WELCOME TO NO MUSIC DAY
6 October 2006

The following text was written specifically for the UK Sunday paper The Observer. It was published on 15th October 2006.

Some years ago I walked into HMV Oxford Street. I wandered around the aisles, rack upon rack of thousands upon thousands of CDs. There must have been every form of music that ever existed there. I wanted something new. Something that I hadn’t tried and tasted before. Something that would make me go ‘Yeah, this is it. I’ve never heard anything like this in my life.’ There have been so many times when I have read a review of an album telling me how great it was so I would go out and buy it, only to get it home to find it sounded like something I had already heard before. There was nothing to be found in HMV Oxford Street for me.

So I went back home and went online and searched every corner of the World Wide Web for something to download which would sound new, different, fresh, exciting. Something that would make me hear music in a different way. Something that would open a door to a room in my head which I had never been in before. But even in those furthest corners I could find nothing that did this.

Maybe it’s just an age thing. Maybe it is just that my palette is jaded. So many men, and I guess women too, who get to my stage in life are happy enough slating all modern music as rubbish, are happy to content themselves with music that presses the nostalgia buttons. But I can’t sodding stand that. And it’s not ’cause the new artists don’t mean what they play, it’s that, to my ears, they all begin to sound like vaguely updated versions of something that has gone before. Do I just accept this as a natural part of the ageing process? The sagging flesh, the thinning hair I have to accept, but this? No! No! And fucking NO!

Although I stopped making music, to all intents and purposes, back in 1992 and have even stopped listening to it for great chunks of time since then, I have never stopped thinking about music. Thinking things like ‘All music is shite’ or that we are in this rut so deep with music, it’s like we have spent all our lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and we are unaware of the world above and beyond.

I have tried different tactics to re-engage my emotions with music. In 2002 I decided to listen only to CDs made by artists who had never released an album before. As soon as a second album came out I would stop listening to them.
The idea was that life is too short for listening to somebody’s third album when the second was just a polished-up version of their first. Yeah, I know about the exceptions, but like I said, life is short.

All my old CD collection was stacked up at one end of the bench in my workshop, hundreds of them. There they sat, all alphabetically ordered, ready, waiting and willing to be played, an arms’ length away from where I was sitting. At times over the months while I was trying to get on with work I would hear them in my head going ‘Bill, Bill just one listen, you know you want to, what harm would it do?’ It was in January 2003 when temptation got the better of me. Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys was what broke my resolve. I mean, what harm would it do? Just one listen. I put it on. Music never sounded so good. I was defenceless in the face of the emotions triggered in me by listening to Pet Sounds. After that it was The Byrds’ Greatest Hits. At full volume.

I had a problem that needed confronting. There was no 12-step programme that I was aware of to deal with stuff like this. I would ditch the old regime, replace it with an equally hardline new one. This was my plan of action: for the rest of the year I would only listen to music by bands, soloists or composers whose names began with B. I assumed I would be working my way through the alphabet finishing off with A in 26 years’ time. Come the following Christmas, I had developed the idea. Using a homemade lottery system of a carrier bag containing a sheet of paper torn into 25 pieces and each piece with a letter of the alphabet written on it, minus B, the next year’s listening was decided. It was artists beginning with P. This year is my fourth, the letter is G. This approach to listening to music, I assumed, would give it a value that no price tag could ever do. If I didn’t listen to Beethoven’s late string quartets – or whatever – this year, I might never live long enough to have another chance. Although this has meant I have ended up listening to a lot of music that I would have never listened to without using these tactics, it has not changed my sense that something is missing. That said, I’m still committed to working my way through the alphabet.

It was in 2004 that I began to suspect that my problem lay not so much with the music as the form in which all music now seems to exist. The very fact that it is all there for us to purchase on Amazon or iTunes or wherever – every piece of recorded music that has ever existed since recorded music began 110 years ago is just a click of a mouse away. And once we have got it we can literally listen to it where and whenever we want. We can have this non-stop soundtrack to our lives as we sit on the bus, do the shopping, go on holiday. And whether it’s traditional music from Bali, Bach’s Cantatas or the latest R&B, the experience is somehow the same. Yeah, I know we have had Walkmans for the last 20-odd years, but back then it seemed liberating, now it seems constricting. It has nothing to do with the genre and everything to do with the fact that is just there on tap. Maybe I want music that is to do with place and time and occasion and I don’t just mean something on your MP3 to dull the reality of your bus ride to work, but music to celebrate the great moments in our lives; music that we can only ever hear if we travel to one specific place at one special time. This does not mean Pink Floyd reforming at Live 8.

As for the live music that has been available to me, it has somehow been having the same effect on me. The experience of it is very one-dimensional. You buy a ticket, you go to a place, you watch it performed on a stage; you clap, or even scream, you enjoy yourself, you get your money’s worth, you go home. But you weren’t part of the music; you were just consuming it in bite-size chunks as defined by those who have decreed how these things should be done.

I know these traditions are as much decreed by the economics of bringing musicians from all quarters of the world to your local club or concert hall but that doesn’t stop me from wanting more, something else in a different shape and a different form. Something that is not just about promoting their latest CD.

There were all sorts of other things going on in my head about music and experiments. I wanted to take in the making of music itself in the hope that it might exist away from the consumable formats of recorded music and away from the concert platform (and club stage, band stand etc). I even have fantasies about waking up one morning to find that all music has disappeared completely from the world. We can’t even remember what it sounded like. We knew we had music, we knew it was important to us. In my fantasy we would have to start making music again from a year zero situation, with nothing but our voices. As I said, just a fantasy.

Sometime in the summer of 2005 I decided that what I needed was a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead of listening to it I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn’t want from music. Not to blindly – or should that be deafly – consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas of how that could be achieved. This day I would call No Music Day.

St Cecilia is the patron saint of music. I have no idea why this is and I am not interested in finding out. But what I did find out was that her Saint’s Day is on 22 November. This is the day we are supposed to celebrate music, thank God for its existence. I decided that No Music Day should be on the day before St Cecelia’s Day. Using the same traditional principles as having Halloween the day before All Saints’ Day or Mardi Gras on the day before Lent kicks in.

As with much of my work over these past few years, I have taken these initial personal urges and turned them around so they would also act as invitations aimed at anybody who comes across them to take part in. The main media for these invitations are posters and websites.

The first thing I did was register the domain name nomusicday.com and then put together one of the posters I do, an image of which I hope is printed in close proximity to this text.

Nomusicday.com was up and live a couple of weeks before 21 November 2005. Its format was, and still is, simple. It exists mainly as a place where people can register that they will be observing No Music Day and to document how and why they will be doing so. I did next to nothing to promote the site, but it seemed to hit a nerve and a few thousand people stumbled upon it and many left their comments. This year I have wanted to raise public awareness of No Music Day a notch. I have done this by approaching the art radio station ResonanceFM www.resonancefm.com to see if they would like to observe it. They were up and eager for the challenge. The other thing I’ve done is to write this text you are reading.

Maybe my perceived impasse about what music can be and how we can experience it is something singular to me caused by where I’m at in my life and what I’ve been through. But if the idea of No Music Day resonates with you in some other way that reflects where you are at in life and in your relationship with music, make use of it. Where this will lead to and what purpose it serves, I am still unsure. But from now on 21 November this and every other year will be No Music Day. Visit www.nomusicday.com and register your observance.