Wednesday, 17th October 2007.

Moment of Truth

I remember where I was the day I first realised I liked Billy Joel. It was a Haven park cabaret performance just outside Newquay, ten years ago, and the house band were going through 'My Life'. It was a song I'd never been fond of: I'd grown up in a world of lushly orchestrated eighties synth pop that gave way to overproduced early nineties top-heavy house and indie, and Joel's occasionally sparse arrangements (coupled with the fact that 'It's Still Rock And Roll' really is one of the most annoying pieces of music ever) generally didn't do much for me.

But on this occasion, during a holiday that was in many respects a coming-of-age experience - first real trip without parents, along with childhood friend who had recently lost his mother - the band's music struck (forgive me) a chord. Maybe it was the atmosphere - Haven clubs aren't really the sorts of places to have fun but I was, at least, amongst friends - or perhaps a growing awareness of the importance of song-crafting that would explode the following year like a tropical storm in a whirlwind of writing, most of which wasn't actually any good. Or perhaps it was the way the song's subject matter related to my final manifestation of teenage angst as it began its long and slow descent into twenty-something angst - contempt for mediocrity, contempt for the world, and contempt most of all at yourself.

Whatever the reasons, I suddenly sat bolt upright in my beer-stained chair (a by-product of someone else's clumsiness, not my own) and stared at the house band and declared aloud to no one in particular, "This song is fantastic!". All the days of flicking to another station every time it appeared on Classic Gold were instantly forgotten. When I got back from Cornwall, I went out and bought Billy Joel's Greatest Hits and went from there. The same thing happened the following year with Joni Mitchell; the following year it was Bob Dylan. The moments were less dramatic this time around but the effects were just as clear-cut: a sudden amalgamation of back catalogues and immersion in artist history.

Little musical epiphanies like that crop up with alarming frequency in my life. They can take the form of sudden realisations about the motives of particular performers (such as the moment I figured out that Johnny Cash didn't wear black because he was in mourning for the world or the dead POWs in Vietnam - he wore black because it was cool and he knew it). Or the acute awareness of plagiarism - I was driving to Henley, I think, when I realised that the verse of 'I'll Stand By You' is a note-for-note (and chord-for-chord) rip-off of 'It's A Heartache'. Similarly, it was only a few weeks ago when I was experiencing the bridge in Whitney Houston's saccharine-drenched 'The Greatest Love Of All', and - after trying to work out where I'd heard it before - suddenly figured out that it bears an uncanny resemblance to Gordon Lightfoot's 'If You Could Read My Mind'. (This latter example, incidentally, sparked a fairly hefty lawsuit.)

Some of these are inevitable, and a by-product of motifs and lyrics and other stuff gathering in my subconscious, so there's usually a sudden click of recognition, as if I'd found a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There are times, however, when these sudden epiphanies surprise the hell out of me. One such occasion occurred when I was driving back to work one afternoon singing along to a CD we'd recently inherited from my mother during one of her periodic clear-outs. Said CD - one of those cheap anthologies of Music For Contemporary Mothers - is graced with hits old and new from crowd pleasers (Westlife, Chris De Burgh) and less obvious choices (umm, Anastacia?). It makes for an eclectic, unbalanced mix, but there was some stuff on there that I wanted that we didn't have, so when she said she wanted rid of it I snapped it up for the collection.

I tell you this because there was no other reason why I would have been listening to Will Young. I was never a fan of Will - I found his cover of 'Light My Fire' insipid and empty, whatever its affiliations with Jose Feliciano. He was a product of manufactured pop and at the time he got famous I despised manufactured pop with all the angst my angry young man persona could possible muster. But Will has stayed the course and my respect for him has gone up over the last couple of years - he's quite a talented actor and has made wise career choices to enable him to survive beyond many of his contemporaries. All the same, I'd never actually buy any of his records. But 'Evergreen' was playing at full blast as I drove down Foxhall Road on my way back from lunch, and I was singing along at the top of my voice, and all of a sudden I had another revelation, and (in an eerie parallel with the Billy Joel encounter) I shouted out "This song is fantastic!". This week, anyway.

My point (and I do have one) is that you can change your position as often as you change your socks if you want, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Tastes wither and die and then stuff gets re-evaluated. Over-exposure nearly killed James Blunt (and no, I'm not talking about the ridiculous snowbound striptease he did in the 'You're Beautiful' video) but now that he's been off the scene for a while before returning with a new song that hasn't been played nearly as much, he's actually quite fun again. Bill Drummond wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian the other week about how he reached a stage where he threw a Bob Dylan tape out of his car window and stopped listening to him. I have recently reached the conclusion that Pink Floyd, formerly my musical idols, were actually completely up their own backsides for most of the seventies, with a few notable exceptions. In a few years it will swing back. I am as fickle and shallow as many people I know and my musical tastes fluctuate year by year.

And so it was that this morning I had one of those freak-out moments. I was driving from the local pharmacy to the office and the stereo was blasting out 'Umbrella', a song I'd recently downloaded. I should point out here that I am not a fan of contemporary R&B - a name, by the way, that's been shamelessly stolen by a corrupt usurper. After an evening watching the Hits channel the other night I've come to the conclusion that chart music is fifty per cent superficial bump-and-grind that's impossible to dance to, forty per cent whiny indie bollocks masquerading as music with 'depth' when it's mostly just sub-standard pap - oh, and ten per cent novelty records, most of whom are produced by Simon Cowell.

So I wasn't surprised when 'Umbrella' hit the top spot, although I was surprised at its longevity. For any song to be at number one for more than a couple of weeks takes some doing these days. Records used to creep up the charts; some were definite slow burners that came in at number 35 and inched their way upwards on a week-by-week basis. It was musical lovemaking, hit parade style: the first, exciting point of contact with the charts, the gradual escalation and the intensity that would come from realising that your record was in the top twenty, now the top ten, top five, oh my GOD t's going to make it, and then the wondrous, orgasmic moment when Mike Read would announce that it had reached number one. (And that's before we talk about the occasional re-entry.) There were the odd anomalies - songs that would crash in at the top five, or even go straight to number one in the week of release, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule.

These days the situation has been entirely reversed: a song goes straight in at number one and then crashes out without trace a couple of weeks afterwards. It's the disposable music angle - quick gratification followed by an almost immediate waning of interest as the public find something else to latch onto. Which was why I was taken aback that 'Umbrella' made number one about nine weeks in a row, and I realised that this record obviously had something.

So I finally listened to it, and it's a mess. Exactly as I'd feared - the obligatory rap delivered lazily by Jay-Z (does the hyphen appear on his deed poll certificate, I wonder?), the crowded rhythm track almost devoid of any real beat, and a bunch of overused synths. It's all over the place, and it sounds a little like they put a sixth former in a studio and told him to include as many grooves as he can in four and a half minutes. The lyric and melody both contain promise, and Rihanna doesn't have a bad voice, but it's the sort of song that could have worked much better if they'd stripped it down completely (as 'manufactured' girl group Hero did the other week in one of the X-Factor's more interesting auditions). You can imagine 'Umbrella' working rather nicely as delivered by Tracy Chapman or Roberta Flack on a beaten-up acoustic in a lone spotlight, but instead the song's potential is wrapped up in a slick and soulless production that is really little more than a showcase for an oft-played video featuring a lot of gold paint.

I'd downloaded the wretched thing, however, because it was number one on the day that Thomas was born, along with McFly's 'Transylvania'. We cheated: McFly were number one in the afternoon, and Rihanna in the evening, but because we initially disliked 'Umbrella' we bought the McFly track instead. But 'Umbrella' hung around like an awkward shaving rash, and despite my base instincts I really felt that I ought to give it another chance. At first it seemed that I'd made a mistake - there it was, the same disjointed groove, the same sense of a good song fighting to escape from the bondage of an ill-advised arrangement. (And what on earth possessed Rihanna to add that manually constructed echo at the end of the chorus? "Ella - ella - ella - "...it sounds like a toddler speaking down the phone.)

All of a sudden, something happened. I remembered the day that Thomas slipped down the birth canal and was ushered into this world - a day I really ought to write about some time, rather than scribbling lengthy digressions like this one - and the problems that followed; the sleepless nights, the reflux, the fact that it is a lot harder with two than it is with one, particularly when one is permanently whingy and the other has developed a tendency to whack people, Emily exhausted, me trying to help and unable to, lost and impotent.

"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"

Things have, I think, improved, and it's this summer that I've realised my true capacity to love someone. I am an imperfect beast who messes up constantly, but if getting through those first few months with Thomas and Joshua was a test then I think we passed it, and the lessons we learned are still being used on the occasional bad days, like today. And fighting the urge to burst into 'I Made It Through The Rain', I pushed on through roundabouts and past lorries and the giant, soaring concrete of the power station cooling tears, and it was then that I realised that I had a lump in my throat. All of a sudden I blinked, involuntarily, and realised there were tears falling, and that I couldn't stop them.

"Damn you!" I remember shouting at the radio. "Not this one! This song is not supposed to make me cry!"

I drove onwards, and I realised two things: firstly, that despite our initial loyalty towards the McFly boys, a far more appropriate (if imperfect) song was sitting under our noises the whole summer. And secondly, that sometimes the biggest epiphanies you experience aren't necessarily the musical ones.