The First Music

Here's a lovely reminiscence from Woebot about the first records he owned - a pre-cool collection of children's music initially, graduating gradually to proper pop music and a genuinely cool record to have bought at the age of nine (no spoilers) and perhaps even more so as a pre-recorded cassette. 

Matt's meditation got me thinking about my own start with music. 

And I realised that with the exception of a single single - the theme from The Sting, better known as Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" - I didn't buy any musical recordings until.... the age of 16. Not one!

My brothers and I did between us get some comedy LPs - Monty Python, The Goodies, National Lampoon's That's Not Funny, That's Sick!.  These had some songs on them  - "Winter Sportsman" by the Goodies; a pretty tight and slick funk track on the Lampoon album titled "The Shere Hite Disco Report" - but they were not primarily music. They did, each one of them, get played scores of times - this was the pre-videocassette era when if you wanted to re-enjoy your comedy faves, the LP (or the spin-off book - of which we also had loads) was the only option. 

So music for me, growing up, was the music that my parents played. 

Which was musicals (mainly West Side Story), comic song (Tom Lehrer), light jazz (Oscar Peterson, Dudley Moore Trio - these didn't impact me much, although as a grown-up I would adore Dudley's Bedazzled soundtrack LP). And then there were a few famous classical things.

Which is why to this day my favorite classical works are Beethoven's Pastoral and Holst's The Planets.

The latter was a particularly favorite - I used to listen to this on the Grundig radiogram in my parent's bedroom, sprawled on the coverlet. "Neptune, the Mystic" especially would have me drifting and swooning into a trance.  

The embarrassing truth is that my favorite classical music - the stuff that I can actually remember - is from before the age of 16. Things I heard from my parents. Or at school, like Carmina Burana (although its "O Fortuna" sequence was also in the famous aftershave advert). 

Further embarrassing truth: the only things added to the small classical faves list subsequently would be things heard through movies:  Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", Saint-Saen's "Aquarium", the Ligeti bits on 2001, A Space Oddity....  

The classical I like is all the most famous bits that get either portioned out on the radio as if they were singles and "hits". Or that you just hear around (in film, or adverts). 

Take Satie. I am not sure how I would first have heard Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies" - was it in a TV drama?  That's another one that would have been heard young. At a certain point, it seemed to be everywhere.   But again, despite later efforts, I have failed to fall in love with any other Satie. 

Yes, it's not for want of effort in this department. But even things I like as I'm listening, e.g. Debussy, it doesn't stick somehow. 

I think rock and pop have spoiled my ears. My ears want insistent rhythm (meaning drums and bass). Production. Studio spatiality. 

It's one of the reasons I found this book such a surprise - and why, in a strange way, even while  enjoying parts of it, on some fundamental level, I just don't believe it. I don't believe that someone who grew up listening to and deep-feeling the Velvets, the Stooges, John Martyn, Roxy, Eno, could go through such a conversion. I mean, yeah, he who fucks nuns will someday join the church...  but still!

There is a great novel about this (well, not exactly this, but on theme) - Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach.  The conflict between the young woman and the young man - in love, but unable to function sexually - is paralleled by her love of classical music and his passion for blues and rock 'n' roll. It's set around the turn of the 1950s into the 1960s and he's going to places like Eel Pie Island and seeing people like, I dunno, Alex Korner. He tries to play her rock'n'roll records and she tries to make nice comments ("bouncy!"). But the four-square rhythm sounds impossibly crude and rudimentary to her (she plays in a string quartet so has a deep understanding of and immersion in the music). Conversely, when she  takes him to concerts, it all sounds ridiculously fussy to him, a prim agitation that makes him itch with restlessness. 

Spoiler alert! The marriage breaks up almost instantly (on their wedding night in fact) and they go divergent paths. He is caught up in the adventure of the Sixties, free love, etc. He organizes some rock festivals. He becomes part-owner of a record shop. Never marries or has kids. She meanwhile steadfastly and with great discipline continues with the string quartet, who become acclaimed and renowned. 

There is an extraordinary short passage near the end where the young man, now old and red faced and bald, looks back on his life and concludes that it has amounted to nothing. Whereas his ex-bride...  She has made a contribution. 

McEwan is saying that the whole of post-WW2 culture - the cult of youth, sexual liberation, informality, spontaneity, living for the now - was a gigantic detour and waste of energy. That the true strength of Western civilization is its high culture traditions. This is what will endure. This is what has value and spiritual profundity.  He is saying that sublimation and deferred gratification are the mettle out of which lasting cultural worth is forged. 

(The childlessness of the rock-and-roll loving boy-man symbolizes this, and is McEwan tipping the hand a bit. Perhaps the  only clumsy touch in what's otherwise a delicate and subtle book).

Ah, this turned into a bit of a detour in itself, from the original point of the blogpost which was a little nostalgic cast-back to when you are innocent of an idea of pop, let alone cool or a internal aesthetic hierarchy within rock (one that mirrors and duplicates the high versus low opposition that once cast all of pop rock etc into the lowly category). 

We used to watch Top of the Pops every week. And I used to love certain songs (Hollies "The Air That I Breathe", Bachman Turner Overdrive "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") and was fascinated by others (the bass-detonations and "t-peculiar way" in "Space Oddity", reissued in 1975 and an even huger hit. or the wah-wah guitar in "Theme from 'Shaft'", which I didn't know was wah-wah or even a guitar -  it sounded to me like helicopter blades). Sparks's "This Town" made a big impression. 

But it never once occurred to me to buy any of these as a 7-inch single. 

My slender resources money-wise went to books or Indian ink (I was an aspiring cartoonist, obsessed with Windsor & Newton's range of products)  Or to other hobbies / pastimes / obsessions, of which there were a great succession.

Actually, now I remember, there was another source of music in my life before my brother Tim introduced me to punk. 

Granny had one of those small portable record-players that look like picnic hampers, with a built-in mono speaker. 

For some reasons she had a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits (I think her eldest son, finally moving out, left it there - her own attitude to pop was "it's all rhythm", meaning the drums were too strident).  

But the record that we did play a lot was Evita.  Despite generally reviling Andrew Lloyd-Weber, this is a really pretty tune, I think. 

So, yeah, a late developer with the music thing. 

After such a slow start, it is kind of weird that 

A/ I've dedicated my entire life to music and 

B/ amassed an inordinate number of records.