Saved By Rock ’N’ Roll?
It’s been a hectic week, and the next couple of months promise to be equally hectic, with lots of travel to visit shows, events, and clients. Fridays are always busy here at HiFi PiG Towers, but this week we decided we’d take Friday afternoon off.
Once we’d eaten lunch (borlotti bean stew, sweet potatoes and brocolli for anyone interested), we headed out for cake and coffee at a lovely little café we’ve discovered in recent months. For anyone interested, I had a strawberry muffin with strawberry icing and, weirdly, a hard strawberry sweet/candy on top. This was accompanied by a very well-made caramel frappuccino, again, for those interested.
We sat in the autumnal sunshine, nattered, and watched the world go by for half an hour or so, with our phones turned off and a complete disconnect from work. It has to be done every once in a while, and it’s always massively unwinding when we get the chance to do this kind of thing. You don’t realise how wound up you’ve become until you make a conscious effort to stop being wound up.
Anyway, we finished our cake and coffee and went for a bit of a walk around the city, looking for interesting things to photograph. For those interested, I didn’t take a single photograph.
We headed home via a ridiculously convoluted diversion that took us about 20 kilometres out of our way, also for those interested. The diversion was signposted at the very last minute and seemed to have been devised by somebody who had looked at the most direct diversion possible, decided that would be far too sensible, and sent us on a barely signposted tour of the surrounding countryside instead.
We listen to the radio a lot in the car (BBC Radio 6 Music, for those interested), and I do enjoy Huw Stephens’ show. He plays a huge variety of music; he’s knowledgeable without constantly reminding you that he’s knowledgeable, and I like his Welsh accent. I also like the fact that voices on the radio are no longer confined to the clipped Home Counties’ non-accent that once seemed compulsory if you were allowed anywhere near a BBC microphone.
Anyway, his playlist started with “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” by Arctic Monkeys, followed by “Go!” by Public Service Broadcasting (I must get to see these at some point), “Call It What You Want” by Fat Dog, “Bossy” by Kelis and Too $hort, “Anthem” by N-Joi, “Valley Kudu” by Porij and then “Rock & Roll” by The Velvet Underground. That’s a pretty eclectic run of tunes by anyone’s standards, and one of the reasons I enjoy the show so much. However, it was the Velvet Underground tune that caught my attention and got me thinking about stuff whilst I navigated the twisting lanes of barely recognised countryside.
The song tells the story of a young girl called Jenny who feels disconnected from her life and her parents until one morning she turns on a New York radio station, hears something unlike anything she has heard before and begins dancing to that fine, fine music. Then comes the line that stuck with me: “You know her life is saved by rock ’n’ roll.” It’s a big statement, for sure. But then, no one ever changed the world, nor sold many records, by singing about music that made their life marginally more agreeable and gave them something pleasant to listen to while doing the ironing. Perhaps there’s a whole genre of music out there that sings about just that, but I’m yet to stumble upon it, and I really don’t want to go to the places on the internet where I might find it!
I wasn’t all that self-confident as a youngster, although apparently I came across as being very confident and a bit “naughty”. I struggled to fit in at senior school for one reason and another, though I was a really quite good cross-country runner. I ran for the school and the county, and once competed in the internationals in Gateshead. I suppose running could be seen as having been my saviour at that age, but that’s not going to make for a particularly interesting read, given that this is HiFi PiG and not Cross-Country Capybara. There are only so many paragraphs I can reasonably hope you will read about muddy fields, short shorts (we called them “freedom shorts” and went “freestyle” underneath, for those who are interested), frozen limbs and the joy of being shouted at by a PE teacher before you bugger off to look at pictures of audio kit.
I don’t think music “saved my life” per se, but I do think it helped me to feel part of something. I’ve written before about the whole tribal thing teenagers latch onto, with much of that tribality being based around music. When you’re young and still trying to work out who you are, the music you listen to can become a way of defining yourself and, just as importantly, finding other people who define themselves in roughly the same way. The records you bought, the bands you liked and the clothes you wore told other people which tribe you belonged to. It gave you a language and an identity, even if that identity changed completely six months later when you discovered another band, bought a different jacket and declared that everyone you’d previously associated with had appalling taste in music.
I got into Blondie and made friends through a shared love of the band, but then the whole mod revival happened and I became really interested in the Two-Tone aspect that came along with it. Music wasn’t just something playing in the background. It dictated how we dressed, where we went, who we hung around with, and how we saw ourselves in the world. Specifically for the purposes of this article, it also took me to my first proper gig: The Beat at Wakefield Theatre. That experience of being in a room full of people who all knew the same songs and had all come together for the same reason was incredibly powerful. However much you enjoy listening to a record at home, there’s something very different and life-affirming about hearing that music in a crowd and realising that everyone around you feels some version of what you feel. My Life was changed forever by that gig, and oddly enough, I was speaking to Bill from Dynaudio a few days ago and knew that he was at that very same gig, photographing the band. I asked whether he still had any of the photographs, but it seems the negatives disappeared during one of several house moves. It would have been amazing to see those pictures and perhaps spot a very youthful me somewhere in the throng.
I digress, though not entirely.
Music brings people together during their teenage years, when many of us are struggling to discover where, or even if, we fit into the world. Close ties and bonds are made through bands, records and gigs, and some of those bonds last for years. Others last not so long and perhaps only until another genre or fad comes along.
As an undergraduate student, I recall sitting around people’s flats, usually stoned, and listening to music for hours on end. Wouldn’t it have been weird to sit around someone’s house for that length of time if we hadn’t enjoyed at least some shared taste in music? Without the records, we’d have just been a group of people occupying the same room, staring at the wallpaper and occasionally asking whether anyone wanted another cup of tea or rolling yet another joint. The music filled the space and time, but it also gave us something to talk about. One of us would put on a record or tape, somebody else would suggest another, and before you knew it an entire degree period had passed. We were discovering music, but we were also discovering one another and, in the process, perhaps discovering a little more about ourselves.
That doesn’t all necessarily stop when you cease being a teenager, either. Music continues to introduce us to people throughout our lives, and those shared connections can appear in the most unexpected places. A conversation with somebody you don’t know in a hotel bar can suddenly open up because they mention a band, a record, or a gig that means something to you both. I’ve talked about these random encounters before in my Sunday Thoughts pieces.
All those years after The Beat at Wakefield Theatre, I’m talking to Bill from Dynaudio and discovering that we stood in the same room listening to the same band, though he got to go backstage after the gig whilst I got on the XWhatever bus back to Barnsley. Decades after sitting around in student houses listening to records, my whole working life revolves around music, HiFi and the people brought together by both.
So, perhaps music didn’t exactly save my life, but it gave me somewhere to belong while I worked out who I was – perhpas I’m still discovering who I am. It gave me friendships, experiences and memories, and eventually it gave me a career that means a supposedly relaxing Friday afternoon can still end with me thinking about music and turning it into an article.
There we were, driving home after cake and coffee, 20 kilometres out of our way because of a ludicrous diversion, when a song released more than half a century ago came out of the car radio speakers and pulled together my awkward schooldays, cross-country running, Blondie, Two-Tone, my first proper gig, student houses, old friendships and the life I have now. Did rock ’n’ roll save my life? Probably not, at least not in the dramatic Lou Reed sense of the word. It did, however, give me a tribe, introduce me to friends, take me to my first proper gig, and eventually provide me with a living.
So perhaps Lou Reed had a point. Rock ’n’ roll might not have saved my life, but it certainly found something interesting for me to do with it.
Vive le rock’n’roll!
Stu
