FORKS IN THE ROAD
I’m 8 years old, in the front seat of my mum’s car. She’s driving us over to pick my older brother up from school. Little Creatures, the mid-80s album by Talking Heads, is on the cassette player. I’ve never heard music in this way before. This music is perfect. It fulfils a need I didn’t even know I had, for the very first time. I remember my elbow involuntarily sort of twitching as I was sat there in the car. Something’s hitting deep, some synapses waking up. And staring at the album cover, with its bright, crude sunny painting of the band surrounded by leaning towers of Babel, David Byrne in his underwear with the world on his back. In all this, I was taught some of the most important lessons I had as a kid - that art doesn’t need to tell you anything, doesn’t need to be technically adept. That the good stuff isn’t sensible. It just has to … resonate.
Like the lyrics! Such as the following from one of the songs from the record, ‘The Lady Don’t Mind’:
I go up and down
I like this curious feeling
I know, I see, it's like make believe
Cover your ears so you can hear what I'm saying
I'm not lost but I don't know where I am
I got a question
All right, all right, this is what we like
Who knows, who knows what I'm thinking?
Uh-oh, here we go again!
I don’t know, don’t know what I’m saying.
I didn’t know what they meant then, and now I think they’re saying nothing. It’s just rhythm and sound. I’ll always be grateful to Talking Heads for showing the power of art as non-sense. I loved these lyrics, and perhaps not coincidentally, the lyrics read like something a young child might sing absent mindedly, just grabbing bits of cliche and sticking them together in weird ways. They’re what you’d sing in the shower if you didn’t really care about what you were saying—if all you wanted was the pleasure of these sounds to come out of your mouth.
On the other hand, I do also remember on the same album David Byrne singing the line “I’ve tried sex and I think it’s alright”, and I was so embarrassed with my mum sat there right next to me that I shrank back in the seat so much that she asked me what was wrong and I had to pretend to be car sick for the whole journey.
I was 8 years old, and with this cassette I felt like I’d got a key to steal into the world of grown ups.
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I’m 12 years old, in the music block of high school at lunch time. In this, my first year at high school, we’d taken to hanging out in the music block as we—at first unconsciously— start drawing the lines between us and the lads that play football every lunch time. What starts out as a shaky, uncertain preference will eventually turn into full, violent tribal allegiance in a few years.
There’s this guy in the music block, a few years older than me, hair down to his shoulders. He spends his lunch times sitting perched high up on some cupboards in a store room playing this riff on his guitar. It is, without doubt, the greatest music I’ve ever heard. It’s still probably the most memorable, affecting performance of live music I’ve seen. I have no idea what this riff is, and obviously I’m not going to ask someone a few years above me with long hair what this riff is. But each time we hear it start echoing down the corridors we run towards the music block. And stand under the cupboards, looking up as he plays the best music in the world.
I can’t remember how we learn, eventually, that the riff is from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, But after months, we do. None of us have Nirvana’s Nevermind, or could afford to buy it, so our only access to it is to continue coming to the music block every lunch time and hope that he plays it. He doesn’t always. I guess he got bored and moved on to other things. I have a vague memory of him wearing a Pearl Jam hoodie over his school blazer, so he always had divided loyalties. But the joy I felt when, once in a while and unannounced, he’d launch into the riff from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ after weeks of dashed hopes … that is the greatest joy I’d ever had.
In my bitter middle age, there is a part of me that thinks…that 15 year old strumming his electric guitar in a Pearl Jam hoodie in front of an audience of crushy 12-year-olds? I bet that guy was insufferable. But really, fuck that. He changed our lives. I wouldn’t be writing for this zine without him playing guitar in those lunchtimes. I, truly, would not be whatever person I am today without that. He cannot have had any inkling of what effect he was having, but in those moments he mapped out decades of my life.
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I’m 14 years old, standing among the CD racks of HMV. I’m holding a copy of US punk band’s Rancid’s And Out Come The Wolves album, and I’m torn. I’ve heard a few of their songs, and I love them. I know I’ll love this album. But I’m staring down at the cover, a punk with mohawk with his head in his hands. This would be the first punk record I own. And what are punks? 14 year old me doesn’t know for sure but I do have a sense that if I buy this album, it’s going to have big repercussions. Somehow, I’d be aligning myself with those who society rejects, and who reject mainstream society. I keep staring at the punk with the mohawk. There’s a fork in the road, and I feel like if I take this path I won’t be coming back. Looking back, it’s both very silly and very important. But that’s what being 14 is about, right? I walk nervously over to the cash register.
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I’m 17 years old and way down the road that Rancid album put me on. I have a strong memory of going to a punk alldayer with my friend Will in the basement of an Irish pub in Liverpool around that time, at which a grindcore band called—I think—Red Right Hand played 3 second long songs. And then on the way home after the gig us wondering whether we’re reached a kind of terminus of the particular journey that we were on. We’d been digging as deep as we could into the underground and had hit something hard and unyielding.
And then, a subconscious step sideways. I bought Shellac’s Terraform album - and I can’t quite remember why. I knew that they were Steve Albini’s band, and I knew he’d recorded a load of great records for other bands, but I’m unclear what drew me to this record. Anyway. The first track is 12 minutes of the same 4-note bass riff, played over and over again. It’s so boring it messes with your sense of time, your sense of self. It’s sublime and numbing. Recite the same word enough times and it becomes a foreign tongue. We used to hang out and drink homemade espressos and listen to this stuff, and I’d think how clever we were for liking it. The feeling of having superior taste is an intoxicating drug for any obnoxious 17-year-old. This record was my first introduction to the avant-garde and that’s coloured pretty much everything since. A lesson in working to like something, and— in truth—striving to like something because other people didn’t like it. Morons! Not an edifying character trait, but there we are. And a genuinely wonderful record. Best drum sounds of all time, among other things—like firecrackers going off in marbled rooms.
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I’m 21 years old and visiting my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) family home in South London. I’d started to hear a little about the new sound coming out of London’s pirate radio stations, this alien anti-music from kids who came up from UK Garage but then splintered off. The feverish indie kid internet message boards at that time were alive to it. So one humid, smoggy night at her place, I scan the radio dial and THERE IT IS. Bleeping out from a thick crackle and hiss—it sounds like it’s blanketed in the heat haze of the city itself. In time this music would be called grime, but at this point—2003—it hasn’t yet got a name. What makes me fall in love with it immediately is the sparseness of it, and the weird prettiness it has. Simple ring-tone melodies looped together, shifting every 8 bars. Everything is stripped down to the barest of essentials. Music as imagist poetry. I tape the radio show and play it constantly for weeks afterwards. This set is particularly beguiling as the music is presented without any context or humanising influence at all. There’s no MCs on this set, and no chat from the DJ either. From memory, I think often the tracks aren’t even mixed. It’s just these skeletons of tunes played next to each in perfect isolation.
It takes me a few months to learn what it’s called, but my absolute favourite track from these first tapes is ‘Salt Beef’ by Danny Weed. The percussion is crazy sparse, just a few dry clicks and a thin wheeze like a robotic arm extending. There’s loping pentatonic melody over the top—much early grime had such Oriental melodic phrasing, I guess linking both to the Kung Fu films that they were into and to Wu Tang. ‘Salt Beef’ has that same melody throughout, with it just changing tone every 8 bars, from a flute, to a synthesized cello, to the typical grime hollow bass sounding like someone blowing over the top of an empty Coke bottle.
A few months later we move to South London and I listen to pretty much nothing else other than grime on pirate radio for 3 years. Travelling through the FM dial, locking into the city’s hidden centres of energy. I used to gaze out at the tops of nearby tower blocks in Stockwell and Brixton Hill and wonder whether the sounds I was in love with were being broadcast from right there. Kids, only 10 years old or so, used to hang out on the street corner near ours after school and MC together. The only time I can truthfully say that I saw and heard a cultural revolution happen in real time around me, and we knew even then how lucky we were.
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I’m 36 years old and I’ve been on parental leave with our newborn daughter for six months. This particular occasion, she’s weaning and I’m chopping up pears for her—her first words being “more!” when presented with pears. We’re listening to Vatican Shadow on the kitchen stereo. Atonal synth drones, death-march percussion, track titles such as ‘CIA Contractor Freed Over Pakistan Killings’, the sound of mid-2000s endless tension. Feels good at the time but in hindsight listening to harsh industrial noise during my child’s weaning, after 6 months off work, is a good indication that I’d lost my mind.
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It’s April 2020 and we’ve been in lockdown for a month. In my allotted hour of exercise out of the house I take to walking the hot streets of South London (that weird year’s heatwave already taking hold) while listening to Bad Religion’s No Control album. This is the stuff we used to listen to obsessively back when we were teenagers, which is apt as I’ve regressed back to the level of a 15-year-old kid, stuck in my bedroom (grounded!), miserable and hating the world. Angry music for angry times. Whenever I listen to this record again now—which is rarely—I can remember, but can’t fully grasp, how hopeless everything felt back in 2020. I got to wallow in teenage angst again, but this time without any seeming light on the horizon. Greyscale, grinding days, as time began to slip its moorings. The righteous fury of Bad Religion at full tilt was an ancient record of how we used to live. And given that we were in a dying world, that’s why I used to listen to this record so much, I think—to remember, in those numbing endless days, what it used to be like to feel.
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Things got better, of course! It’s 2021 and I’m listening to a mix from DJ Supa D and his MC Cold Steps. They’re playing the latest big sound to hit London—South African amapiano, and often London producers’ own take on it, which is harder and more obviously indebted to grime. Covid has meant that the club spaces that this music is designed for don’t exist currently, and so crews regularly do live stream performances on the internet.
This particular set, Cold Steps goes on this reverie about the healing power of music, ancestral worship, music as ritual. Check out these lyrics from the set:
I told you this is a spiritual sermon.
Spirit dance!
Spirit dance!
This is our ritual
Higher learning, spiritual awakening!
Our spirits shall not be broken.
You wouldn’t get MCs going to these places before the pandemic. But now, after years of time on our hands, and this music being played without crowds, without parties, it’s taken this turn into introspection, magic, and religion. This our ritual: Cold Steps and Supa D conjured something transcendent in those days—music which tapped deep into the life force. They believed they were communing with the spirits and, just because they did, so they were.
I listened to this set dozens of times in the final days of lockdown, as things were opening up again and we blinked into the light. Those live streams were an essential promise that, despite it all, something precious had still survived. In the paranoia and hell of lockdown I spent a good deal of time worrying that something deep in me, may be in all of us, had died. That the immediate, intuitive spark to rush towards the world, to truly engage and to feel had gone forever. Supa D and Cold Steps’ sets were proof that it hadn’t—whereas Bad Religion offered a memory of what it was to experience the world fully, in all its suddenness and closeness, these sets gave hope that there was more to come and that the spark had not gone out.
But the MCing, particularly, was also a sign that we had all changed. We weren’t leaving this thing the same as when we came into it. There was no way back from this—but then, I guess, there never is.