Current mood: RECONCLUSIVE....
Category: RECONCLUSIVE.... Music
It's 2002, and I've arrived in London, after spending a year in the wilderness (literally)..
I am out of musical touch...
Yes boss, despite regular trips to buy records, I'm about as off with current music and cultural happenings as I've been since I was 12 years of age.
I'm keen to catch up..
As luck would have it, I find I'm living in just the right place.
Specifically, in a flat above Epra Fabrics on Brick Lane at the top of Fashion Street in East London..
Now, until moving there I had no idea that the area had become quite so hip and jaunty.
No boss, at that time, I knew the south and center of London pretty well, but could count the number of times I'd been to that bit of the East End on two fingers.
Well, to start with, I both liked and hated this new found East End fashionability.
Whereas it was always a pleasure to see Gilbert and George shuffling past with their eyes open, it was much less of a pleasure to see the identikit artists in their mullets pretending to be important and CRAAAYYYYZZYYYYY!!!!!!
But all told, I was happy: It was central, there was music happening and it was completely different to looking at this kind of thing all day everyday as I'd been doing previously...
So, for the first year in London, I was living with Andrew, Sarah & Katie.
Between them they had sought, found and paid the deposit on the flat.
Andrew and Sarah are a couple who I've known since art school and Katie is Sarahs sister.
Well, in order to balance things up, I soon set about doing my absolute level best to get into Katies pants, despite her having a boyfriend called Mat.
No, actually, that's not accurate...
I was hopelessly infatuated with Katie in a way that can only ever lead to disaster..
Yes boss, it was a shameful Giovan-performance that appeared to start when Matt gave me some Ketamin on the night I moved in.
I think from that I figured he'd given me K (Katie) etc and therefore set myself along the road to building an entire mythology around this girl involving the letter K and the number 23....
Yes boss, in my book, every good relationship/encounter has to have a good mythology about it, constructed out of numbers and letters and coincidental happenings...
Of course, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this approach, and on that occasion, this clever and well worked mythology didn't work out - instead it creating a fucking terrible old mess...
So..
Sarah (a very talented painter) worked a day job in a high class jewellers in Bond Street and Katie worked for an architect in Angel and whilst they were at work, Andy and I would do whatever we felt like doing.
We were of course supposed to be working our genius...
Yes boss, Andy is an extraordinarily talented painter and you already know about the talents I claim for myself, and we were both in London to try and make good on these skills.
However, we spent very little time directly practicing our arts in that first six months....
No boss, our average day would work as follows:
I'd wake up, change the music that had been playing all night (I was enjoying listening to music all night AND all day), I'd then look out of the window to see what was happening...
Providing the street was quiet, I'd then repair to the kitchen where Andrew and myself would spend 3 or 4 hours drinking tea and discussing whatever needed to be discussed.
Sometimes we'd listen to the radio and Andy would sing along to pop songs.
Other times, we'd fight over the copy of 'Birds' magazine that had arrived. (Andrew and myself were and are both fascinated by birds - being able to talk about the plumage differences betwen Rock and Ortolan Buntings whilst our other artsy friends discussed Post-modernism or some such crap - was part of how we first got on)
Once we got bored of tea, I'd nip back to my bedroom and pretend to run my record retail business.
This usually entailed me phoning the banks and credit card companies with great tales of the HUGE AND BOUNDLESS SUCCESS!!! of my business..
In exchange for these rather large stories, they'd agree to increase my credit card/loan and overdraft limits...
My work for the day done, Andy and myself would then either repair to the Off Licence and/or the pub (most often The Pride Of Spitalfields AKA The Living Room (we don't have our own)) where we'd continue our conversations..
Katie and Sarah would then join us when they'd finished work and we'd all stay in the pub talking complete horseshit until we got kicked out at around about 1am
Andy and myself would then finish the day off in the kitchen until whatever time was appropriate (sometimes moving back onto tea if the booze had run out), meanwhile the girls would go to bed so they'd be up for work again the next day..
Repeat.
Of course Andy would get a whole load of grief about this kind of a non-working carry on from Sarah, but as long as I made the rent (which thanks to the banks regular generosity I invariably did) I didn't...
So...
One day I woke up, changed my music, took a look out of the window and wandered into the kitchen in order to start on the usual routine, whereupon I found Andy dancing away to The Strokes.
Now, this wasn't unusual.
Andy loved The Strokes.
He played a battered cd copy that belonged to a friend of Katies at least once a day and sometimes many times a day. He knew all the words.
In fact, one of Andy's many talents is his memory for songs - as far as I'm aware he doesn't own a single record himself, but he knows the lyrics to more or less every pop song you care to mention and if he's in the mood will happily sing along..
What was however different about that particular morning was that Andy was dancing and singing along whilst wearing a pair of red high heels and an artists smock. He was also drinking wine form the bottle...
Now, feeling in something of a more serious mood myself and not quite sure such behaviour was appropriate for the hour (most likely I was already trying to second guess the contents of that days Katie texts), I declined to join in the dancing and instead headed for the kettle as per the normal schedule...
Without missing a beat, Andy moved out of the way of the kettle and continued as he was - perhaps even raising his enthusiasm a little.
I then got on with making the tea whilst switching between looking out of the back window onto the building site to see if there was any evidence of the pair of Black Redstarts, and then back at Andy's dancing whilst trying to work out what was going through his mind....
Now even though I wasn't hugely surprised to see what I was seeing, I did feel quite embarrassed by the whole situation.
Andy didn't however appear to be at all ashamed.
No boss, Andy is an incredibly natural person and if he wakes up of a morning and feels the need to dance to The Strokes in the kitchen, clad only in an artists smock and a pair of red high heels, whilst drinking wine, that's just what he does, without any regard whatsoever as to how anyone else might perceive or interpret such a move...
That was and (were I to still know him) still would be one of the things I love about Andy...
So,.., getting to the point...
Until then I'd been very, very unsure about The Strokes.
Yes boss, at the time, it was bloopy and bleepy electronic music that was flying my flagpole and not that much else, and when hearing them on a daily basis, I'd essentially found The Strokes to be rather thin sounding and hugely over-rated for what they were.
But as I stood there, and poured the water on top of the teabag, i couldn't deny the effect they were having on Andy. And because I liked Andy and generally respected his pop music taste, I found a whole new world of appreciation for the band to be opening up...
I mean, if they were inspiring someone to dance about in an artists smock and red high heels first thing in the morning, having what appeared to be an absolutely wonderful time, they must be doing something right musn't they...?!?!
The result is that ever since then, I've had a very great affection for that first Strokes LP...
And I guess the thing I learnt there and then is that music means a whole host of different things to a whole load of different people and that to say one thing is better or more valid than another is on one level at least a complete and utter waste of fucking time.....
Which, makes me wonder why I've been writing critically about music for the last 2 years...
Oh well...
 | Currently listening : Is This It By The Strokes Release date: 2001-10-09  |
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