the news that Amy Winehouse is off the wagon. (You can almost picture Amy walking into her record company headquarters, shambling and shambolic, like an Enfield vagabond, after a night on the tiles, requesting taxi money with the words “Spare any change, please?”. The receptionist fixes her with a cold, sceptical eye and says “I’m not giving you any money. You’ll only spend it on booze.”)

While Winehouse’s behaviour, however sad and self-destructive, is if nothing else an indication that there’s life in at least some of the business’s icons (Chris Martin’s very talented, but honestly, he’s so boring), I refuse to accept the assertion that modern music is in decline. The MP3 has threatened the influence of the album, and – as Bill himself said – it’s very possible that “all recorded music has run its course”. But even if the act of recording itself is perhaps in need of examination, the fact remains that there is a great deal of great music being recorded today by real artists with real agendas and real emotional impact, who play real instruments, write real songs and have the same crazy lifestyles, wild tours and creative angst as Pete Townshend, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. You only have to do a little digging to hear Bat For Lashes, Eels, Lambchop, Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Joan as Policewoman, Paolo Nutini, and any number of great artists who would much rather be interesting than commercial. Even Robbie Williams’ new stuff is great. Music wasn’t better years ago. We just think it was. Sandy Thom expressed a wish to be a punk rocker, with flowers in her hair, but her irritating dirge is just a glorified list song about a world that never really existed in the manner that Sandy (who wasn’t even there) would like to think it did.

There’s a passage in the book of Haggai that illustrates this point: the Israelites have been sitting around for decades not wanting to get on with the job of building the new temple, largely because it looks too big, and also because it probably wouldn’t live up to the wonders of its predecessor. Sixty six years ago, the temple that Solomon built had been destroyed: there probably weren’t many of them who’d have been around to see this, or who would have remembered the original temple, but stories and oral tradition were incredibly important to the Israelites – they still are – and they would have heard all about it from their parents and grandparents. And there probably would have been the fear that when they’d finished the new temple it would have been a disappointment – all sparkling and new, but just “not as good as the old one”. It takes God himself – via Haggai – to ask them “Who among you is left who saw this house in its former glory?”

Chief among the accusations levelled at The X Factor is that Simon Cowell is destroying the soul of pop music, but if anything the only real sin of which he’s guilty is that of destroying the race to the Christmas number one slot – which, due to manipulation and marketing, is now more or less guaranteed to be filled by an X Factor winner’s song. Cowell’s defence is that he’s actually doing the great British public a favour: “We all have this belief,” he said, “that the Christmas No.1s were just amazing songs. But actually over recent years it was Bob the Builder, Mr Blobby…we were getting to a point where it was all becoming like The Millennium Prayer that was knocked from the Christmas No.1 slot by Westlife.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that Mr Blobby was actually produced by Cowell, and concede that he does have a point. The Christmas No.1 has been filled by great songs in the past – and even as recently as 2003, when Gary Jules’ minimalist, ethereal cover of Tears For Fears’ ‘Mad World’ became one of the last seasonal chart toppers that wasn’t a product of the Cowell hit factory. But there have been quite a few novelty songs up there – Jimmy Osmond, Benny Hill and the execrable St Winifred’s School Choir were some of the worst offenders in the seventies, and let’s not forget that the Spice Girls dominated the charts in the late 1990s to relatively few complaints, even though the songs were crap. In the days of The X Factor’s reign, you may at least guarantee that the Christmas No.1 will at least be a serious song, sung seriously, by a serious person.

And that guarantee is essentially the problem. Because while Cowell’s assertion about novelty acts is at least partially correct, he’s missing the point, which is that the Christmas No.1 slot was never about what song was there – it was about what song might be there. The race to the top of the charts was half the fun of things: there were always three or four hot contenders, as well as a few outsiders that have on occasion managed to greatly upset the favourites (and the bookmakers). In fact, placing bets on the top seasonal record is now a complete waste of time, because there is only one winner – such is the devastating success of the X Factor hype machine. The euphoria of having a song you liked scale the heights of the Top 40 at yuletide was unmistakable, but it came second to the excitement of the race – the waiting may be the hardest part, but it was also the most fun. If anything, the Christmas No.2 has become the new Christmas No.1, so perhaps we should concentrate on that instead – or simply bar X Factor singles from the chart. Simon Cowell has become the Michael Schumacher of the pop world: victory is so assured that the only solution is a complicated series of rule changes and new regulations that will make it harder for him to win.

It’s a problem, then. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of the music business. It’s not headline news. It’s not even NME headline news. It’s a page seven by-line, a filler article, an afterthought. It’s not something for the armchair politicians to beat themselves into a frenzy about, or a reason to retreat into your shed and listen to nothing but Sex Pistols records. This whole thing would really only be a big deal if the singles chart still had any impact, but the rise of the download, the decline of the CD single and a gradual shift in focus has rendered the Top 40 more or less redundant – and as much as we may wish to believe otherwise, the Christmas No.1 stopped being really mattering some time before Shayne Ward started the trend of winner’s hits that looks set to continue this year. Perhaps the age of the MP3 has posed a serious threat to the integrity of the album as we know it, and perhaps all recorded music has run its course. But if popular music as we know it is currently at something of a crossroads, no longer sure of its aims, ethics or the direction it should follow, I seriously doubt that anything The X Factor could do would make any serious long-term impact upon it: there are still plenty of real musicians making genuine music, and Simon Cowell couldn’t stop that even if he wanted to (and I’m quite sure he doesn’t). He may have saturated the British entertainment business with his manufactured slush but he hasn’t killed decent music in Britain or anywhere else in the world – the public backlash alone, misplaced as it may be, is proof that people do at least still care about it.

There are issues with the top 40, and the packaged feel that hampers a great deal of contemporary pop, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have concerns about The X Factor’s hold on the market and the fact that our culture is absolutely saturated with an obsession to be famous for fifteen seconds. Perhaps too there is an issue with his status as media tycoon extraordinaire (and seriously, the man has to stop using that tanning machine) and perhaps he is in danger of having a monopoly, but there will always be decent musicians as long as there is the desire to make music, and Ben Elton’s prophecy of doom as documented in We Will Rock You is not even close to fruition. The X Factor is an irritation, but is a source of pleasure to many, and a harmless one at that. There’s probably nothing wrong with a harmless Facebook campaign, even one that’s been described as “cynical” and “stupid” by its chief target for abuse, and if viewed as a bit of seasonal fun in the same way as, say, Bill Nighy’s bid for the No.1 slot in Love Actually, it’s quite amusing.

I also seriously doubt it will spoil the fun for Joe McElderry, not really, and I don’t expect it will harm his career any more than the ceremonial dumping by his record company that is certain to follow within the next eighteen months. But it would be wrong of us to think that a serious protest about the state of the music industry that is conducted in this manner is actually going to do any good – I’d like to believe that this was harmless, but there’s a genuine feeling amongst some of the community that this is the first throes of a revolution, when it’s really nothing more than a reactionary stunt, and to be honest a rather childish one at that. Whether or not our concerns are valid, we’re not going to solve the problems in the music industry through raging against Simon Cowell – and certainly not Rage Against The Machine.

Two and a half days later

December 20, 2009

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OK, well, I’m pleasantly surprised about that.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 50

December 20, 2009

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You
Various – The No.1 Christmas Album
Joni Mitchell – Hejira
John Denver and the Muppets – A Christmas Together

(We drew an ‘X’.)

These Foolish Things

December 24, 2009

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There’s a scene near the end of High Fidelity where Rob Fleming / Gordon (depending on whether you’re curled up with Nick Hornby’s novel, or watching Steven Frears’ adaptation) is approached by a pretty journalist who asks him, as part of research for an article she’s writing, for a list of his all time favourite songs. At first Rob can’t decide whether she means songs he’d play in a club, or at home (there is a difference, apparently), but after they’ve cleared that up, he’s able to rattle off a provisional list with minimal effort, before deciding instead to make her a compilation tape. This lands him in hot water with girlfriend Laura, with whom he has only recently reconciled, but Rob manages to make amends by proposing, albeit in a slightly unconventional manner.

It would be nice to have some sort of summarising list with which to (almost) finish the blog, and a roll call of all-time favourites would probably be quite apt. My musical preferences have been fickle over the years but one thing I’m quite pleased with is a general sense of consistency when it comes to great songs. I’m never quite sure if I find Pink Floyd pretentious or brilliant, or the Beatles overrated or masters of their craft (it depends very much on the day) but I’m always reasonably sure which of the thousands of songs I’ve encountered on my travels stand out as personal favourites.

The problem is that I’ve held this list in my head for over ten years now, and while it’s altered surprisingly little during that time, it’s also frightfully tedious. The simple truth is that my taste in music is just not very interesting: the palate is too unrefined, the experience eclectic but not particularly knowledgeable, meaning I come across as a man who knows a little about quite a lot but nothing that scratches the surface; a jack of all trades; a bluffer. I don’t own a single Van Der Graaf Generator album. I do have most of the Dire Straits back catalogue but the sum total of my Elvis Costello collection amounts to his greatest hits and North, the album of autumnal-sounding songs he released in 2003. I own a lot of Lloyd Webber recordings, including five different versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, but no King Crimson. I have a lot of stuff, but you’ll still find more gaps than in a redneck’s dentures.

My list of all time favourite records includes Chris Isaak, Elton John and The Police. I maintain adherence to a few songs that are universally acknowledged as being structurally flawless and immaculately produced (none of this would matter, of course, if they didn’t connect with you on an emotional level, but they do). There may be the occasional nod to nonconformity but for the most part it’s all very predictable; a dreary mixture of established academic authenticity and personal response. They are the songs I will bring out for MP3 compilations, the ones I’ll lecture about at parties and in the car to anyone who’s interested, and more often than not to a lot of people who aren’t. They are my own choices and I make them freely in spite of support from the critics who would agree with me, but to discuss them here would be tedious, so I won’t.

However.

Instead of a list of great songs, how about a list of great moments within songs? You know the ones I mean: the spine-tingling, heart-stopping moments where you jump out of your chair with surprise or delight; the climaxes; the unexpected modulations; the split-second changes where the adrenaline courses through your veins or, alternatively, you burst into tears for all the right reasons. Moments like this are few and far between but they turn a good song into a great one, or a great one into something truly exceptional.

This is thus a list of those moments, as experienced by yours truly. It is not exhaustive; it is of course entirely subjective and not entirely balanced. Many of these tracks would not necessarily make my all time hits list, because it is for their stand-out moments that I choose to remember them, rather than the songs as a whole. Conversely, individual songs that I consider unilaterally great but which have no specific moments that grab me have been omitted: this is why you will not find any Joni Mitchell, or any Bob Dylan. Even the Beatles one is an anomaly. But they’re all there because they have for one reason or another made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, nigh on every time I hear them.

‘Back to Black’ (Amy Winehouse)
2:43 – In one of the finest breakup songs ever written, Amy Winehouse puts herself through the wringer over a driving Motown / Phil Spector beat, as she laments that “Life is like a pipe / And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside”. The first chorus remains unresolved after “Back to…”, almost as if Winehouse can’t bring herself to say the word ‘black’ (even though she’s just done it at the end of the verse). Come the second chorus, she jumps in with both feet, dolefully and repeatedly chanting ‘Black’ over a torrent of strings and choral-like backing singers. The effect is solemn, almost funereal, and it’s arguably the most moving moment on the album. The long-term impact was diminished a little when she got back together with Blake, the subject of the song, but it’s still a fantastic four minutes.

‘Fantasia’s Confidential Ghetto’ (P.M. Dawn)
6:49 – A medley of Prince’s ‘1999’, Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’ and Harry Nilsson’s ‘Coconut’ is perhaps not what you’d have come to expect from New Jersey’s finest R&B group, but ‘Fantasia’s Confidential Ghetto’ turned out to be a career highlight. Closing 1995’s Jesus Wept, the Cordes brothers take three songs that on paper really don’t go together, and create a smorgasbord of musical wonder, a whole that’s far more than the sum of its parts. Halfway through ‘Coconut’, Prince Be sabotages Nilsson’s lyric, changing the doctor’s instructions to “Put the lime in the coconut, and call me when you’re flying”, before jumping seamlessly into a four-bar musical nod to the Beatles’ throwaway instrumental – it never worked in Magical Mystery Tour, but it slots in perfectly here. And speaking of which…

‘Hey Jude’ / ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise’ (The Beatles)
0:11 – There are many fine moments on the Love album. The mashup of ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is a powerful tour-de-force of Eastern mysticism that gives both songs new life and vigour; elsewhere, George and Giles Martin effortlessly fuse ‘Drive My Car’, ‘The Word’ and ‘What You’re Doing’, and the rendition of ‘Strawberry Fields Together’ – which moves through from Lennon’s original demo through the various studio incarnations he concocted with Martin through to the final version – is simply stunning. But it’s the end of the album that provides perhaps its finest moment: an edited ‘Hey Jude’ climaxes with an isolated orchestral track, the band having faded to silence, and after a couple of circulations of the four-chord riff there’s an audible “One – two – three – four!” as Ringo’s drum track from the Sgt. Pepper’s reprise kicks in, underpinned by the orchestra, before they’re joined again by the guitars. It’s like being at a gig, and watching the band disappear backstage after the last number for a quick snort before rushing back on for the encore: slick, seamlessly mixed, and utterly captivating.

‘Comfortably Numb’ (Live, Pink Floyd)
0:53 – The contrast between the menacing, imposing doctor of Roger Waters’ verses and the lyrical, resigned tenor of David Gilmour’s choruses was never more pronounced than it was in the live versions of Pink Floyd’s magnum opus. The live recording of The Wall is absolutely packed with atmosphere, but it reaches a climax on CD two: performing the second half of their 1980-81 show largely behind a wall, save for occasional appearances through the holes, ‘Comfortably Numb’ begins as Roger emerges wearing a medical coat to deliver his prescription. All of a sudden, Michael Kamen’s beautiful string arrangement swells in the background, as Gilmour begins his vocal, and a spotlight blasts the upper section of the wall to reveal that he’s standing on top of it, to a roar of approval from the crowd. One of the best songs in the world just got better.

‘Sol Invictus’ (Thea Gilmore)
1:38 – Thea Gilmore entirely escaped my notice until last weekend, when a chance encounter on the Bob Harris show just this side of midnight left me absolutely spellbound. Strange Communion, her 2009 Christmas album, contains a pleasant mixture of styles, but one of the highlights was this a capella opening, a Pagan winter hymn that promises the coming of spring. ‘Sol Invictus’ starts with Thea, and then by the second chorus – where we join her here – the choir swells, declaring: “Rise up, rise up / Ever victorious / Low the tide / Low the light / Comes the sun again”. Spine-tingling, ethereal, beautiful.

‘The Angry Mob’ (Kaiser Chiefs)
2:50 – After two and a half minutes of satire directed both at the tabloids and the people who read them, the Kaiser Chiefs’ semi-title track from their 2007 album suddenly kicks into another gear. The guitars become earthy and grungy, playing a menacing four-chord riff underpinned by Nick Hodgson’s thumping bass drum. After a moment or two, the rest of the band come in with “We are the angry mob / We read the papers every day / We like who we like, we hate who we hate / But we’re also easily swayed”. Repeat for two minutes. A nice way to stomp on the masses and get a superiority complex, but it gets the adrenaline going.

‘Umbrella’ (Rihanna)
0:55 – I’ve long since maintained that ‘Umbrella’ is a good song hidden beneath overproduced R&B pap, and it’s the arrival of the first chorus that proves it. Jay Z raps for a bit and Rihanna talks about magazines and shiny cars, before getting to the meat of the song: “When the sun shines we’ll shine together / Told you I’ll be yours forever”, before admitting that “Now that it’s raining more than ever / Know that we’ll still have each other / You can stand under my umbrella / You can stand under my umbrella”. The melody is repetitive but not dull, and the changes work perfectly. Perhaps my personal connection with this song makes me biased, but it’s still enough to bring a practically cancerous lump to my throat every time I hear it.

‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (The Who)
7:44 – The Who’s eight-minute stadium favourite, describing an impending revolution which leaves the state the same as it ever was (to bring back Talking Heads again), is also home to one of the coolest moments in all recorded music. Roger Daltrey sings of fighting in the streets, and the party on the left now jumping to the other end of the spectrum, while Townshend’s guitar crashes through to a lengthy breakdown that consists solely of repeated organ chords. Eventually Keith Moon begins to fill out the texture, tentatively at first but gradually becoming louder, still drumming like he’s playing lead guitar – you get the sense that something is about to happen, and when Townshend hits another power chord, it does. Roger bellows a “Yeah!” that is pure, unadulterated rock and roll: lustful, carefree and rebellious, ascending the mountain of potency to the sort of dizzy heights that the band would never again reach, at least not on record. You could read all sorts of contextual significance into the scream, perhaps seeing it as a metaphor for political defiance, or embodied frustration at the corruption of the system, but personally I think Roger just dumped it in there because he thought it sounded good. And it does.

‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ (Pink Floyd)
3:08 – Another scream, another Roger. This one is chilling, rather than defiant: three minutes of droning bass and weird, almost raga-like improvisations from Rick Wright, and then the song appears to gather momentum. Roger almost imperceptibly whispers “Careful with that axe, Eugene…”, before breaking into a blood-curdling wail that rips out your heart the first time you hear it: there’s a roll from Mason, Gilmour’s guitar gets heavier and then the rest of the band smashes through the metaphorical doors with a full-on jam that lasts for the rest of the song. We all have our favourite screams: mine is the live version on 1969’s Ummagumma. Music to commit murder to.

‘One’ (Live, U2)
3:18 – My first exposure to U2’s powerhouse ballad was the live version that serves as a B-side to ‘Miss Sarajevo’, and some fourteen years later it’s still my favourite. Eschewing Larry Mullen’s drums in favour of a full orchestra, the band deliver an initially tentative, almost hesitant version of this that builds in intensity as the strings gain prominence, threatening on occasion to drown out The Edge’s guitar. Perhaps the best moment comes at the climax of the middle eight, when Bono sings “You ask me to enter, and then you make me crawl / And I can’t be holding on to what you’ve got / When all you’ve got is hurt”. The way he sings ‘holding’ alone, full of pain and suffering, is enough to bring tears to your eyes.

‘Solsbury Hill’ (Peter Gabriel)
3:23 – From solsburyhill.org: “The track’s pace quickens as new instruments are added with each additional verse, the final cathartic moment occurring at the last ‘home’ as the crash cymbal darts across the stereo spectrum (a technique applied to many of the songs’ instruments, so much so that listening to ‘Solsbury Hill’ in audiophile headphones can create a sense of motion sickness) and the electric guitars growl down to the tonic chord over bristling shouts and oddball squeals. ‘Solsbury Hill’ is one of the few songs in popular music to guarantee goosebumps with every listen and well deserves its place in the Peter Gabriel catalogue.” There’s nothing I need to add to that.

‘Hello Earth’ (Kate Bush)
1:07 – The emotional climax to The Ninth Wave, the Arthurian song cycle that makes up the second half of Hounds of Love, sees Kate Bush admit that “with just my heart and my mind I can be driving / driving home / and you asleep on the seat”. There’s an orchestra, and some very eighties-sounding drums, and a lot of reverb on those lyrics, and then she does something totally unexpected – the sound cuts back completely to reveal a chanting male choir performing ‘Tsintskaro’, a Georgian folk song that was also used in Werner Herzog’s take on Nosferatu, during the plague scenes. It’s an absolutely stunning moment: the choir is fragile and brittle but totally focussed, and the sense of sadness and melancholy is almost overwhelming. Kate herself says that the voices “are meant to symbolise the great sense of loss, of weakness, at reaching a point where you can accept, at last, that everything can change”. I’ve never sought out a translation of the text, and I am tempted to leave it this way, thinking instead of Morgan Freeman’s monologue in The Shawshank Redemption: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared. Higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away…and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 51

January 2, 2010

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Various – Maybe This Christmas
Thea Gilmore – Strange Communion
Joni Mitchell – Blue
Chris Rea – The Very Best Of
John Denver and the Muppets – A Christmas Together

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 51

January 3, 2010

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Cliff Richard – The Whole Story
The Beatles – Love
Jeff Wayne – War of the Worlds
Various – Music of the Millennium
Martyn Joseph – Nobody’s Fool / Sold Out

Three Prayers and a Piano

January 4, 2010

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It would have been around half past eleven. I was sitting on a piano stool at the far side of the church hall, having slipped quietly back there from my high-backed cushioned seat after the morning’s sermon. Being able to surreptitiously glide from one to the other without bringing too much attention to yourself is something of an art form: you have to know in advance where you’re going, anticipate how long you’ll be able to spend on the proper chair, calculate whether it’s worth the effort of moving in the first place (it is in my case – listening to a half-hour sermon from the discomfort of a piano stool gives me backache), and then choose an appropriate moment to make your move, preferably when there is some sort of communal activity going on so as to minimise the attention you’ll draw to yourself, and making sure that you don’t trip over microphone stands, sloppily strewn stacks of sheet music or abandoned plastic cars on your way.

It may sound melodramatic, but I have my reasons. The accompanist needs to be present but discreet, playing his part when needed and then fading into the background when not. This means keeping your fingers clear of the keyboard in between hymns, anticipating when the pastor will want mood music over an evangelical prayer, and choosing an appropriate voluntary with which to close the service. Above all, you need to know your hymns: feasible key signatures, apposite tempos and consistent interludes between verses. If there is more than one choice of melody, you need to know which one the preacher will select and which one the congregation will expect, and hope that they’re the same.

It’s like assembling a mix tape: there are a lot of rules. The biggest problem you find when accompanying church singing is that the congregation will slow you up if you let them. This does not mean that the best approach to playing is to plough through the introductions to hymns at breakneck speed, hoping that the congregational lag will automatically adjust your given tempo to one that is more suitable. This is a mistake many beginners make, and it leads to confusion on all sides. The congregation expects the organist to set the tempo, so the best thing to do is to find one that works and then stick to it: they will have to keep up with you, and deep down they know it.

There was an elderly musician in my church in Reading who meant well, but who struggled intently on Sunday mornings. Curiously, her piano playing – and accompanying – was flawless, and it was only on the organ that she found herself unable to control proceedings. We would thus be singing ‘Meekness and Majesty’ at half speed, as Wilma started slowly and, thanks to an inevitable lag that she had failed to control, became slower still, with lengthy, almost unbearably plodding choruses that seemed to go on for an eternity. I can remember nearly passing out during one held note that lasted for a full twenty seconds during the second chorus. Meanwhile, in one of the back rooms where the sound carries, my brother and the other members of the Junior Church were singing along, trying to keep their own pace. It was only halfway through the second verse that Mark stopped and said “Hang on, shall we see if we can lap them?”

I started playing at our church about eighteen months ago, filling in the gap left by a departing pianist. The rotational system means I’m only on once every four or five weeks or so, which means monthly Friday night rehearsals where we will run through the order of service for that Sunday, talk in advance about any changes we might want to make, and crack bad jokes. The worship group have power of veto over any hymn choices, but I have yet to actually exercise this in practice, although we came perilously close when the Children & Families Specialist picked ‘One More Step Along The World I Go’ for an all-age service. It’s a song I’ve hated for years, for various reasons that are too dull to include here, but we played it anyway. Sometimes you just have to compromise.

It’s nice accompanying a congregation that means what they’re singing, even if you have to deal with occasional arm-waving and gestures of fierce concentration during the more spirited choruses. It beats the hell out of having to play for people who are simply going through the motions and who seem almost afraid to put any emotion into their singing for fear of what it might do to them: I’ve had this plenty of times, and thankfully the occasions where I have to deal with it at our current church are few and far between. There’s a difference between approaching worship with quiet reverence – I have absolutely no problem with that – and making it quite obvious that you’re thinking about last night’s Doctor Who, or whether you set the timer for the oven. I refer to these people as Mrs Beamishes, after a song by Peter Skellern and Richard Stilgoe about a middle-aged conservative who is outwardly respectable but utterly devoid of love. The song is drenched in acidic humour, but makes a serious point.

At the opposite end of the worship spectrum are the charismatics, and while I welcome signs of genuine enthusiasm (there’s nothing quite so gratifying as watching someone get swept up in the moment when you’re playing for them), they do get a bit carried away. I can remember being at Emily’s church in Cambridge for the first time: I’d grown up in a well-meant but restrained Methodist environment where the closest we got to getting swept up in the moment was a frenzy of off-the-beat clapping in ‘Shine Jesus Shine’. It wasn’t particularly dynamic, but it was what I was used to. I’d witnessed emotional responses to worship before, but nothing prepared me for what happened during one particular chorus, when, all of a sudden, a middle-aged woman in a house dress jumped up from her seat and left the pew, lolloping down the aisle to the front of the building. There was a large brown flag lying on the carpet next to the fire doors, and the next thing I knew she’d picked it up and begun to wave it around, moving as if caught in a breeze, an expression of utter sincerity on her face. She looked like an extra from Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps it would have helped if the chorus itself had been one of profound beauty, where such an intense emotional reaction was entirely expected, but in truth it was one of those dull and meandering worship songs with no real melody, depth or lyrical content, much like ninety-five per cent of the stuff in the books.

Slightly bemused by this spectacle, and not really wanting to stare, I glanced across to the other side of the building, where the band were sitting – and saw a woman of roughly thirty who was skipping around in a manner that can best be described as a confused hybrid of ballet dancing and cheerleading. She had moved from her seat into the central aisle and – eyes closed – was prancing and hopping, limbs flailing, legs thrashing wildly, elbows threatening to poke out the eyes of the seemingly apathetic man who was standing next to her. Occasionally, she would lift her arms and raise them high above her head and press her hands together in a fashion that was evidently designed to evoke a praying gesture, but in truth she looked like she was trying out for an Olympic diving team. I turned my gaze back to the overhead projector screen and tried to ignore it. There was, I remain convinced, a lesson to be learned from all this, but some six and a half years later I’m still trying to figure it out.

Our current church falls somewhere in between the respectful decorum of the Methodist church and the emotional whirlpool of Emily’s Cambridge haunt. There are moments of abandonment, typically when our pastor decides to add an a capella chorus at the end of a song, and there’s a bit of arm-waving. The posture adopted by the more outwardly earnest parishioners in our flock appears to be one of a single arm in the air, raised but not straightened, as if almost tentatively, eyes closed. Everyone else just sings, but they sing like they mean it. There is no flag waving and no diving. I never thought it was possible to have your cake and eat it, but there we go.

I was at this particular service alone, which was probably a good thing. It’s nice having the boys there, but they do tend to get in the way: Thomas, in particular, tends to suddenly become clingy at the most inopportune moments, electing to join me at the piano during or between hymns. The latter is less of a problem as I will just hit the off button on the electric piano and rest assured that his key-thumping will be met with a resounding silence. During hymns it’s more of a problem, and on more than one occasion I’ve had a good praise chorus ruined by enthusiastic improvisations down at the bass end of the keyboard. I actually gave up a regular playing commitment in a previous church on the grounds that the worship was being compromised by Joshua’s input. Besides, the singing was lacklustre and no longer any fun: to be honest I was glad of an excuse to stop.

People say they don’t mind, and in our church they truly don’t, but while it may not matter to them, it does to me. You feel that bad behaviour from your children, whatever their age, is a negative reflection on you as a parent, and no amount of well-meant reassurance from parents and non-parents alike changes any of that. It’s easy to forget that there are variables: the tiredness factor, any current anxieties that they may have and the fact that all children have an in-built radar that flags the times that they should be behaving themselves, so that they might do the exact opposite. This explains why Joshua always picks the prayers to start fighting with his brother, or why Thomas waits for the Gospel reading to mount the dais at the front of the church and veer alarmingly towards the advent candles. We’ve tried all possible seating combinations and all possible toy combinations, but at the end of the day there is only so much you can do: children are children and they will behave how they want to behave, irrespective of any parental input. So we just let them get on with it, and take them outside if we need to. Besides, pianos are there to be played. There’s a time and a place, but how is a two year old supposed to know about that?

The visiting preacher that morning was David Coffey, President of the Baptist World Alliance – a quiet, contemplative man and a thumping good speaker to boot. It was the final Sunday in Advent, and to be honest I can’t really remember what he discussed. It was one of those sermons that spoke to me, but on a quieter, almost subconscious level: I knew how I felt at the end of it, and I knew why, but the specifics of how we got there are hazy. That makes it sound like I was drunk. Perhaps the best sermons have that effect.

It was five days before Christmas, and I was drained: a succession of late nights and general fatigue had combined to leave me tired, stressed and – rather like this year’s Doctor Who – distinctly lacking in seasonal cheer. It wasn’t one particular thing, but a combination of financial concerns, a lengthening list of jobs that seemed to show no signs of abatement, concerns about Emily, and a state of despair about the state of the world. When I’d begun to use the Sun forums back in early 2008, I felt driven to help people – to guide them, to talk about my faith and its conflicts and lend some insight where I could. I am now so riddled with conflicts I have no idea how I feel about anything. I see an international obsession with the trivial, with the ridiculous and with the superficial and I despair. I see the current public infatuation with being offended – either on your own behalf or on the behalf of someone else who actually doesn’t mind at all – and it makes me nauseous. I read the moronic ramblings on internet forums and cannot understand how people could believe what the press tells them. I don’t believe I’m particularly special or insightful, so why should I be the one who has to point out how much they’ve misunderstood things? Why should I be the only one to see what they can’t?

I have no idea whether I’m a good husband, or a good father – there are days that I think I’m getting it right, and then there are others, like this one, where Thomas screams for half an hour and I wonder what on earth I did to deserve this. I feel like I have no real place in the world other than to push journals from one state to another, and even that’s something that could be done by other people. My wife loves me, and my children love me, but that doesn’t stop me feeling useless. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel abandoned.

It was like this the other Sunday, and in the midst of this sense of general turmoil, I suddenly became aware that David was telling a story I’d heard before. It told of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish virtuoso, who had arranged a concert at Carnegie Hall. The venue was filling up and the audience chatter was alive with anticipation. All of a sudden, a small boy who was attending the concert with his mother wandered up to the stage, approached the piano and, oblivious to the stunned reaction of the audience, began to play ‘Chopsticks’. The attending patrons seethed in anger and annoyance at this graceless faux pas, while the boy’s mother squirmed in her seat, presumably wishing that the floor would open and swallow her (presumably while Reggie Dixon comes up the other way).

All of a sudden, who should emerge from the wings but Paderewski himself, who had overheard the commotion and was anxious to see what was going on. The audience watched in tense anticipation as he approached the piano from behind: they were waiting for him to deliver the boy a stern reprimand, and were instead shocked into silence as he sat down on the seat behind him, before delivering a whispered instruction into his ear: “Just keep playing”.

As the story goes, Paderewski then placed his hands either side of the boy’s, and played an apparently spontaneous concerto based around ‘Chopsticks’, turning the boy’s key-bashing into the most unlikely of duets. The admonishing glares of the audience gradually dissolved into smiles of delight, as their perception of the boy changed from that of unruly tearaway to future virtuoso in the making. And all the while, Paderewski never ceased his whisper: “Don’t stop. Just keep playing. You’re doing great.”

It’s a charming tale, and it would be even more charming if it were true, but it isn’t. There is, according to truthorfiction.com, “no evidence this ever happened”, although the story itself takes its inspiration from a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden in 1940, the souvenir programme of which features Paderewski encouraging a small boy who is seated at the piano. But it’s a moot point, because true or not the tale of Paderewski’s ‘Chopsticks’ concerto takes on a deep theological significance when you consider the possibility of an omniscient deity, placing metaphorical supporting arms around us and embellishing our own work with his own. Many of the internet versions of the story choose to include this in one form or another, generally in the form of mawkish sentiment like this:

“Perhaps that’s the way it is with God…the next time you set out to accomplish great feats, listen carefully. You may hear the voice of the Master, whispering in your ear, “Don’t quit! Keep playing!”. May you feel His arms around you and know that His hands are there, helping you turn your feeble attempts into true masterpieces.” Remember, God doesn’t seem to call the equipped – rather, he equips the called.”

Buckets are by the window. Please feel free to take a mint afterwards.

I was pondering all this as David wrapped up his sermon, and the pastor took the dais. Earlier in the sermon, David had mentioned in passing a carol that was familiar from his childhood: one that I’d never heard before, but which was nostalgically remembered by the older generation. As Keith now approached the lectern, he said “I think before we go any further we’ll sing that hymn”. I panicked. It wasn’t on the order of service, I had no idea of the title – just a few snatched lines – and what’s more, I’d never played it before. Before too long Keith gave out a hymn number; I thumbed through the book as quickly as I could but I’m not the world’s strongest sight reader and had no idea how the thing should go.

The other musicians crashed with me through an introduction, and mercifully, this was one of those occasions when the congregation knew the hymn much better than we did. My substitutions were all over the place and it wasn’t until the final verse that I managed to make the thing sound respectable – we did at least finish quite well. But while I’d had to think on my feet, as well as make a mental note to ask Keith not to do that again, my mind was racing with possibilities. Because it occurred to me that throughout the whole hymn, the voice in my head had been steadily chanting “Don’t stop….just keep playing. You’re doing great.”

There are days at the moment when I don’t even know if I believe in God, which arguably makes me a highly inappropriate choice to be leading worship even on a monthly basis, but that’s not something to contest now. Paderewski’s ‘Chopsticks’ may be an urban legend, but there’s a lesson to be learned here – there was for me, anyway. Because whether the voice I heard in my head was that of God himself or merely my own subconscious, the message was the same – even if there’s no God to embellish our one-handed melodies, our own willpower may be enough to make them something extraordinary. It’s very easy to reach the point where giving up is inevitable, or even sensible, simply because it’s the easier path to travel: where the realisation that you can’t really change the world is enough to grind you into the dirt. I’ve felt like that a lot lately – this sense of hopelessness and loss.

But you keep playing, and you don’t stop, because when you look at it, that’s the option that makes the most sense, even if it’s the harder road. So while the story in David’s sermon was entirely fictional, it was exactly what I needed to hear – and while Keith’s impromptu service alteration dropped me in at the deep end, it was the perfect example of applying the theory in a real-world context, which is something that Keith does very well. We fail, and we fail, and we fail again, but we don’t stop. We have no idea whether what we’re doing is making any difference, but we keep playing, because there’s nothing else. And so I will grind on, whatever it takes, as best as I can, because that’s what you do – as a parent, as a husband, as a musician, as a teacher and as a human being, because I will not give up and I will not back down. Perhaps I’ll even let Thomas near the keyboard next time.

Closing Thoughts

January 5, 2010

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Tuesday. The winter sun has all but melted the early frost and ice. It feels like years since it’s been clear. This will be my last entry.

Today was Josh’s first day at school. These days, they try and minimise the jumps: as my father said, they’re so much better at preparing them. Full time attendance at the feeder nursery has helped, as has a series of weekly visits in the run up to Christmas. He has met his teachers and spent some time in the building. His mother dropped him off this morning and he passed through the gates without complaint. I don’t know how long this enthusiasm will last, but we might as well make the most of it.

Listening to Abba in the car may have been a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. Cold air pulsed through the broken heater, as Agnetha’s voice drifted through the speakers:

“Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
  Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
  I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
 And I have to sit down for a while.”

I drove to work with a montage playing in my head: Joshua, pulled from the womb with a bellowing cry. His first car journey, almost a week later. Those early, ham-fisted nappy changes. The look in the eyes of my grandfather, himself not long for this world, the first and last time that all four generations were together. The time I left Joshua on the sofa and watched him roll off, helpless, unable to reach him in time despite running in from the kitchen as fast as I could. Those first, stumbled attempts at conversation. The day we were due to move house and I had the mother of all arguments with British Telecom, and how he came into the empty study and I just held him. The pirate games and the introductions to Captain Caveman and Scooby Doo. The time he tottered near the edge of a sixty-foot drop at Pevensey Castle, and I had to run like the wind – and against the wind – to pull him away from the edge. I remember tantrums and tears and cuddles and stories and that first trip to the cinema, and the Sunday that we watched The Lion King on the sofa.

There is a large part of me, I will admit, that doubts that I have been a good father. I have given of myself, freely and without complaint, but I wonder to what extent I’ve created a reservoir of knowledge rather than a fountain: I wonder to what extent I’ve tried to imprint my own self upon him. The journey to school is one of letting go for parents: you relinquish your hold and you allow them to grow to some extent by themselves. They still need you, but perhaps they need you a little less. Someone else is responsible for their moral development now, someone as well as you – you still get the lion’s share, and one of the biggest mistakes that some parents make is assuming that their child’s teacher is the only one who needs to be a role model, but you lose some of your clout.

Martyn Joseph says that songs are like children. You create them, you give them life and you nurture them, and then when they’re ready you send them out into the world and hope that they’ll be all right and that no harm will befall them, and with a bit of luck they send you a little money from time to time. But songs are never really finished. Even my best ones could still be polished. There’s no right answer to the question of how you should raise your family: you read the books and you browse the websites and you ask your friends and family and workmates and, where possible, you try and avoid Gina Ford. When I was seventeen, my mother told me that as a parent, you never stop learning, and to be honest the prospect of still making mistakes when all my sons are grown up is one that troubles me greatly. I’d rather have got a handle on things by then.

It’s milestones like this that make you stop and think, specifically of your own past. I don’t recall being happy or unhappy at school – like most things in my life, it was a grey area, rather than one colour or the other. We want Josh to be happy, and we don’t have a lot of control over that, at least inside those gates. Perhaps that’s what concerns me. Perhaps it’s the need for him to be loved and supported and the fear that he won’t make friends – even though, as Emily pointed out over lunch, he is a sociable little boy. Perhaps that’s why you take stock; you want to rewrite your own past.

And I remember tumbling things. I remember the record player in the back bedroom, and the mild, almost claustrophobic sound that formed the textures of ‘The Name of the Game’, and which somehow convinced me that Abba were hiding in the wardrobe. I remember hearing The Bee Gees’ ‘You Win Again’ for the first time on vinyl and thinking that the sound quality on my parents’ Sony was much better than it was on Top of the Pops. I remember playing a trick on my family one Christmas when I was six years old: they asked me to put the Band Aid record on my uncle’s record player, but my aunt and I secretly swapped it for ‘Bermuda Triangle’ when no one was looking. Everyone laughed, but when they refused to let me play the whole song, I burst into tears.

I remember thinking Vanilla Ice was the most talented rapper on the planet until I learned he’d ripped off Queen and not even obtained copyright permission. I remember Ewan lending me a copied C90 that contained Greatest Hits, and his disappointment that I didn’t like it. I remember hearing ‘America: What Time Is Love’ for the first time on a warm June evening en route to an orchestra rehearsal, walking up Knowsley Road, the screaming wails of Cressida Cauty testing the battered old transistor to its limit. I remember buying De La Soul is Dead and my younger brother threatening to tell my parents about the bad language in ‘Afro Connections at a Hi-5’.

I remember ‘Lust For Life’ and how it punctuated 1996 like Tony Christie would some nine years later. I remember discovering the revival of Jesus Christ Superstar and how I’d crank it up to full volume and throw open the windows in my university quarters, and how it was a miracle the neighbours never complained. I remember Eleanor, and how we bonded – albeit briefly – over Gershwin in the music room. I remember listening to ‘Manchild’ by Eels at three in the morning, after too many cups of coffee. I remember standing in the quadrangle in my hall of residence, the night before I left Leeds for the last time, suddenly regretful and sorry, Brightman and Bocelli’s ‘Time To Say Goodbye’ running through my head.

I remember the upheaval that followed the millennium change, and listening to Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush singing ‘Don’t Give Up’ on a Bristol-bound National Express, when I was at perhaps my lowest ebb. I remember hearing ‘Comfortably Numb’ for the first time on a Sunday evening and bursting into tears. I remember learning the words to ‘Joseph’s Coat’ by sticking them on the wall above my office desk. I remember dancing with Sandy to Nnenna Freelon’s version of ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ – an awkward, superficial moment. I remember giving a lift home one afternoon to two colleagues, and the torrential rain that cascaded down as we drove out of the business park, as the MP3 player’s shuffle function took us into ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, and how we roared with laughter at this juxtaposition.

Most of all, I remember my wife. I remember our wedding: a day of kisses and photos and playground swings and Teletubbies and ceilidh dances, all of which seemed to have a soundtrack of some sort, and the P.A.’s background music that the hotel staff failed to turn down, with the result that our church minister had to say grace while John Paul Young was crooning ‘Love Is In The Air’ in the background. I remember driving through the Peak district, with lakes and more lakes and slow-moving people-carriers that roll down enormous, high-gradient hills, and a vast display of green and brown, without a soul in sight – not a farmhouse or cottage or even an animal, this mildly oppressive canvas of strange and beautiful things, all scored to the sound of Kate Bush. I remember driving back from Blackpool, singing ‘God Only Knows’ to Emily, and then singing it again a few weeks later when Aqualung performed it at Greenbelt, and then again the following year during a trip to Southsea. I remember The Proclaimers, and how I thought ‘Sunshine on Leith’ had been written for me.

Music, you see, has punctuated my life, in the same way that it’s punctuated the lives of so many others. Recorded music may or may not have run its course, but these songs have acted as milestones and waypoints along the road to salvation or damnation or somewhere in the middle. They become audio snapshots of times past, for good or ill. There are songs – perfectly good ones – that I can’t listen to now, because I associate them with bad times in my life. I would love to look at music in a purely detached and thoroughly academic manner, because it would enable me to be objective and educated and critically informed, but the sum total of my analysis – however well-intentioned – is always going to amount to little more than “X is better than Y but not as good as Z”. And over the past year I’ve learned to live with that, because I don’t think objectivity is the path I’m supposed to be treading.

And I think of the boys, and their budding musical tastes and talents, and I wonder if they’ll grow up with music as a source of lifeblood to them, as it has been to their father, or as a disposable commodity. In making everything free, are we raising a generation of children who will place no value over music? Have we shunned the here and now in favour of the always available? I was saying just the other week that I did not believe that music today was any worse than music of decades past, and I hold to that, but have we nonetheless fostered a culture where nothing holds any real value simply because it’s so easy to get hold of? Has recorded music become the equivalent of Zimbabwe currency – cheap, transitory, worthless?

The older you get, the more you realise that you do not have the answers, and I don’t think I can spend another year trying to work this out. I have no idea, and so I choose to voluntarily bow out of the argument, conceding victory to whichever side would like to think they’ve won. I choose instead to think of my children, and their own legacy, whatever that may be. I want them to love music as their parents did, but I can’t make that choice for them. I want them to get emotional responses from songs they love – to treat good music with reverence and respect and reserve, and to keep those favourite songs for special occasions rather than Friday night pub sessions on the jukebox, and to actively listen to them, rather than just having them on in the background, and to turn up the car stereo to the extent that the music is all you can hear. That would be wonderful.

But that’s my own destiny, and it may not be theirs. I’ve spent years trying to make fountains, and not reservoirs. Sometimes, although it kills you, you have to step back and let the stream flow of its own accord and carve its own path, even if that path takes you into unfamiliar and perhaps even unwanted territory. To do anything else is an insult to the people you claim to love unconditionally. Ultimately, your biggest gift to them – after your time – must be your approval of whatever road they choose to travel, within reason. I’d love my children to inherit their old man’s fascination with music, but you do what you can with the hand you’re dealt, and you can do no more.

And it’s corny, and trite, and sentimental, but I’m reminded of an early scene in Superman – a film I think you appreciate on another level once you become a father – where Marlon Brando addresses the infant Kal El just before rocketing him away from a dying Krypton:

“You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you, even in the face of our deaths. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything I feel…all this, and more, I bequeath you, my son. You will carry me inside you all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your own eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father, the son. This is all I…all I can send you, Kal-El.”

And as I entered Joshua’s bedroom last night, and stood over his sleeping form, whispering these words with the same quiet intensity that Brandon Routh has at the end of Superman Returns, I felt a sense of loss – that a part of our lives is over – but at the same time a sense of anticipation. Because it’s the end of the beginning, and that’s a cliché, but like many clichés it’s rooted in the truth. “I’ve just looked at his first-day-at-school photos,” says my father, who has just emailed, “and my eyes are moist. But Josh looks so eager and happy and smart; you are rightly very proud of him.”

We all have our own playlists, whether music is an obsession or a passing fancy or even of no interest whatsoever. There is no template for how these lists are constructed or what they are supposed to contain – the compilation of a mix tape, as Nick Hornby says, has a lot of rules, but that’s not how it works for human beings. This last year has been a chance to look back, to take stock, to take less control over what I’ve been playing but far more control over how I choose to respond to it. I’ve discovered songs I never knew existed and re-examined the ones I’d forgotten, as well as distanced myself from some of the more familiar standards that now bore me. I’ve looked at the how and the why as well as the when, and while I don’t think I’m any more familiar with my CD collection than I was this time last year, I think it’s being appreciated a little more.

I’ve discovered that I need music in the same way that Julian Barnes needs love: our only hope even if it fails us, although it fails us, because it fails us. I don’t want to become one of those people who shun events like No Music Day “because music is my life, and I can’t live without it even for one day”, because these people hopelessly miss the point. Those who claim that they can’t live without music even for one day do not truly value it, because you cannot truly value something until you have faced the prospect of a life that does not contain it – and it is for this reason that I value the contribution that No Music Day brings to the world. But perhaps the secret towards truly appreciating music, whatever its academic qualities, is context. This, above all, was the point of The 17, in which music became an event and an occasion, rather than something to be catalogued and filed. Perhaps it’s best this way: perhaps we can view music as a collection of moments, of accompaniments, but savoured and remembered correctly and made precious, rather than ephemeral. It sounds like more obsession with nostalgia, but it needn’t be, because the records needn’t be old. We have access to everything that there is and everything that’s ever been, but this needn’t be a bad thing. We just have to cherry pick, but be willing to experiment, and savour, and appreciate the songs that we love, and actually listen, rather than simply hear. Perhaps that’s the best way. Perhaps, ultimately, that’s the only way.

I wonder what I’ll listen to tomorrow.