CHAPTER 60

 

#41: FOCUS

"Sylvia"

from the album Focus 3

Released: November 1972

 

 

It's a pretty sad sight, isn't it, a pile of old pop records. I don't just mean in the sense of stumbling across them in charity shops, wondering who brought them in and to whom they once belonged. The names of the shops - British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research, Age UK - suggest that unhappy things may have befallen their former owners. What do you leave behind you when you go, however, and if you didn't manage to draft a will, then where will the things you left behind end up?

It is of course also the possible case that donors of these records may simply have grown out of them, or away from them. But the cumulative poignancy is unavoidable and overwhelming. Look at all those brightly, tackily-illuminated NOW albums, offering the most popular songs of their moment, or those k-Tel albums from up to half a century ago which once looked so exciting and, well, now in Woolworths. It's as if the child in us has vacated themselves.

What is the purpose of holding onto all of that former music? With the uncalled-for recycling of a spent, defunct format for sound reproduction, the layout of most record shops now resembles a morgue; dead culture, born-dead clones, piled in unlovable piles of necrophiliac grey. Thank Christ I don't collect records. When people ask me about my record collection, I simply and politely respond that I haven't got one. I'm not a "collector." Record collections are like butterfly collections, carefully assembled and displayed, and entirely lifeless.

What we actually have is a record library - a living archive of ever-changing preferences and whims, all of which gets used, based on a benignly immovable foundation of music which demonstrates how we live, what our lives have involved and encompassed. A century down the line - if humanity manages to get that far - this record library, if preserved, will prove to the world that once we existed, that this was what marked us out as human beings. Look and marvel at what we were able to imagine, or even achieve.

From my perspective that would include rock instrumentals from when I was a young boy in the midst of primary school which remind me of many things other than its content, things and people which can never be recaptured or reproduced. Oddities which managed to penetrate this intermittently liminal journal of popular songs because somebody's gates had been uncannilly left open. The chilling, fallacious reassurance that those things you recognised and adored when the song's tense was present could never disappear. Reach my age and the final rallentando of apologetic organ and drums will have you counting down the moments which might still be allowed to you. And that, perhaps, is why people don't let go of their music unless they absolutely have to - this, impassive posthumous observer, was me.

(Envoi: I do like how the tune was originally written in the late sixties, with lyrics, under the title "I Thought I Could Do Everything On My Own, I Was Always Stripping The Town Alone." Sylvia Alberts, the singer for whom the song had been intended, understandably didn't like it. The point, though, is, in the end, you can't. I don't know who could.)