SCREAMING SWIFTS

10 July 2006

Back up on the ledge escaping the world, or maybe returning to it. Listening. Listening. Listening. Wondering why reality sounds so much better up here than anywhere else.

When I first went to art school at the age of 17 in September 1970 I was plunged into a world of seeing. Being made to think about, and focus on, what everything … I was going to say looks like, but it is far more than just what something looked like – more like everything’s complete and utter being in relationship to every other physical object around you. I suppose this is what art schools were traditionally supposed to instil into students – a total awareness of the visual presence of everything around them and what signals those things were giving off, and what those signals meant.

Come the following March and spring was beginning to break its way through. I had never experienced anything like it before. As a kid I had been a total nature boy. The changing seasons had been very much part of my life. The season defined all the activities and games that I was interested in: fishing, collecting bird’s eggs, swimming in the Penkiln Burn, scrumping apples, playing conkers, sledging. But nothing could have prepared me for the spring of 1971. Now I am sure that spring of 1971 was no different in any major way from any spring that had come before or since the last ice age at least, but to my senses it was like the first one that had ever been.

When the buds on the trees burst open to reveal their new young and tender leaves I couldn’t believe there were so many shades of green. When the wild flowers started to blossom on the verges the strength of colour almost hurt my eyes. Colours in nature were more intense than I had ever experienced. It was almost shocking. As if it had been turned up way past 11. No drug has ever been able to replicate what I experienced that spring. Although this has had a lasting effect on me and upped my appreciation of spring ever since, nothing could ever compete with that spring in 1971.

But something similar has been happening this year to do with sound. Yesterday evening I spent almost three hours out here on the ledge just losing myself in the sounds of the city. A filmmaker using this scene would probably want to smother/enhance these sounds with some subtle soundtrack or at the very least have the sounds of somebody practising jazz trumpet coming out of one of the open windows.

Tonight, like last night, every sound distant or near, muffled or clear, seems ridiculously perfect and I want it to go on and on. I want to spend all night here just listening. Now I’m not going to try and make any case for what I’m listening to being music, and there is no way I would want to record it for anybody else to hear. I’m not interested in using ‘found sound’ in the making of New Music. I got all of that out of my system in the late 1980s.

Something has happened to my hearing over the past few months to make sound seem richer, more heavy with some abstract meaning. Of course it is not. It is all in my head. Weirdly, I know at the same time that my hearing is not as good as it was some years ago, down to the ageing process I guess. It is also different from when I was making pop music when I could deconstruct every record that I heard on a passing car stereo. That used to drive me up the wall: it meant I couldn’t enjoy hearing the record for what it was.

The way that I am hearing sounds right now is in some sense the way I experienced the colours in the spring of 1971. Has this come about because of what I have been doing over the past few months with The17? Have I been subconsciously upping my awareness of the sounds around me? Or would it have happened anyway? What I do know is that it will not last in the same way, just as the spring of 1972 was nothing compared to the previous one.

Back to the here and now. I’ve just heard some swifts screaming as they tear across the evening sky. One of the major things I knew I was going to miss living in London was the comings and goings of migratory birds. Swifts are about the only migratory bird that you can easily be aware of in London. Screaming is maybe not the best word to describe the sound they make but the next time you hear them tear across the sky above your head see if you can come up with a better one. Time to turn in, not like the swifts who will keep flying all night.