CHAPTER 89

 

 

#12: EMMA BUNTON

“Maybe”

from the album Free Me

Released: February 2004

 

 

You don’t want the old days back. You’d be horrified by “the old days” now. What you want back is the illusion of security, not having to fend for yourself or want for anything; not even having to think about what you’re going to do when school ends and you are expected to grow up, as some of your fellow exasperated classmates begin to tell you from fourth year onward. You don’t want the shouts back, the pain, the punches. You don’t want a potato knife hovering over your right hand because your father has threatened to cut your fingers off if you don’t stop sucking them. Active, loose plug pins being pressed into your mother’s arm.

 

No, you want the spectacle of light entertainment, easy laughs, colourful signposts, expensively smiling entertainers on the frequently wonky television screen, with your father continually having to go out of the sitting room window and up onto the roof to wrestle with the aerial. You want familiarity and its blood sister comfort. You want not necessarily having to think.

 

You don’t want the way it actually was back – not ever. Merrie days when your chums at school beat you up and kicked you while you were lying on the ground, or they kicked you out of the society which YOU created, it was YOUR idea, or all of a sudden you’ve left school, your father has died and they’ve all just become fucking invisible. Not like that.

 

When you look at your life objectively, you realise there isn’t a time in it when you didn’t make a curdling mess of things, when you got things wrong, when you acted like an idiot because you didn’t know or weren’t told otherwise, and what life constitutes is a steady procession of making mistakes, learning from them and growing, except you never stop making mistakes or doing or saying stupid things. To do otherwise, as Bill Fay almost sung, would be to go against your own, “true” nature.

 

I keep on making mistakes, many of which have already occurred in this book. I can see that it’s going to be a failure, that as a supposed writer I am clinically incapable of entertainingly articulating what I feel in my head – and heart – that it’s already a fired bin of compromise. If you’re repelled by this admirably relentless drip feed of self-pity, other books to make you feel better about yourself, i.e. agree with you, exist.

 

I think of the Kinks song “Do You Remember Walter?” and am aware that the world I knew even twenty years ago has long since ceased to exist, and that attempting to go back to my chimerical notions of “it” would prove clumsy, hurtful and ultimately destructive. Hence you can love what the easy listening music of 1968 – a time when this music wasn’t necessarily described as such – had to offer and how it presented itself. But recreating it requires compromise and a fatal wink. I play this Emma Bunton song so often because, frankly, it will do to remind me of when I was four years old and everything wasn’t in black and white and I wasn’t thrashed to within a millimetre of my life with my father’s belt because I’d buggered up that week’s football pools coupon and King and Kennedy didn’t get shot and Jim Clark escaped injury. Or rather it turns up so high because the Spotify algorithm keeps throwing it back at me like an unwanted frisbee. I don’t wish to know dreary critical crap about influences which nobody would have cited in the sixties. I played it to buggery in 2004 because I was still in mourning and it made me feel happy. Life in mono, though? You need two speakers to get hy and it took me a lifetime to learn that.