Mass Consumption

Most people seem to consume vast amounts of music. They like to have it constantly sloshing around in the background.

I’m not like that. For me, music is too powerful and significant, too important to be a background, too affecting to gorge on.

I even went through a phase of disliking it.

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I don’t like music

is what I would say.  

It happened at around the age of fifteen when my brother started playing records. The music would prod at my brain, get lodged into my thoughts, aggravate and confuse me. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like it; if anything I liked it too much. It was too powerful, too much for me, I couldn’t cope with it.

This anti-music affliction ended in the summer of 72, when my friend lent me ‘Rubber Soul’ by the Beatles. It was the perfect record to wean me back onto the drug - really good music but somehow friendly and non-threatening. As soon as I had repaired the habit (opposite of broken the habit) I progressed rapidly. And ‘progressed’ is an apt word, because this was the early 1970s and prog rock was happening.

Before that though, I accidentally stumbled onto a different way of experiencing music - I acquired a guitar. I didn’t particularly want one at the time. My best friend had one and kept going on about how much fun he was having playing it. Then one day he said he knew someone who was selling one. I kind of thought, okay, why not, I’ll give it a go. I wasn’t that bothered but it seemed like a good way to bond with my friend.

 

I Bought a Guitar.

It cost me £3.

It changed my life and was the start of a lifelong love affair.

The guitar is one of the easiest instruments to get to know. It is the perfect shape and size, big enough and rounded enough to hold in your arms and cuddle, small enough to be easily portable. Once it is tuned, it is relatively easy to get pleasing noises out of it, and you can play it as quietly as you like to avoid embarrassing yourself or annoying anyone.

I feel rather sorry for piano players.

The piano is a large, heavy, solid box that they have to sit next to and operate via mechanical levers attached to keys (there were no small, portable electronic keyboards in those days). The source of the sound is hidden from view, deep inside the machine.  

 

My guitar is Naked

My Guitar, by contrast, is naked, and in order to play it, I have to hug it and stroke its most intimate parts. I tickle it gently with my fingers and it sings to me.  

I never bothered with lessons or anything, I just picked up my weird stringed thing and started tinkering. I seemed to have a kind of naïve delight in the simplest little tunes and chords. It was pure pleasure, which meant that I tinkered endlessly.

With almost no effort, I started to get quite good at it.

It was a revelation to discover that I could not only listen to my favourite music, I could actually recreate some of it myself. It’s fairly easy to sing the tune of a song, but most of the feeling and atmosphere comes from the chords that accompany the tune. I was delighted to find that, by putting my fingers in certain positions on the fret board, I could actually make my weird stringed thing reproduce those feelings and atmospheres. This has been one of the pleasures of my life ever since.

 

Song Writing is Impossible

There is something magical about generating music yourself, rather than just listening to it. When you listen to a song, it comes into your brain from outside fully formed. When you play a song you are making it yourself, you are generating it with your own body. You almost become the song, you climb inside it, you occupy it and it occupies you. It’s a wonderful thing - endlessly enjoyable and rewarding.

The next logical step was to try to write a song of my own.

I decided to give it a try one day. I sat down with a guitar and a piece of paper. An hour later I gave up and decided it was impossible. It's actually quite easy to write a crap song, as my piece of paper testified, but to write anything worthwhile is bloody hard. My early attempts were so embarrassing, I gave up on the whole idea . . . until I went to Uni and met Peter Brinn.

 

Or is it ??

Peter was solid and masculine on the outside, with short, curly hair and chiselled features, but underneath, he was an artist and a poet. He was mischievous and rebellious but also gentle and sensitive, with a love of nature and a way with words. He would casually and with no effort come out with phrases that would stop me in my tracks and haunt me for days.

It was Peter who first encouraged me to write poetry.

I kept telling him I couldn’t do it, and he kept telling me I could, and if you keep telling someone they can do something for long enough, they eventually start to believe it.

I wrote my first poem while I was stuck indoors recovering from a cold. It was no masterpiece, but it was good enough to make me wonder if maybe I could do it after all.

So I wrote some more, and the more I wrote, the easier it got. I seemed to have unleashed something and words began to flow out of me in an increasing torrent.

And with all those words lying about, it wasn’t long before I tried setting some of them to music. I started small, with a simple four line poem. I liked the result and just like with the words, this minor success gave me confidence and unlocked something. The flow of words was joined by a flow of songs. Song writing has been my companion ever since.

 

A Few Intense Likes

Music is still extremely significant in my life. I’m very particular though. Rather than quite liking vast amounts of it, I tend to dismiss most of it and really fall in love with a small selection. And these (mostly songs) I will get involved with quite intensely. If I like a song I will very quickly try and work out how to play it, I will analyse it, dissect it, take it apart and explore it’s construction. ‘Doesn’t that ruin it for you?’ people ask. Absolutely not; it means I can enjoy it even more, in different ways and on different levels.

A joke is like a frog they say; if you dissect it, it dies. People assume music is like that too. Well, not for me. Certainly the emotional reaction to music is unaffected by my understanding of how it works. I think these things happen in different parts of the brain.