Last week I wrote about photographs, music and the memories they evoke, and how those memories can get under your skin when you are least prepared. I am still in much the same headspace and, as it turns out, in much the same physical one too. The same hotel where the Carpenters were playing, the same week-long stay, and another new person to get chatting to. And once again, music crept in quietly and took over the conversation.

We met him in the bar. One of those “hellos” that begins without apparently having much in common and ends up feeling like you’ve met a kindred spirit. He was an ex-Navy guy, a guitarist, and someone who had clearly lived a life that had taken him well beyond the humdrum. He talked about his time in Hong Kong, about being young and having forty-eight hours “off ship”, about the intensity of that city when you drop into it and then disappear again just as fast – I love Hong Kong for that. He told us about a pub in Kowloon, the Bull and Bear, a place that became a kind of temporary anchor when he needed one. You could almost see it as he spoke. Noise, banter, the sense of being very far from home and very much alive all at once.

From there, the conversation did what conversations like this often do. It drifted. Navy life led to guitars. Guitars led to bands. Bands led to memories. And then suddenly we were all grinning like idiots because someone had mentioned King Kurt, quickly followed by The Meteors. It was as if a switch had been flicked. We were no longer strangers making polite chat. We were people who had stood in front of the same speakers, felt the same energy, and come home with the same bruises….and maybe covered in flour.

I was never much of a musician; the DJing was my musical path. Regarding the psychobilly music, I was there for the laughs, for what we used to call wrecking. Dancing feels like too polite a word for it. It was more like (barely) controlled mayhem. Elbows everywhere, bodies colliding, sweat and adrenaline doing most of the thinking. You went home aching and exhilarated. It was messy and physical and communal, and it was fun. Truth is, I knew the music and joined in with it all at the clubs I went to, but the bands were not really that high on my personal choices of bands to go see – I clearly missed out judging by this conversation. 

We were sharing moments. Being fans (me, less so) of the same music was almost incidental. It was what those bands and those shared times on a dancefloor represented that counted, even though we’d never actually shared a dancefloor. A feeling of belonging to something that felt bigger than you. The same happened with me with punk, the free festival scene…

He talked about his father and about how he had been into HiFi, about the stack system that sat in the house. Separate boxes, probably bought as a complete system, but each box bought with hard-earned cash. The sort of system that looked impossibly out of reach when I was young, and I was listening to my Amstrad system. Music was something you listened to properly in our new friend’s house, he said. Records were put on with intent. You did not talk over them. You paid attention. You could hear, even now in the bar of a Barnsley hotel, how much that had shaped him and his love of music.

And then he mentioned his daughter. She is into music, properly into it, and she has one of those all-in-one record players. The kind that looks cool, does the job, and is often the first step into vinyl for a lot of people. I knew exactly the brand he meant before he said it. Crossley. He laughed about it. It had done its job. It had got her listening. But now she was curious. Now she wanted her to hear the music better. Not louder or flashier, just better. To understand what had hooked her dad all those years ago.

There was something quietly wonderful about that. A line running from his father’s stacking system, through his own life of music and travel, to his daughter discovering records in her own way. Music being passed on.

At one point, I went for a wee. When I came back, he said how really cool it was to meet people like this, how fab it feels sometimes to properly connect. He said something about music being the thing that does it, that cuts through everything else. It was not a grand statement meant to impress; it was just an observation. But it resonated with me.

Because music is the great connector. It does not just give us something to listen to. It gives us a way to recognise each other. We form clans around it. Scenes. Movements. Those movements don’t just change what we listen to; they change how we dress, how we think, how we see the world. Sometimes they change politics. Sometimes they change culture in ways that only become obvious years later. Sometimes they change the course of history. And sometimes, more quietly, they change individual lives. I can say with hand on heart that each of those points I make here has been how I’ve reacted to music; the uniforms of specific genres, the politics and world-view around anarcho-punk, the sea-change that house and techno had on culture. They changed mine. The people I met. The confidence I found. The sense that there were others out there who felt the same way I did, even if we did not always agree on the details. Music gave me that. It still does, and I love to bump into folk who are into the same kind of tunes. You know you have met someone you are going to enjoy having a natter with.

What happened in that hotel bar was small in the grand scheme of things. No massiverevelations. No life-altering decisions. Just a connection made not because of shared background or profession (he worked in logistics), but because of shared experience through music. 

We live in a world that encourages us to be neatly defined and carefully segmented. Algorithms feed us more of what we already like and limit our “choices”, though we could always turn the algorithm off. Music has the ability to break those fences of division down, but only if we let it spill out into the world. Only if we talk about it, argue about it, and remember it together. I don’t know if this saying carries beyond the UK, but topics we are told to avoid in conversation are politics and religion…music is fine, but that’s not to sugegst that things can’t get heated.

That night, in a fairly crappy bar, music did exactly that. It connected people. It bridged gaps and drew folk together. It reminded me why any of this matters beyond the gazillion quid systems, formats, and boxes of kit. Music is not just something we consume. It is something we share. And in sharing it, we find each other. What really brought Lin and I together was a shared love of music and the culture that went with it.

As I sit here now, back in the hotel bedroom, I feel that good kind of knackered. The kind that comes from genuine human interaction rather than obligation. It makes me hopeful, because as long as music keeps doing this, keeps forming clans and movements and quiet connections between strangers, it will continue to matter.

It’s just occurred to me that we chatted for an hour or so, but never asked each other’s names.

Stu

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