CHAPTER 27

 

 

#74: STEREOLAB

"Ping Pong"

from the album Mars Audiac Quintet

Released: August 1994

 

 

During the working week, I lived in Westminster for just under two years, between 1993-5. That's Westminster, you smug bastards, not Pimlico; my flat was just off Vincent Square and I could see Parliament from my bathroom window. Those were days. As part of going to work, quite early in the morning, I was in the habit, if the weather held up, of walking to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on the Fulham Road (and even then my journey wasn't finished; I'd clamber into the inter-hospital minibus and travel to Charing Cross). The same minibus actually stopped at Rochester Row so I didn't need to do any walking; it was self-inflicted and when I now think of the distance I covered and how I covered it (none of my route was direct) I exhaust myself by wondering how the hell I managed it, four days a week (not Monday morning because I was coming back into town from Oxford - off the Oxford Tube coach at Park Royal, four stops on the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith and then whatever bus was available to escort me two stops down Fulham Palace Road isn't this a thrilling read, yes I know it's anything but).

THE POINT OF IT ALL is that to accompany my walk I'd listen to certain albums on my Walkman. Because it was a relatively small circle of albums, by my choice, I got to know them intimately. No, I'm not going to do a list because this is a book, you're not going shopping with it, and I'm keen to put exactly that type of person off reading it. Enough to say that repeated listening in various limited settings brought out a semi-expected extra magic in the music; the way a certain guitar chordality would sound like a gift of unsoiled gold if the sun materialised in the corner of your left upper eye just as you turned the corner from Royal Hospital Road, heading towards St Leonard's Terrace (okay, for one example, just think of the treated Gary Lucas guitar chord ushering in the first chorus of Jeff Buckley's "Mojo Pin." For a grudging second, the blue light emanated by Bally Sagoo's Bollywood Flashback two-thirds up Warwick Way, past the Tesco. That's enough. I don't want Record Collectors getting any ideas about this, let alone the wrong one).

I was extremely careful to keep the number of albums on my walking Walkman rota down because the mind then has to concentrate on the album, get to know it, familiarise itself with the music's twists and curvatures. But you also know the album from the times when you initially do that. You grow up with them, share some life with them. Then I'd take them back to Oxford on the Friday evening and L.G. would react well not always how I would have anticipated her to react and in truth that might have been a little frustrating.

The trouble is, well over a quarter of a century on, you can listen to these records again and know them like you know your own veins and arteries, but you don't - cannot - get the same punctumised kick out of them. Why? Because since 1993-5 so much has happened to you, you've been through things unspeakable and glorious, and you are not at all the same person you were back then when you could just go down the Our Price on the King's Road and dick-a-dum-dum buy these albums on cassette for a convenient £7.99.

That's part of it. Another part is disappointment, you know, when you hear that song for the first few times, when it gets played on daytime mainstream radio and you imagine how huge a hit it's going to be and how few people are really going to get what it's saying. Then the week of release comes, followed by the week of the chart, and it's numphed into the mid-forties, bumped down by all types of corporate crap funded by expensive PR agencies which no one will remember next week, let alone in thirty years. It disappears and you quietly despair.

The most significant part of it, however, is not that you can't go back to the initial feeling. It's to do with the fact that modern technology has rendered it impossible to recapture it. If anything, and if not carefully nurtured, untrammelled availability of music - and in Spotify terms it's not actually untrammelled, as the 1,300 or so (and counting) songs or albums in my YouTube Music library will attest - may lead to active hatred of music. Specifically the helpful algorithm recycles the same songs over and over, regardless of which "Made For You" playlist/"Mix" it compiles - they are always there, and the power they used to nourish is flattened out, neutered.

Perhaps I need to inhabit that ten-albums-a-year lifestyle which the vast majority of humans observe, where you concentrate on the music they contain and nothing else. But that gilded magic; it was of and for its time, and no stream, however noble or well-meaning, is going to reproduce it. And maybe I'm past the age where I could instinctively harbour that capacity for feeling. Actually, maybe delete that "maybe."