Musical Maturity of a 25-Year-Old
I am a mere 32 years old. Some of you may be gasping at such superannuation, others chuckling indulgently at callow youth. In the world of music there seem to be a large clump of enthusiastic kids, a big chunk of people like me – getting a little too old to be indie kids but still are – and then another big clump of folk in their forties who decided a few years back that they were never going to be too old for all this and fuck anyone who suggests they are.
I seem to find myself easily identified as the middle category: not enough knowledge of Joy Division to be the latter, nor enough enthusiasm for Blood Red Shoes to be the former, and this is pretty much accurate. The problem is that almost everyone in this country of my age grew up listening to the sort of music that is being reprised right at this very moment, and I missed it. Spending your teenage years in Vienna and Singapore you just didn’t hear current music, ever. Beyond pantomime metal and shitty disco pop it just didn’t make the leap.
This means that when I hear groups like Cats on Fire, Decoration, The Siddeleys, My Teenage Stride, Shout Out Louds and countless others who are either reinterpreting – or just plain ripping off, depending on your view – this sort of sound I actually don’t hear a rip off. I am hearing a good chunk of this music for the first time, despite it conjuring up a slightly disembodied sense of nostaligia, which is slightly odd because just about everyone my age over here is pretty familiar with this sound from the first time round. There are patches of knowledge because we did have MTV and my cousin Steve used to send me mix tapes on my birthday, but for the most part my musical knowledge starts almost entirely from scratch in 1993, when I first moved to the UK to go to university. I was seventeen.
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Soupdragons, The Wonderstuff and The Levellers were just fading from public approval and Britpop was about to take off. My first year in Manchester was the year Definitely Maybe, His ‘n’ Hers and Parklife were released. So I missed C86, despite the fact that I should just have been starting to develop an interest in music at the time. I was the only person I knew who had heard of The Stone Roses.
This is why you will often hear me get all excited about groups almost anyone else my age would probably dismiss as a bland knock-off of stuff they heard years ago. For me the first time that is likely to happen is when the 90s Revival kicks in and grunge comes back.
The Cure – Killing an Arab
The Smiths -Â Shakespeare’s Sister
The Siddeleys – Sunshine Thuggery
My Teenage Stride – Terror Bends
The Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Levellers – Liberty Song
Pulp – Pink Glove
Blur – Tracy Jacks
Hi Matthew, I LOVE your comment about folk in their forties – it’s the best thing I’ve read for ages: I’m going to use that phrase from now on instead of finding myself half-apologising for gate-crashing gigs where it’s deemed by most that I am a parent of the band.
You do very well as it is, but to find out that your “knowledge” only dates from 93 – is frankly astonishing. Well done, thanks for this brilliant blog (even if it does moan a bit!!) and please keep up your excellent work.
Thanks mate, much appreciated. I think there definitely comes a point at which people can fuck right off with the age thing. If I go to a particularly trendy gig I can get some right looks from haircut teenagers. These are precisely the sort of people I thought were knob-ends when I was a teenager myself of course, just now I’m old enough to stand there happily by myself and wink at their girlfriends.
This is getting spooky young man (of course, I say young from the slightly more jaded positioning of a 36yo).
I’m away from 29th Jan until 11th Feb, so am pre-recording a number of shows to fill in the spaces where I’d normally be. In one of the shows I have rambled on about this precise period / music / indie pop era & how important it was to today’s music — in fact, now I think about it, Nick (the BIGGEST, most obsessive Stone Roses fan I have ever met, as well as an uber ’90s indie obsessive & rave/dance officiando)& I rambled on about the same thing last week after he had complained he felt he is ‘too old’ (he’s 39) to understand what it is the kids of today are “digging”, esp. when it all sounds like the ’90s indie scene. It plum baffles him.
It’s interesting, though, because whereas I will complain about something being a ‘rip off’ (as you well know), or at least an ‘omidge, I am equally prone to falling head over tit for something that is clearly a very obvious lift (e.g. I Am The White-Mantled King by Cats On Fire), yet say cock all about it’s dubious origins.
I recognise the legacies at work, I suppose.
DC
Well I hear it and can usually peg it as 80s indie, which is generally obvious enough. What I can’t do at all it ever name particular bands who may have been more obvious inspirations that the obvious Smiths/Cure fallback. It can be frustrating at times, but there’s no way I could face going back and trying to get into all the original work again. There’s just too much of it.
& nor should you have to.
Thing is, & you know this already, it works with all genres & time periods; there’s no way I’d be able to reference the entire 1960s in terms of the output of certain bands in the early 90s, & then again in early 2000s. Nor would I be able to reference the entire 1950s re: pockets of output in the 60s, 80s, & parts of the late 90s.
But, getting to point, the fun & the worth of music is in the discovery of ‘new’ sounds — regardless of how old it is. I get very excitable when I hear something that blows me away sonically (whilst happily referencing who they’re *ahem* been inspired by) only to be further blown away when I find out it’s a 70′s number, or from the 60s, etc. & it turns out THEY were the influence on the ones I thought were responsible some 3 or 4 decades later.
That’s why I love working with Nick on the show – he is very stuck in his groove, but gets very wide eyed & all panty-tongued(as in panting like an excited dog, not a fanny – as in vagina, for the Americans – hammock) when he gets confused by period & genre because one sounds like it should be there & the other here & and that bit’s from there, with a little bit from them &, my o my isn’t it annoying when people just COPY other people; that’s just lazy lazy! etc. etc.
)
Man, talk about topical. I just watched/listened to “Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop” this morning. Being in the US, I didn’t even know Pulp EXISTED until 2002, and by then they were on their way to breaking up. Now when I read/hear about the explosion of music in the 90′s in the UK, I am so sad because a- I wasn’t there, and b- I was too young to give a fuck about music. Plus, I fully plan on being the old guy at a rock show, but hopefully by then someone will be paying me to do it
I can boast having been at T in the Park in ’95 when Pulp and Radiohead were the headliners. That was a bit special.
Actually I was always quite big on Pulp. Blame my uni friend James Strath who was rather a big fan. Pink Glove was the first of theirs I really like.
Being the old guy at a gig is not really much of an issue really, unless you are self-conscious. I am not, so I don’t really care. Most folk tend to just assume I work there/am a writer/A&R man/too old to notice in the first place. Either way, I don’t give a fuck, unless the band get their hopes up that they might get signed.
DC – I know what you mean. That rash of American gospel-backed stuff a couple of years back was a complete joy, despite obviously borrowing pretty heavily. Ocean Colour Scene I draw the line at though. They just made collages of other people’s songs.
Everybody’s got to start somewhere. Which is fine, just as long as you investigate the past while moving forward as well.
Following that mention of Pulp at T in the Park, I was about to launch into my hoary old story involving V96, Jarvis Cocker and a gorilla costume; then I had a vague recollection of having given our host a slurring, drunken rendition of that particular tale through an Addlestone’s-based fugue a week or two ago..
Nevertheless, for those who weren’t either at V96 in Chelmsford, or the Malt & Hops the other week: Jarvis was on stage midway through Pulp’s headling set on the Saturday night at V96, and he produced the head of a man-sized gorilla fancy-dress costume, holding it up on his hand almost like a puppet.
He then told us how, earlier that day, he had put on the full costume and walked extensively around the entire festival site, taking in the atmosphere in complete anonymity. He then dedicated the next song; Sorted for Es and Whizz if memory serves, to the two stoned lads he’d seen sitting against a tree who, upon seeing a six-and-a-half foot tall and skinny gorilla walk by said, “See that? That’ll be the drug squad…”
Lovely story.
Well I think I do, generally. But I’ll get a Dylan or a Waits or a Stones reference quicker than, say, a Sonic Youth or a Jesus & Mary Chain one.
[Erm, obviously enough I think, this was a response to Bill P, not Dylan.]
Good to see the Levellers and wonderstuff get a mention, the latter still have a place in mny heart, and there’s still fair bit of those era of bands on the record shelves, even if it’s not played on the iPod very much.
The old man at the gig thing has always intrigued me — I’ve been at some gigs & never really questioned the obvious elder statesmanship of some of the old soaks propping up the bar (&, delightfully, obliviously/on purpose causing logjams in the student crush/queue behind them)(depsite the clattering delight on stage). Then, there are some gigs I’ve been to & thought, man, he’s really taking his life into his own hands here.
Now, I’M that guy & really don’t think too much of it until some doe-eyed waif in a polkadot dress does somethign rather, well, young & I catch myself tutting & rolling my eyes in a “have they no shame” kind of way. But, that aside, it doesn’t bother me at all – it even has its perks (as Mr T. well knows, snigger) when sometimes I chip in to private conversations in order to correct someone’s mis-information & you end up being reverentially ‘admired’ by a throng of skinny hips, pidgeon tits & bulbous lips as you explain the musical family tree connections between, say, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Daniel Johnston, Sparklehorse, Bright Eyes & who ever is up on stage.
‘course it’s all laced with piss taking & condescension from the fillies part. Still, it keeps the blood warm
)
I never noticed out of place people at gigs because with my gently swaying at the back and generally cast-iron status in the numbers of the uncool it never occurred to me that there were people I might be permitted to look down upon.
Nowadays it’s too late, but I don’t mind. And I certainly don’t mind being the ‘why are you here’ figure in a young ‘uns gig. Confuses the little bastards, which is amusing.
I am 38 and went to see the Twilight Sad back in October with a 40-year-old friend of mine. We stood right up front, but we wore earplugs and made sure to stay well hydrated. Safety first and all that. ;^>
I’m 44 and a bit. Mrs Villain is 49 and a bit. We inevitably are among the oldest folk at many gigs – we’ve long past caring about it.
But it was scary a couple of years back when we went to see The Young Knives at a show that was being recorded by MYV2 when we were right down the front dancing along with the best of them. It was strange to later see ourselves on the box…it can’t have helped the band though that casual viewers would be thinking that wrinklies are acceptable.
The old cradle snatcher! JC, I love a dirty woman, and we both seem to have snagged one. I’ll raise a glass to that!
Wrinklies aren’t acceptable. Not in the pop world. We’re fucking well there though, and we won’t go away.
Sheesh. Only in the world of the NME could 32 seem at all old. In real life I am but a whippersnapper.
Oh, Mr. T., it isn’t a look down upon thing at all. It’s the cool-o-meter. A status-u-like.
Chipper young flipperty jibbets & their Top Shop accessorised life course thrive on the recognition of the out of sorts hangers on, such as we. But, it ain’t no deliberate ‘look down on’ thing, really. It’s a “how d’fuck does he/she know about these? guys” thing (i.e. the perceived “jumping on the ‘cool’ bandwagon to appear vital & eternally ‘with it’ & youthful”).
Then they/we’re immediately forgotten as lipgloss is pressed to student-loan diet chapped kissers, while flat, watered-down beer is spill-slurped from squashy plastic glasses (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?), & the latest one step, two step, back again & repeat, clenched hand/half-fist parallel with flank dance is painstakingly performed (usually for some boy/girl they’ve spied who has a cool Mighty Boosh/ Sharon O haircut) in that one space between those standing up & those hunched cross-legged (once upon a time trying to figure out if it’s safe to roll/smoke a joint; now they’re just having a rest between the periods of strutting off like Pete or Kate when heading for a piss or fag through the designated, strip lit double doorway) on the terminally sticky venue floor.
The nadir, if you will, of those attempting the casually/quirkily hip approach to life.
Yes. I generally spend too much time watching rather than listening.
DC
Christ.
I just feel a bit old occasionally. You’re just plain weird.
and you both should try and get to bed at a respectable hour rather than spend half the night hanging round here…
Yes Dad.
(See DC, now he’s old)
Yeaaahhh Daddio, get with the drift.
Me? Weird? Cheeky bastard. That’s inebriated verbosity, that is.
Anyhow DC, stop chattering and get on with your chores. I have a busy afternoon and you have yet to upload your show from last night. Chop chop my good man.
“now I’m old enough to stand there happily by myself and wink at their girlfriends” Hahaha. Or should I say – LOL!!! OMGZ!!!
No Tim, you most certainly should not say LOL or ZOMFG or any of these things. Ever. I may be young enough to go to cool gigs but I am far too fucking old for that sort of behaviour.
LMTO!*
*Laughing My Tits Off
OFAP!!!11!1*
*Off For A Pint
Mr. T.,
Chores now over with.
Podcast duly up *sniff*
Delay due to editing a wee bit to equalize Hope’s levels (she has never got a hang of the technology, poor monkey), but all is peachy.
Enjoy.
FYI: The Siddeleys are not a contemporary group. They split in 1989. They are not therefore reinterpreting the sounds of C86…
Fucksake what a nitwit. Case proved, I think!
jeez i lived for this stuff and even put out that siddeleys record – if you want any demos or even a proper single give me a shout.
we went to see richard hawley the other day and even in my haggard state i felt young. old people these days, i don’t know…
x