Day 7 – The 30 Day Song Challenge – A Song that reminds you of a certain event...

Song 7 – A song that reminds you of a certain event – ‘Fools Gold’ – The Stone Roses

The Stone Roses - Fools Gold 12" Cover (rather lovely piece of artwork from John Squire)

I’d been ‘into’ Indie for a year or so before the Stone Roses appeared, following an earlier dalliance with Dire Straits and Genesis.  Laugh if you like, but at my school, in the mid to late 1980’s it was either that or pop and I knew that I didn’t like pop so it was a kind of rebellion, a move away from the mainstream, even if it was in the wrong direction.  I suppose it was music that took itself seriously, that wasn’t frivolous and that was probably what turned me onto it.  At some point a friend lent me the album ‘Doolittle’ by the Pixies (shout out to FB’s Juniper Fortune) and then with Martin Bradbury lending me the first Morrissey solo album that was pretty much it.  Me and ‘indie’ sitting in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g.  And then probably going back inside to my bedroom, wearing black and pondering the agony of life, in the way you can when you’re 15.

It took me a little while to find my indie feet, which I probably only managed to do when I started reading the NME from cover to cover each week, a phase that lasted until I was about 20 when I realised that they were obliged to keep raving on about just how good each new band and album where, because it was never going to be commercially viable to run an otherwise empty issue saying ‘yeah, basically there’s this new grebo scene but all the bands are a bit shit so we’re not going to bother writing about them’.   

Other formative experiences?  One was waiting for the three weekly ‘indie’ charts to be shown on ITV’s chart show on a Saturday morning, the others being the always tiresome ‘Metal’ and ‘Dance’ charts.  Quite often (about half the time) the band in question didn’t even have a video and so they played 10 seconds or so of the song over a grainy black and white picture of the band or the cover of the single.  Based on that 10 seconds you had to decide whether you liked it or not and whether you wanted to spend your pocket money on it at ‘Track Records’ in Doncaster, assuming they even had it.  Hard to imagine isn’t it, when you can find a dozen performances of even the most obscure band on Youtube and often a clip of a live performance that you only just saw the previous night.  Still, the chart show would play a couple of songs in full and I still hold it in a lot of affection for that.  The other source of new music was borrowing cassettes from friends.  I remember ‘James’ were particularly desirable, ‘Stutter’, ‘Strip-mine’ and the early live album ‘One Man Clapping’ all being eagerly sought out.  I also remember Steve Walters lending me a couple of compilation cassettes containing ‘proper’ John Peel approved indie.  I’ve bought most of the songs and artists on it over the years, ‘The Field Mice’ are still a huge favourite but ‘Galaxie 500’, ‘Benny Profane’, ‘Another Sunny Day’, ‘The Pastels’ and ‘The Pooh Sticks’ still sound good to me.

The first ‘scene’ that appeared on my radar was the whole ‘baggy’ or ‘Madchester’ thing.  I suppose one of the attractions was that you could actually buy the records (or a few of them anyway) and see some of the bands on TV.  I wasn’t into the scene at the start, but it was pretty near the start and as it crossed over into the mainstream I did still feel that I owned it.  I particularly liked The Stone Roses, probably because they had enough musicianship to satisfy the lingering Genesis fan in me, but mostly because they had such great songs.  The first album still sounds great and I do imagine just how good they might have been with a singer who could sing and a work ethic.

So, autumn 1989, I’d just started in the lower sixth and I went straight into town on the bus after school to get the 12” single of Fools Gold.  I expect I played it all night at home and then taped it so I could listen to it on my walkman at school the next day.  At that time I’d also become involved in the School production of ‘Grease’ as the ‘stage manager’.  I’d no ambition to act and anyway, acting wasn’t what the academically smart kids did, it was for the cocky, confident, lippy kids.  One lunchtime a bunch of us were painting the set in the school hall, sponging white paint bricks onto a grey background.  We had a stereo in there and were allowed to play music, what with us being so responsible and mature and all.  So I stuck on ‘Fools Gold’, the full 9 minute 53 second version and as it was so new and cool we all had a dance on stage, grooving round in our best ‘Bez’/’Cressa’ (the Stone Roses equivalent of Bez – every band had one in those days) fashion.  A load of younger kids were looking at us through the windows of the school hall, which was open on three sides.  I don’t remember them laughing, I think we were a curious rather than comical sight, the concept of the school hall being used for fun was mostly unheard of.  I do remember feeling that we were super-cool and while not exactly like a grown up, much less of a child than before.  Things were starting to change.

So, a record that reminds me of a certain event – The Stone Roses – ‘Fools Gold’ (9.53 version), painting the set for Grease, Edlington Comprehensive School Hall, autumn, 1989.

(And here's The Pastels, because I love it and I won't be able to fit it in any other way.  Terrible singing but it's from the heart.  llove the homemade video someone's done too!)

David Millington

7^th April 2011

Nottingham

Lost in Music – Part One

Sometime in 1999, there was one of those emails floating around the office I worked in.  One of those emails that contained jokes or funny pictures of cats or Darwin Award winners, the ones that we don’t get anymore since Facebook appeared.  This particular email contained a bunch of amazing facts about the millennium, one of which was that first year university students would only have been 8 years old when the Stone Roses debut album came out.  In the office this did give us pause for thought.  A generation had grown up and gone to college who probably had no idea how important that album had been to my generation and who had a relationship with it that was, at best, the same as my relationship to Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, a record I loved but could never really ‘get’ as I’d never heard it in context.  It was a snapshot of a time I only dimly remembered and of a scene I had no experience of.

(I’ve linked a load of videos into this bit.  Don’t worry about watching them, they’re there as a sort of series of footnotes, you don’t need to listen if you don’t want to.  But you should, because they’re brilliant! Except for Al Martineau.)

Of course 11 years further on and this year’s graduating students, never mind undergraduates, weren’t even born when the ‘The Roses’ album first made it’s impression on a generation of indie kids.  That’s an even more sobering thought.  Putting that into my own timeframe, the genres of glam, punk, disco, krautrock, prog, hip-hop, new wave and dance were all ‘invented’ or at least popularised after I was born.

Going back 10 years before I appeared and the Beatles and Stones hadn’t released a record.  Bob Dylan was playing the folk clubs in Greenwich Village having just released his first album.  Go back another 10 years and it’s the first year that the Top 10 (Top 12 as it turns out) was even recorded.  The people having the most hits were Bing Crosbie and Vera Lynn.  The first recorded Number One is ‘Here in my Heart’ by Al Martineau (have a listen – yikes!).  It was a very different world.  Rock and Roll was still two years away in the form of Bill Haley and the Comets ‘Rock Around the Clock’ which sold 15 million copies around the world and kicked the whole shebang into commercial life.*

I re-watched a film called ‘Almost Famous’ a few months ago.  If you don’t know it, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie, heavily autobiographical, set in 1973 about a teenager who blags himself a job as a music journalist following a band, which are on the point of breaking through, as they tour around the States.  It won an Oscar for best screenplay and Kate Hudson showed she’s a damn good actress before going on to appear in a seemingly endless stream of terrible rom-coms.  I digress.  In the film there’s an old, wise, journalist who acts as a mentor to the young hero.  What struck me was that from Bill Haley to the setting of the film, only 19 years have passed and that this is all them music that this old sage will know about.  That’s like the film being set now and no music existing before 1992.  It really brought home to me just how much of what we should probably term ‘pop music’ was made in my lifetime and how much of it I can remember first hand, certainly compared to the bright young things I stand alongside at gigs.

I wonder about the relationship that people have with music that comes from a time that they don’t remember.  I get a sense of ‘now’ from music that’s been freshly made and even listening to stuff I first heard twenty years ago I can still remember how it made me feel back then.  It still has some of that newness.  That connection back seems important in the way I relate to the songs.  It always feels very personal, even if the person I was has gone, leaving only me.

A lot of music I hear now will be made by people of a different generation who have grown up in a world that’s moved on from my growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.  It might be music by and of people living in a culture and from a background of which I have no firsthand experience and no real understanding, like West Coast Hip-hop or Americana.   That doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s enough that they’re living in a world that I understand and that we’re all experiencing something of the zeitgeist together.  Does this matter to other people?  Is there something important about listening to new music as it appears or is living in a world of old songs fine too?  I’ve not come to any conclusions.  Feel free to let me know what you think.

<<End of Part 1 – I’ll pop part 2 up later this week>>

David Millington

February 28^th 2011

Nottingham

* - And I’m not citing any of these records as era defining or ‘classic’, they’re just examples of what was going on at given points in time and records I like.