#20: THE O.T. QUARTET
“Hold That Sucker Down”
Single released: September 1994
Oh, memories just end up misleading. This is one of the epically saddest pop records I know and yet people raved to it, so much so that an enthusiastic junior consultant I knew at the time – a Scot, no less - had the cassette single programmed to loop. The song’s meticulously wrecked grandeur is worthy of Elgar in its suppressed tragedy, specifically the Fringes Of The Fleet song cycle which he co-wrote with Kipling (“The ships have a thousand eyes/To mark where we come . . ./But the mirth of a seaport dies/When our blow gets home”).
The record was in great part the work of Rob Dougan, who would go on to explore this narrowing funnel of despair further. It was not that big a hit in the pop charts. Yet it unavoidably laments for something lost, and one of those things lost in this context is my memory, because I would like to think of a disappeared utopia bookmarking a life previously lived but actually Laura didn’t like this sort of stuff at all (“too charty”). I sometimes wonder whether she liked me at all. Hence I should be thinking of the life I lived in London during the week, where I elected to be affected and moved by the culture which moved and affected me, as opposed to the life we lived in Oxford at the weekend, which was all about unsatisfactory, tweedy compromise. And I would venture up Vauxhall Bridge Road with this song on my Walkman and I would dance to it in my head because I never learned to dance properly in public. I told you before that it was beaten out of me, that urge towards confidence. So either one overcompensates and ends up like saddened David Brent, or one just hoards every feeling and emotion to oneself, with the consequence that no one else ever knows that such feelings and emotions existed.
Therefore, if “Hold That Sucker Down” induces mourning, it does so on behalf of a life that was improperly lived, or that I was too cowardly and reserved to live. I didn’t go out dancing; it was all compressed, that stuff. So many things I could and should have done but didn’t or wouldn’t…or, indeed, couldn’t. I was never a raver; I was always the quiet guy in the corner incapable of talking himself out of it. Others I encountered during my life did not have those problems; they emerged, networked, prospered, talked themselves into life, whereas I if anything made it a personal mission to think myself away, or apart, from life.
I was formally diagnosed with grade one autistic spectrum disorder the following year and suddenly everything became clear. Of course it wasn’t my fault, this condition with which I had been born and which I could never shake off or lose. Those were the cards dealt, and I had to make the best of the combination. Overall I don’t think I’ve made a bad job at dealing with them, although in many important ways I have done a terrible job. This is why I am a fifty-nine year-old medical typist living in a rented flat and not a company director owning a mansion, or even an acclaimed music writer (as opposed to one of this world’s obscurest music writers). I am partially disabled with major heart problems and, outside of the day job I currently do, am very likely unemployable. This is what happens to a person when they don’t, or in my case can’t, speak up for themselves, when they permit all kinds of shit to happen to them. My nature is altogether far too heavy for most people to bear; it’s the easy, “light” folk who get by better. I can’t help it, though. Asking me to lighten up is akin to asking me to learn to play the tuba or badminton. It’s beyond my capabilities. The lack of lightness will probably see me off soon anyway. Oh, such self-pity, get over yourself grandad, get a life. The problem is that the life was usually taken away from me. I did in the end get one, however, and cherish and nurture it. As usual, I was right all the time. “Hold That Sucker Down,” though; that’s one of the most furious of angels.
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