CHAPTER 22

 

 

#79: THE KORGIS

"Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime (Alternate Version)"

from the album Dumb Waiters

Released: July 1980

 

 

It's one of the saddest residual feelings that ever can be, that moment in late May or early June when the prizes have been given out and school is officially over for the summer. If you were me you went over the street from the school, downhill to the railway station and boarded the train for Glasgow. In your seat you'd watch Kylepark, the dividing river, everything you'd ever known, gradually vanishing, and it was hard to contemplate the prospect of being away from your friends - your orientation - for the best part of three months; at least, those you presumed to be your friends.

 

 

I recall a very specific spell of melancholy in the summer of 1978, end of my third year, around the time school stopped being fun and changed into preparation for the workplace, when everybody started to take this lark seriously. Retreating from the village, the song "Many Too Many" by Genesis, then a not very successful single (but a better and subtler song than the big hit from that album, "Follow You Follow Me"), came into my mind and rendered me sad. I had the feeling - a very accurate one, as it turned out - that the peers I'd see again in August wouldn't be the same people I'd known in May. They'd look and sound the same, but in every other important way they'd be different.

How would that feel if you knew you were doing it for the very last time, leaving absolutely everything and everybody behind? It felt like the melancholy articulated by James Warren in what was intended to be a musical examination of zen philosophy, ways of making oneself a better human, but which to my sixteen-year-old heart played like the saddest break-up song I'd ever heard. Warren sings "change your heart" like there were no hearts left to be changed. There is simply this lush emptiness, filled partly with string synthesisers, a guzheng refrain and solo violin, as though everything had...gone, but departed beautifully. There is also this rhetorical pause after the guitar lick at the end of the final chorus - does the singer have anything else to say?

He does not, and the shoulder-shrug/there's-nothing-else-to-be-said pause is heartbreaking. The string synthesiser wells up like a reasonably-sized hug. I prefer the alternative take which, rather than repeat the one verse twice, gives us a whole new second verse, bearing the world-wrecking sigh of "You know, we live such lives." Let it all come down. All of my heart. There is no going back. Everybody who heard the song felt it before they liked it.

 

 

And my suspicions proved correct. When my father died in July 1981, eleven days past his fiftieth birthday, none of my alleged former school friends got in touch. None of them appeared at his funeral or wake. The truth was clear. They had never really been my friends. They just tolerated me. They secretly hated me. They left me behind, or I them. I had been scrubbed out of their collective memory. I haven't learned to forget or forgive that at any time.