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30. Hurray for the Riff Raff - Living in the City

A few themes have emerged across the previous 29 posts, which will feature here and thus validate the truism that although some things change, some things never change.  Despite the fact that I am wallowing in the comfortable abyss of middle-age, disinclined towards many of the things I enjoyed doing in my teens, 20s and 30s, favouring routine and productiveness over excitement and spontaneity and functioning in society burdened by indifference, irritation and contempt....despite ALL of that bleak gloominess, I am still in some ways no different to the person I've always been:  I still love Bob Dylan, I'm still open to forming distant crushes on talented women like Kate Bush and I am still capable of being passionately awestruck when discovering a new band or artist. And that's the point of this last post.  Illustrated by Hurray for the Riff Raff. The famous line in Forest Gump about life being like a box of chocolates is much better applied to the BBC music show, Lat...
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29. Oscar Isaac and Marcus Mumford - Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)

Films filled the void left by football, when I finally fell out of love with the latter and rediscovered a new love for the former.  Everyone would cite films as one of their interests, but what they usually mean is that they either enjoy going to the cinema a lot - to watch anything half-decent usually - or they have an exhaustible list of favourite films that provide familiar and comfortable viewing when they happen to be on. Personally, I hate the cinema.  People are conditioned into unnecessary and irritatingly noisy snacking and the ones you end up sitting near will either fidget or whisper and generally leak piss all over the experience of getting into a really good film on the big screen.  Once my children didn't need me to take them to the cinema anymore, I stopped going (except for the recent Star Wars episodes and spin-offs that is). But then a few things changed that.  One was the discovery that there were a lot of cleverly made films in the late 60s a...
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28. Queen - Brighton Rock

Middle age - in the sense of being forty-something, as opposed to being medieval - is a chronological situation which I have embraced without regret or wanting.  I give far less of a shit about things these days.  Some people might find that sad or even reprehensible.  They might argue that indifference is a crime.  That by becoming disengaged from what's happening in the world, being (even more) socially misanthropic and by re-embracing political incorrectness, I am in some ways doing something wrong.  In a world in which ill-informed, polarised, over-simplistic, bite-sized opinion-spewing is the fabric of social media, I daresay my attitude would arouse much castigation.  Fortunately, the not-giving-a-shit state of mind in which I dwell allows me to waste no amount of worry over what people think. I'm not saying I am a calmer person - I frequently feel irritated and annoyed by life, contemptuous of much of what happens around me - but I do feel like I h...
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24-27. Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road, Neil Young - Harvest Moon, Paul McCartney (The Beatles) - Blackbird, Blondie - Rapture

I don't think that thoughts of my own mortality really started to take seed until I was well into my 40s, so it would be taking too much poetic license to try and link that to a new attitude I started to develop towards music as I approached middle-age.  I was only 39 in 2009, when this next part of my autobiographical music-loving journey begins.  Nonetheless, there is some coincidence. It occurred to me that I had not seen in concert some of the bands or artists that I had loved from (in most cases) my teenage years and it started to feel like I should do so before they die.  I suffer from mental blocks that can last years or even decades, where I tell myself something negative about music and then close my mind to it without review for far too long.  A few examples: Deciding that Springsteen was rubbish once he released the relatively disappointing Tunnel of Love in 1987 and followed it with the mediocre crap of  Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992....
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23. I am Kloot - The Same Deep Water as Me

If this entire blog isn't self-indulgent enough, then this post certainly will be.  That's because it is likely to end up as nothing more entertaining or interesting than a homage to a band that few readers (let's face it, that 'few' still might be ALL readers) have heard about. My possibly unreliable memory suggests to me that during one of my years-long phases of eating the same breakfast every day, one particular box of Cinnamon Grahams unexpectedly housed a free CD of songs by lesser known alternative rock bands.  On reflection, it might have been a music magazine, but the cereal box story has a more curious coating to it (see what I did there?)  Anyway, on this CD was a track called The Same Deep Water as Me by a band with the enigmatic and inexplicable name of I am Kloot.  And ultimately, this became what might just be my favourite song of all time. With the aid of the internet - for our story has now taken us to 2005/6 - I found out that I am Kloot had re...
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22. Ryan Adams - When the Stars Go Blue

We like to take the piss out of British people who like cowboys.  People who don the boots and check shirts, who unselfconsciously own a Stetson and attend line-dancing classes alongside other couples who you suspect would be swingers, doggers or naturists if they were any more uninhibited.  ('They're sex people, Lynn!')  Country and Western is almost as unfashionable and frowned upon as folk or prog rock, so you might be thinking that someone sad and crap enough to produce a blog like this would be a fan.  Not quite.  C&W is a bit too cheesy and whiney for me, with too many mentions of whisky, good old boys and the singer's daddy.  But some music genres work better when they are diluted or mixed with something else.  I feel a food analogy screaming to be applied.  Garlic maybe.  In its purest form, country music, like folk music, is just a bit much.  But so much stuff I like has country and folk influences, usually alongside blues....
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21. The Who - Baba O'Reilly

In 1997, Fever Pitch was released.  Nick Hornby added a romance and a narrative to his original novel in order to make it work as a film; and, just as importantly, he added a soundtrack.  Now, The Who are quite possibly the most over-rated classic rock band of all time, having churned out for the most part a load of tosh that was either bland or just plain pompous.  But there're enough diamonds in the rough for a creditable Best Of... album and the one I have on record somehow fails to include Baba O'Reilly.  If you know it, you'll know that iconic intro... you probably don't know (I didn't until I looked it up just now) or care that Pete 'It was research' Townsend played it on a Lowery Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ using its marimba repeat feature.  Credit to Pete for the finger-work and credit to Nick Hornby for using this at the point in which the film's main character Paul, as a young boy, prepares to go to Arsenal for the first time on his own.  As h...
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