The day my music died
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Music
The day my music died
Novelist Tim Lott was in love with records; they were his addiction. Then the relationship turned sour and he binned them. He tells how he got his life - and collection - back together
Reborn: Tim Lott with a new addition to his record collection. Photo: Sarah Lee
It is impossible to remember the exact moment I fell in love with music. I can do no more than locate a few fragments from my early childhood, which drift in and out of sight like debris on an ocean. Listening to the Beach Boys' Sloop John B on a Bush transistor radio at my Uncle Arthur's council house in Brentford.
My father bringing home a 78 of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, which sent a chill of amazement (could music be so bitter, so sad?) through my eight-year-old heart. A late-night radio programme, heard after bedtime under the blankets, where I first heard the electric blues of John Lee Hooker. Or was it Muddy Waters, or even Bo Diddley?
The memories are frayed, overlapping and insecure, but they are cumulative, and by the time I had reached my early teens my reliance on music - as an escape from my prosaic, working class, suburban so-called life - had become absolute and compulsive. I loved music; I lived for it, it lived for me.
The moment I fell out of love is much sharper, although again, I can't precisely date it. It would have been about 10 years ago. I remember one day staring at my collection of several hundred vinyl LP's - scratched, withered covers, records played half to death, some of them with me for nearly 30 years - and thinking, "Enough." These things are ghosts, memories, clutter; hardly played, barely loved anymore.
Within a week, I had disposed of them all, offering a few devoted friends their pick of the collection (Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe and The Fish is the only one I now remember being accepted), and the Oxfam shop in Notting Hill the rest. I was without a single item of music to call my own. The love affair was officially over.
At that time I had the vague intention of buying a CD player, and replacing all of my favourite LPs with CDs. But I never quite got round to it. I seemed to manage very well without the drip-drip of ancient riffs and melodies as a soundtrack to my life. There was Radio 4. There was TV. There were books. There were children, a wife, a social network.
The loneliness, anger and alienation that once kept me rocking silently, almost autistically, between the soft embracing pincers of my headphones in a tiny shared bedroom in west London had gone. I was a big boy now, and to rock up and down the kitchen to the timeless cacophony of Jefferson Airplane seemed redundant.
For a long time I thought the story - the story of music and me - was over. What the radio stations played seemed to be largely pap. Most of my friends' interest in music had also waned, and when I wandered into CD shops I hadn't a clue who the acts were any more. And at the cathedral-like chain stores, no one really cared anyway.
The specialist shops on my doorstep in Notting Hill - Honest Jon's, Rough Trade, Vinyl Solution - seemed intimidating, nerdy. I couldn't fool myself any longer. It was official: I was old. Music was a memory. Time to accept reality, tune into Classic FM and quietly embrace the slumber of the soul.
The story of how I was saved from a fate worse than Smashy and Nicey's is one I will come to. First, it is worth recounting where I started. I have said that I cannot remember when my love affair with music began. Certainly sometime in childhood, but as a child, I had no autonomy as a listener.
What I could access relied on those around me; my parents allowing me to play Pick of the Pops on a Sunday afternoon, after Sing Something Simple had thankfully concluded. Visits to my cousin, Dave, a bona fide Mod, who would play the Who and the Beatles' Revolver, and the Small Faces' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. Lastly, and most importantly, my older brother, Jeff, who was even more reliant on music than I was to help survive a disappointingly prosaic adolescence.
Somewhere around his 14th birthday, Jeff started to earn money working at the greengrocers' shop that my father managed in Notting Hill Gate. Opposite, the first branch of Virgin Records had opened, with beanie bags, free vegetarian food, the sweet smell of dope and banks of headphones. Shortly afterwards, LPs began to appear in our shared bedroom, an intoxicating combination of decorated paper, curved plastic, exotic art and ineffable mystery.
The covers were almost more seductive than the records themselves, as often as not in a blatantly sexual fashion - Blind Faith's first and only album, the CBS Rock Machine Turns You On compilation and Jefferson Airplane's seminal Volunteers fronted by the woman who would become my pin-up, my proto-Madonna: Grace Slick.
My brother, although a true enthusiast, was deeply protective of his record collection, and turned near-apoplectic if I went so much as near one of them. So I was allowed to look at the covers, but not touch - listen to the music, but not play it myself. It was sufficient, because Jeff had good taste, and it infected me like the sweetest virus.
Jeff was a West Coast fanatic. He bought his records on import, and the exclusivity and rareness of the music gave it a profound glamour. Not only the Airplane, but Quicksilver Messenger Service's immortal Happy Trails, the Grateful Dead's Live Dead, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester's Farewell Alderbaron began to share shelf space with his other growing loves: the American country of Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, the McGarrigle Sisters, the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He had little time for English music other than Fairport Convention, Brinsley Schwartz and a brief flirtation with Steeleye Span.
Primed and fuelled by Jeff's enthusiasm I began, sometime around the age of 14, to start my own collection. By now I had several friends of my own (all male; it was almost unheard in those days for girls to be interested in anything other than boyfriends, homework and teenybop) - friends for whom, like me, music had become a refuge, a mitigation of angst and a compensation for enforced sexual inactivity.
One of the most remarkable things about Britain - now as well as then - is its incredibly well-developed network of live music clubs, mostly in back rooms in pubs or draughty town halls. Even in Southall in west London where I grew up, there were at least two places to sample live music - the Farx, in Southall Town Centre, and the Oldfield Tavern in the adjoining Greenford.
Here, along with my fellow enthusiasts, Nick Blong, Steve Nannery and - I can't remember the name of the fourth musketeer, but since he was a sturdy Irish ginga, let's call him Red - we sampled the thrill of being crammed weekly into an unbelievably small, sweaty room to listen to the extraordinary volume of the Groundhogs, Man, Genesis, Quiver, Black Widow, Fleetwood Mac and many now-forgotten others.
We had our own network by that time, to rival my brother's. Nick specialised in the Boston Sound (obscure underground rock like Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, Autosalvage and Ultimate Spinach), Steve was into Britrock (Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis) and Red was into - well, I can't remember what Red was into any more than I can remember his name, but the dreaded Emerson Lake and Palmer vaguely rings a bell. Perhaps that's why I've chosen to forget.
As for me, I was taking in all the influences and my own fledgling collection was beginning to grow. Black Sabbath's first, my only nod towards heavy metal; Fleetwood Mac's early British blues on Blue Horizon, Iggy and the Stooges, Hot Tuna (an Airplane offshoot). The only reliable modern English bands were, of course, Roxy Music and David Bowie. Then there were two albums, owned by my brother but purchased separately by me, looming over them all - Happy Trails and Neil Young's astonishing Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
These were the rock years; I air-guitared my way through adolescence, twirling, spinning and nodding along with my heroes. My love for music remained undiminished through school and college, and my first job on a local newspaper, where I started reviewing records for their music column. Then my first big break; a call from the music magazine Sounds, who offered me a job as a staff writer. I whooped; it was 1976 and punk was about to sweep away everything I had ever loved.
I was shocked, confused and intimidated by punk. It was hard to see the clamour of the Pistols, the Clash and the Stranglers lay to waste all my old loves, condemning them as sentimental, or overblown or hypocritical. But still my love continued, adapted. I learned to love at least some of punk, particularly the Ramones' Rocket to Russia, Jonathan Richman and Iggy Pop, and I became suitably ashamed of my fondness for singer-songwriters - Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, even Bruce Springsteen, it turned out, were worthless, self indulgent and prissy.
My record collection, now swollen with free copies from a bloated, over-promoting record industry, was taking up more and more of my house. Even then, I think I was getting fed up with rock, both traditional and punk. Pop - in the form of Kraftwerk and Blondie - had always appealed to me more than, say, the Lurkers or Anti Nowhere League. Then Adam Ant appeared, and a new phase of my relationship with music began.
I left Sounds, and later Record Mirror, and started up my own pop music magazine, Flexipop!, with a partner, Barry Cain. We leapt on the back of the new pop shallowness - Human League, Duran Duran, Bad Manners, Madness - and made a tidy few bob out of it. But was it love? Not really. I felt the spirit of music diminishing within me, even then. I felt all this would sound very thin in 10 years' time, and history has proved resoundingly right.
Sometime after this, in the mid-1980s, I left the pop world altogether and went to university. No one there was interested in music - at the LSE, reading the New Statesman seemed to be more sexy than listening to New Order. The drift away from music had truly begun. My record collection looked at me accusingly: "Listen to me. Love me," it whispered. "It's not too late for us." But I ignored it. I was Becoming Serious.
The late 1980s saw me drift into a slough of depression that again led me back to music, this time the most bleak, unconsoling variety you could imagine. Song for a Siren (the version by This Mortal Coil), Tim Hardin, Mary Margaret O'Hara's To Cry About, Heart Like a Wheel by the McGarrigles, the melancholic grumblings of Tom Waits. They, along with my first few real touches of classical music - primarily Elgar's Cello Concerto and Gorecki - were the soundtrack to my nervous breakdown.
By the time I had recovered, at the end of the 1980s, I think my link with music had begun to crumble once and for all. My record collection was now more or less static. As we drifted into the 1990s, it gathered dust - literally. Pick up one of the sleeves and an avalanche of motes and powder would fall to the ground. I can't remember buying any records at all during these years. Shortly afterwards, I threw them all out.
The reactions from some of my friends - mostly men - were horrified. How could I do it? It was like withdrawing support from your favourite football team (which I had also done) or leaving your wife. But I was just sick of it all. Music was for kids, and all the old geniuses that I had revered had either become defunct, died or fallen into senescence. Neil and Joni had long been going through a bleak period - I'd given on Neil after Zuma and Joni after Bird. The Smiths had split up, and Kraftwerk had stopped making albums. Music, which mainly focused on techno and dance, simply wasn't interesting anymore. Not to me, anyway.
I think it was, as it so often is, a woman who gave me a new impetus, a way back into music. Several years after my marriage fell apart, in the late 1990s, I fell in love with someone 12 years younger than me. The hilarious thing about Rachael is that she had very, very bad taste in music, possessing as she did not only a copy of Rod Stewart's Body Wishes but the Best of Odyssey, at least one Yes album and several Boney M collections.
But she had enthusiasm, and she also possessed one or two half-decent CDs - Lambchop, Nitin Sawnhey, a Chilled Ibiza compilation, Zero 7, Fatboy Slim. And she played them, along with the bad stuff, and sang along and danced to them. Gradually I began to wonder - perhaps the music hadn't died after all. Perhaps it was just a part of me that was on ice.
Our first Christmas together, Rachael bought me a CD player, although I had no CDs to play on it. Then I signed a new deal with Penguin Books after my first novel won a Whitbread award, and I suddenly felt that I had disposable income for the first time in an age. So I started doing what I had long promised myself: replacing my old LPs with CDs. I would visit Soho and come back with 10, 20, even 30 CDs at a time. But there was nothing new there - simply old friends, reunited. The Smiths, Dylan, Millie Jackson, Anne Peebles, Elvis Costello, JJ Cale. It was good to hear them again, but I was still facing firmly towards the past.
It wasn't until last year that music fully found its way back into my life, when I started feeling magnetically attracted to Rough Trade, which I had previously shied away from as too alternative, too nerdy for me. Nigel, who ran the shop, had always been a very sweet and personable chap, but I was almost embarrassed to display to him - given the depth of the knowledge of music I had once possessed - how little I knew nowadays. I had started listening to Robert Elms's show on Radio London, and had heard a few tracks that I'd liked - Aimee Mann, Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynne. He guided me to the right albums, and we started chatting.
Before I knew where I was, I was wandering in to see Nigel regularly. He would furnish me with stuff he thought was great, and I'd stagger off with armfuls of CDs. If I didn't like them - which was rare - I'd return them. But his enthusiasm, like Rachael's, caught hold of me. I bought Robert Wyatt, some amazing old Soul from the Vaults compilations, the Streets, Claude Challe and best of all, the incredible Gillian Welch, whose Time the Revelator was the first classic album I'd heard for many years. I found myself raving about it to friends - something I hadn't done for a record since I was in my early 20s. A crack in my heart had opened once more, and music seeped joyfully in.
I'd like to say that since then I have become a committed fan of modern music, alternating my Dizzee Rascal with my Ms Dynamite. But I'm afraid my perception is much the same as Nigel's when it comes to most contemporary stuff. When I asked him at the end of last year what I should listen to that had come out in the previous 12 months, he replied, dryly: "Not much."
Not much is right. I can definitely survive without Coldplay, Beyoncé and the Darkness. But it doesn't really matter. The great thing about music nowadays is that there's a huge back catalogue to plunder. I suspect and hope that Tower Records's recent filing for bankruptcy will signal a revival for small operations like Rough Trade. Nigel is about to start a record club based on the same principles of our relationship - for a fee, subscribers will be sent two CDs broadly of their taste every month, chosen by Nigel and the rest of the staff. His is the kind of personalised service, with specialised knowledge and good taste, that could transform the future of the record industry.
As for me - well, I'm still looking backwards, but at least I'm looking. The last CD I bought for myself from Rough Trade was at least 25 years old - that old acid-rock warhorse, Happy Trails. It sounds as fresh and dynamic as it always did. And lest I be accused of being an unmitigated dinosaur, two of my daughters, Ruby and Cissy, 10 and eight respectively, love it.
So some of the excitement of those early years has returned. My CD collection now runs into three figures once more, and although it's only a start, I am very definitely reborn. This year I got a 400-CD record changer for Xmas and I aim to have it filled by the end of the year.
Of course, music will never be at the centre of my life again - life's just too big for that now. But it's here again, as a presence, and a backdrop. It weaves its silver thread through the day, just as it did when I was 17, giving me new memories, resurrecting old ones and sometimes, just sometimes, thrilling me to the very core. It's only now I realise how much I've missed it. As Townes van Zandt would have it, I been gone too long, and as the Shades of Blue Orchestra might add, this time it's for good.
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