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IT’S OVER9 March 2006 I don’t know when this whole ‘All known music has run its course’ thing started but for the sake of my own myth-making let’s say it was at 7.21 on the 17 March 1967. My dad had already knocked on the bedroom door twice to get me up. It was a school day and certain allotted household chores had to be done before I set off with satchel on back. This was in Corby, a one-industry town of modest size in the English East Midlands. The one industry was steel. The football team was known as the Steel Men. They languished and continue to do so. I would have been 13 years old, the transistor radio was on and tuned to Radio Caroline. This was in the days before Radio 1 or any of the local radio stations. If you wanted to listen to pop music, you had to listen to one of the numerous pirate stations broadcasting from ships outside the three-mile exclusion zone on the North Sea. Although I thought pop music was rather girlie I was beginning to listen to it more and more. What they were playing at 7.21 on this morning and what was stopping me getting up was not laziness but the new single by The Beatles. Recently our family had invested in a record player, a Dansette Monarch to be precise. I had no records but my big sister had bought a long player (LP) by a jazz singer that one of her teachers knew. My mum had bought the soundtrack to The Sound Of Music and my dad had got a Jimmy Shand and His Band extended player (EP). It was a year or so before my younger brother was to buy The Laughing Gnome by David Bowie’. As I lay there and wondered what a ‘fish and finger sky’ might be like, I decided to buy a copy of this record. This was going to be the first time I had ever spent my pocket money on anything but fishing tackle. After school that day I walked the two miles into the town and into the HMV record shop on the market square. I felt inhibited. I was walking into a teenage world, where everyone seemed to know what to say, how to look and where to find it. At home I plugged in the record player, lifted the lid, switched it on, watched the light grow red and bright as it warmed up. While it was warming I slipped the record from the sleeve. Although the sleeve was only paper, as all the 7” single sleeves of the day were, it was not a generic record company sleeve with a circular hole cut out of the middle so you could see the label and all its details, this was a picture sleeve. On one side were four individual photos of The Beatles and on the other … well, I won’t describe what that was like as I have since learnt that my memory recalls it differently to what the reality was. If ever given the choice, I would always choose my fallible memory over the facts, preserved in the cool and indifferent light of day, but I don’t expect you to. Although I had never bought a 7” single before, I knew what they looked like. I knew only EPs with four tracks on them, which cost somewhat more than a single, had a picture sleeve. The fact this had a picture sleeve made it seem important in my eyes. At that time I would never have heard the word marketing or been aware of its evil ways. This 7” single had a picture sleeve because the record deserved it. In those days record players had those tall spindles with a ratchet so you could stack up half-a-dozen singles at a time, dropping to be played one after the other. It seemed a complicated but magical thing to watch. But on that afternoon I had yet to learn how they worked. I had trouble getting my one and only record down the spindle, past the ratchet to sit on the deck. The record went around and around and around and around and I watched it. Not really knowing what to do next. I lifted the arm, felt butterflies in my belly, and my arm, the one that held the record player’s arm, tingled with nerves. Records scratched easily, this much I knew. Still it went round and round waiting for me to make the next move. Then I remembered the speeds – 33, 45 or 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). There was a little switch at the side of the spinning deck. It indicated the deck was spinning at 33 rpm. I switched it up to 45. This seemed impossibly fast. It was now or never. Caution thrown to the wind I lowered the arm down as gently as possible. The needle hit the groove and the music came. And this was magic, a hurdle overcome and the record sounded as good as it had on the radio that morning. But how were you supposed to listen to a record? Should I leap around the room? Should I recline in an armchair holding my chin between thumb and forefinger in deep contemplation? I did neither. I just stayed there on my knees on the floor, hunched over the record player while staring at the record spinning around and around as the needle made its way to the centre. When the music finished I lifted the arm and put it on at the beginning again. And again I didn’t stop watching the record going around and around. It was as if I was hardly listening to the music, I was too transfixed in the knowledge that this was a big deal in my comparatively short life. Then I remembered that records had things called Bsides so when it had played its way through for the second time I lifted the record off, turned it over, put it back on and dropped the needle into the groove like I had been doing it for at least as long as I had been riding a bike. Once learnt, never forgotten. My eyes still staring at the revolving record the music started. After tea I asked my mum if I could take the record player up to my room. She said I could. And so to bed. In bed I lay, holding this record, staring at this Strawberry Fields Forever. I wasn’t bothered about taking in the train-spotterish information that was printed on the label; the producer’s credit, serial number and all that stuff. What I was staring at was the grooves. This one long scratch in the plastic that coiled around and around, getting tighter and tighter. This one scratch that opened doors in my head into rooms that I didn’t even know were there and in these rooms strange and weird pictures hung on the walls. I wasn’t particularly interested in the mechanics of how all this worked, how the sound was kept on a mere scratch. I wasn’t going to be asking my physics teacher at school about the mechanics of the thing; never been that bothered about having things explained, just give me the magic. Over the next few years that walk into town to the HMV record shop on the market square became a regular thing. By the time I was 15 it was every Saturday, flicking the lengthening hair out of my eyes as I flicked through the album racks. Once I made a list of all the LPs that I wanted. There were 47 altogether. If I could have afforded all those, I would have never wanted for another in my life. In all, I only ever got 13 of those LPs before I went to art school at 17 and decided that buying records and reading music papers was for kids. There was a revolution to be had and barricades to be manned. Of course I never manned any barricades and by the time I was in my mid twenties was buying records and reading music papers again. Decades passed. In spring 2002 I was in London walking down Oxford Street, passing the massive HMV record shop there. I strolled in, thought I would spend a few minutes innocently flicking through the racks. Buy a couple of CDs, maybe. No sooner was I through the doors than I could feel a dread start to grip me. In front of me, aisle after aisle, rack upon rack of CDs, a sea of choice. Every genre of music known to mankind on offer. There was a credit card in my pocket which would allow me to buy at least ten times those 47 long players that I once thought would make my music listening life complete. At a conservative guess there must have been 100,000 different CDs waiting to be purchased. Over the years my taste in music has broadened, I had embraced whole continents of music that I never knew existed when I was 17. From Stockhausen to Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I was into genres before they even knew they existed. I walked away unable to flick through even one rack, let alone make a purchase. Just got on with the day’s affairs. That evening while doing my emails, the dread began to grip me again. I began to feel that every piece of recorded music that had ever existed was behind the screen of the iMac taunting me. Each with the face of a little evil sprite. The thing is, when Napster first hit the World Wide Web I thought it was the best thing that had happened in the music business for the last 110 years. Suddenly there was going to be no need to have a music business, who would pay for CDs when you could get it all for free. And if recorded music was as free as the air we breathe vast sums would never be spent on recording the bloated crap that the music business has been encouraging musicians to make ever since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band hit the racks of the HMV shop in Corby. But somehow the fact that – in theory at least – I could be listening to any piece of music that had ever been recorded within 30 seconds with just a few clicks of the mouse, that is any piece of music from the entire 110 years of recorded music history, left me with an empty feeling. A rational explanation for this hollowness was not what I required. Instead I went up to the attic of our house, found the box that I used to keep my 7” singles in as a youth, and that same family record player that I still had, and brought them down downstairs. In the box was Strawberry Fields Forever in its original picture sleeve. It was at that moment that I realised that the artwork was not as I had remembered it. I plugged in the record player, switched it on, and waited for it to warm up and the red light to glow bright. Stroked a finger across the stylus to make sure it was working, it was. Slid the record from the sleeve and placed it on the deck, still having trouble getting it down the spindle past the ratchet. Gently lifted the arm and lowered the needle into the groove. Looking after records had never been a forte of mine. The first thing to hit my eardrums was decades-worth of scratches, clicks and hisses from the uncared-for vinyl. Then the music hit I had a dream. A dream of ridding the world of every copy of Strawberry Fields Forever so that it no longer existed anywhere. The dream logic was that once every copy had been destroyed and it was obliterated from the world there might then be room in my head to experience that thing again with another piece of music. Maybe there would be more doors to open, more rooms to enter, more strange and weird paintings to look at. The next morning a plan was there in my head waiting for me to follow it. I might not be able to stamp out the likes of Mojo. If you don’t know what Mojo is, it is a despicable publication aimed at men like myself, in their middle years, who want to wallow in the music and pathetic rock ‘n’ roll values of their youth. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Don’t make me sick. I might not be able to stop The Stooges, The Sex Pistols or even The Velvet Underground from doing their reform and cash-in tours, but … The plan was more practical than the dream I had in the middle of the night. I wrote the following words on an AO-size sheet of white card using a big black felt tip: Only listen to music written, recorded or released in the previous twelve months by composers, soloists or ensembles who have never released music in any format at any time previous to the last 12 months. I then stuck the card up on my workroom wall. Following this self-imposed restriction might not deliver a new Strawberry Fields Forever moment which like virginity can never be regained, but it is a well-known fact that most artists produce their best work early in their career. They may refine what they do but you usually get the measure of what they are about on their first outing. It’s a bit of a generalisation and there may be plenty of exceptions that prove the rule (The Beatles being one) but my life had passed the half-way point so I didn’t want to be wasting time on people’s third albums when their second sounded nothing more than a polished version of their first. The following Sunday I started to read the record review page in our paper. I wasn’t checking how many stars each release had been given, or what subjective thoughts the critic had about this or that, I just wanted to know if it was the first album by the composer, soloist or ensemble and if it was, I made note of it. The next morning I would order the discs from Record House record shop in Aylesbury. This went on for almost a year. I was sticking rigidly to the diet but nearly everything I bought sounded like something I had heard 10, 20, 30 or 40 years before. Nothing seemed even marginally new, radical or risk-taking. Everything was safe, tried and tested, even if it was worthy and done from the heart and they meant it. As the months wore on I would at times be sorely tempted to break my vow. In my workshop there were hundreds of CDs that had been bought or sent to me over the last couple of decades, all stacked up against the wall at the end of the bench, in no particular order. Sometime late in the following January I was in there banging nails into wood. Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys kept catching my eye. Pet Sounds was pulled from the pile, slipped into the CD player and the play button was pressed. It was a repackaged version that included the track Good Vibrations. By the time it was half-way through Good Vibrations the tears were once again streaming down my cheeks. Could music ever be this good again? This new? This risk-taking? This everything? Look, I knew I had let nostalgia creep in and play havoc with my better judgment but I was helpless before its power. This felt better than riding a bike down a big hill. After the CD came to an end and shoved back on the pile I couldn’t stop myself. My resolve was in tatters. I put on The Byrds’ Greatest Hits. I got my 12-string air guitar out of its case and I was chiming along with The Bells Of Rhymney, Turn, Turn, Turn, Mr Tambourine Man and soddin’ 80,000 Miles High. As the final track faded I started to pull myself together. I had a problem that needed confronting. A new plan was hatched. For the rest of that year I would only listen to music made by bands or composers or soloists whose names or surnames began with B. So for the rest of 2002 it was Bartok, Bach, Beefheart, Bassie, Broonzy, Byrds, Belle and Sebastian, Black Box Recorder and hundreds of others that I had never listened to before, but who existed in the Bracks in the CD section of our local lending library. I assumed I would work my way through the alphabet year by year finishing off with A in 2028, the year that I would turn 75. It might seem a long time to wait to listen to Crossing The Red Sea by The Adverts but I had never heard it and I loved the title, so I was sure that the wait would be worth it. In some ways this worked very well. I discovered that although I had liked a couple of singles by Bad Finger when I was young, their albums were dreary tosh. But my biggest discovery was that although I worshipped The Beatles as a teenager in the late 1960s and Strawberry Fields Forever still held its place in my heart, listening to them now bored me shitless. I was forced to come to a vastly subjective conclusion that Sergeant Pepper is probably the worst thing to ever happen to pop music. By early December 2003 I was making a long list of C bands and artists that I could to start listening to in the coming January. But then on Christmas day I (again) thought ‘Fuck it’ and had a change of plan. While the kids were fighting and the turkey was roasting I wrote: Tear up a piece of sheet of paper into 26 pieces. Over twelve months, Twelve months later, Repeat the process every 12 months After I had done that I followed my instructions. The letter P came out. I was filled with relief. I was not going to have to listen to the collective works of The Cars. But I was mildly disappointed that I was not going to be able to play one of the other records in the 45 box in the attic, On The Road Again by Canned Heat. Between the years 1977 and 1992 I had found myself involved in the making of pop music. It happened by accident but had taken over my life. In 1992 I had found the strength of will to put a stop to it. Well, almost, I did have a couple of minor lapses. There were a lot of reasons for wanting to stop doing the pop thing. One of the main reasons was there was all this other stuff I wanted to do. Somehow the whole process of making music didn’t allow for this, music being a jealous mistress and all that. I needed to create time and space for the other stuff. ‘Music is not my first love and it won’t be my last,’ to misquote a lyric you might have heard once or twice. But I kept thinking about music. I would find myself thinking about it more than listening to it. Like, what is music for? And why do we listen to it in the way that we do? And what would it be like if …? But the big questions seemed to be ‘Why am I so frustrated with it?’ ‘Why do I want it to be something other than it is? For it to exist in some other sort of way than it already does.’ So although my new enforced listening regime was cute and vaguely interesting, it didn’t solve a much more fundamental problem I was having with music. A vague answer that I was crawling towards was that it was not the fault of the music itself or my loathing of nostalgia or the lack of anything that seemed to my ears to be truly new. It was that it was recorded, that the very fact that the technology for recording music had evolved and we had recorded music and the means to distribute, broadcast and disseminate it in so many different ways into almost every area of modern life. It seemed that all (or should that be 99.99%?) of music being written, composed, created was done so to be recorded, and once recorded, to be experienced in a very limited way. And, of course, I know, there is plenty of live music going on all over the place but the vast majority of it exists to promote or imitate recorded music. As for the music that does not fit this definition and thus avoided being turned into two dimensional recorded music, available to be listened on your MP3 when and wherever you want, will by its very nature, be irrelevant to our modern lives. The vast majority of pre-20th century music is now consumed and judged in its recorded form. Most of this music was conceived to be heard at certain times, on specific occasions or at preordained sites be it marching into war, the crowning of a new monarch, creating states of spiritual uplift, celebrating a wedding or at a Saturday night knees-up. Much of its power came from it being aligned with time and place. None of it was conceived for repeated performance, wherever and whenever the consumer might want. I don’t want to go back to old and irrelevant music from a pre-20th century era. Any form of revivalism is an anathema to me. But recorded music has run its course, it has been mined out. It is so 20th century like paper money and fossil fuels. Maybe we have the internet to partly thank for this, like we have to thank it for so much else. It has helped speed things up, turning recorded music into this dated thing with little value, like what happened to the German Mark during the Weimer Republic. To a small extent we have seen this already begin to happen in the UK over the last few years with the rise and rise in ticket sales for live gigs and concerts and the falling-off of CD sales. Of course I don’t expect many music journalist to agree with this statement, as telling us that the Arctic Monkeys, or whoever it is when you are reading this, is the cultural event of the moment is their bread and butter. Of course recorded music will carry on. Adverts and films need soundtracks. DJs need something to spin. But it is now almost being done in the same way, as you still get people willing to channel their creativity into pottery or mosaics or write tunes for brass bands and other irrelevant art forms from bygone eras. In the words of Roy Orbison ‘It’s over.’ And on that sunny morning back in spring 2003 when I realised it was over and recorded music was a dead art form, as dead as silent films were within months of the talkies coming in, only fit for the museum, I sat down and wrote the following words: ALL KNOWN MUSIC HAS RUN ITS COURSE. A clarion call to myself, if no one else. |