Hope you're all doing okay and keeping safe under the circumstances. Feeling a little tender here following one or two glasses of wine too many during last night's Lockdown Radio session, but it was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone that tuned in, and @JimMcCauley for the visual accompaniment!
"Once upon a time I wasn’t married. That time seems impossible now. Matt and I started dating at the beginning of 2002, so in not too many months it’ll have been 20 years since I’ve been part of the biggest adventure I’ve ever signed up for.
Very early into our dating life we did the music conversation. I bought a bottle of gin and we sat up till very very late playing each other songs we loved and hearing things for the the first time that we would grow to love. Given our age difference (Matt was only 23 at the time) it’s inevitable that we didn’t share a huge amount of similar music. Of course I liked to think (at the grand old age of 33) that I knew more, was cooler and had better taste than anyone. Obviously I was wrong.
That night, we found there were only a few albums we had in common. We both loved Radiohead (I love Kid A and I Might Be Wrong), Matt loved OK Computer. We both loved singer-songwriters. And we both loved gin.
And there was this album. I will always remember the delight of finding someone who loved this album more than this band’s more popular work. I will always remember lying with Matt in his single bed listening to this and marvelling that I’d found someone who understood the oily streak of melancholia that weaves through even the happiest and most beautiful times.
Listeningclub, I wish for you what I found in that man, in that album.
--
There are the albums you had before you met each other, that the other will never get, enjoy, or understand - not to the degree you do alone. There are the albums you get after you got together - sometimes you’ll both enjoy them, sometimes only one of you will, but regardless, after the Big Bang point of meeting each other your tastes will begin to intertwine, no matter what you do to try and stop it. You can no sooner put a stop to the chain reactions of musical taste that emerge from that initial point than you could getting together in the first place.
(Did I think I’d ever appreciate folk music? I did not. There’s good reason so many folk musicians put their fingers in their ears while singing.)
Then, for some, there are the albums you buy after you break up. Maybe you’ll be consciously steering yourself away from the sort of music you both used to enjoy, out of spite, or sadness, or self-preservation.
Finally, there’s the smaller category of albums purchased somewhere along the relationship timeline - the albums you both bought copies of before even knowing each other at all. The points at which your individual lines of taste already intercrossed without knowing.
This is one of those.
To me it speaks of aloneness, of trying to understand the concerns and problems of others, to empathise, to try to help. And perhaps most strongly of hope, even through the most trying of times. I’m sure we can all relate at the moment. It’s hard to see sometimes, obscured, as the sun through dark clouds; perhaps just a reflection of it, viewed at a distance through a camera obscura, but it’s there, all the same. It’s always been there even when you couldn’t see it, couldn’t sense it. The constant. Hope."
Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the stream is below...
Note the clocks have changed here! so see you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)
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