| The 40 In 40 Days Project. | ||
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25. The Musical Epiphany (1976) |
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The Au Pairs |
Ever since
Middle Of The Road’s seminal “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” came
along and rocked my world in the Summer of 1971, I had been an avid
follower of pop music. I liked it because it was a cheerful, colourful,
glamorous fantasy world, which was forever throwing up new variations
and new surprises. Traumatised by my parents’ divorce in the Summer of
1973, I retreated further into this fantasy world; pop music became my
escape, my comfort – my sanctuary. And I started to take it very
seriously indeed. This made me ideally suited as a
consumer of progressive rock, which I discovered in the Summer of 1974
(first with Yes, then with Gong, followed by a whole host of others).
This was music that took itself extremely seriously, with lavish
artwork, impenetrably “deep” lyrics, and twenty-minute long
quasi-symphonic pieces. Heady stuff indeed for an intellectually
ambitious twelve year old. In fact, I proudly imagined myself to be the
only twelve year old in the UK with such advanced, mature tastes for my
age. In short, I really became quite the superior rock snob. I was soon
devouring the “serious” weekly rock papers (NME, Sounds, Melody
Maker), and gleefully colluding with the ever-shifting tastes of my
favourite music journalists. At boarding school, where in most
respects I struggled to fit in with the other boys (too nervous, too
vulnerable, too volatile, too wimpy, too dorky, too mixed-up basically),
I found that my musical tastes, my abnormally large album collection,
and my encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, brought me some measure
of respect and “cool”. I got to hang out with the senior boys, who
would let me sit on bean bags in their studies with a cup of Nescafe, in
return for a hearing of the new Genesis, Greenslade, Pink Floyd or Mike
Oldfield. And then, in the early Autumn of 1976,
punk rock came along. Almost as soon as I started reading about it in
the music press, I was fascinated and thrilled by the very idea of it.
The punk philosophy was nothing short of revolutionary. It fundamentally
questioned all of my received notions of what was good about music. It
then summarily trashed everything which had gone before it (the long
hair, the flares, the guitar solos, the concept albums, the huge
concerts, the technical wizardry) and replaced it with what seemed like
a radical new manifesto (in reality: short hair, drainpipes, no guitar
solos, three minute singles, small gigs, technical incompetency). It was
Year Zero – my very own Cultural Revolution – and so, with almost
Maoist zeal, I jumped aboard the bandwagon. Punk became my new obsession, and boy,
could I obsess. I read every article I could find (carefully pasting
them into my Punk Scrapbook), bought every single (New Rose, Anarchy In
The UK, Spiral Scratch), every fanzine (Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped &
Torn, 48 Thrills), taped every John Peel session…and alienated all my
fellow public schoolboys, who greeted the movement with universal
incomprehension, derision and outright hostility (“Nothing but a bunch
of yobs who can’t even play their instruments”). My popularity,
which had been shaky at the best of times, sank to new depths (“That
weirdo Slater with his bloody awful music”). I cared about that –
but then again, I didn’t. I knew that they were all wrong and I was
right, you see. I still have all the old singles – some of them collectors’ pieces now. I don’t play them often, but when I do, they still sound special. And Punk did me good, I think. It made me think about the world outside the confines of my privileged existence. It made me question the status quo. It showed me that it was OK not to conform to society’s norms. Hey - if you’re a screwed-up fourteen year old in search of a youth cult to provide meaning in his life – I can really think of nothing better. |