Juvenile intentions

I walk past the River Tillingbourne most days. I have seen it running high with spring rain, angrily chasing itself towards its destiny in the North Sea. I have seen it cooling the legs of dogs, horses and children in the warm days of summer. I have seen it carrying the autumn leaves downriver, some speedily, others lazily, like an unwatched and never-ending game of Poohsticks. I’ve even seen it iced up in winter, though never fully frozen over.

And it’s the same river, though philosophers have famously argued otherwise. The fact that it changes doesn’t stop it being the Tillingbourne. In fact, I think it’s because it changes it’s the Tillingbourne. The river just adapts to seasons and circumstance, and keeps being itself.

Maybe people are rivers. And music is the soundtrack that marks their changing seasons.

The first musical memory I have was when I was maybe three or four years old. After playgroup I would go back to stay with my Uncle Nigel and my Aunty Eileen. I think now they were newly married, helping my parents out and practising being parents with me. Bodmin Drive in Bramhall. The soundtrack to those moments was Marvin Hamlisch’s The Entertainer. It’s only now I learn it was from the soundtrack to The Sting. I think it was the way they kept me happy and stopped me asking where my Mum was. I probably had a dance.

It was the summer of 1986 when Billy Bragg’s The Saturday Boy became the soundtrack of that version of me. Sixteen, lonely and wandering the streets of a strange new city my parents had relocated me to. Durham was a beautiful backdrop, but that summer it wasn’t my city. And no-one understood me.  I’d walk down New Elvet, around Palace Green, along the banks of the River Wear, barely raising my head as Billy spoke to me on my Walkman. I was so happy being achingly sad. It suited that me. 

The Stone Roses The Stone Roses came out on 2 May 1989. I remember now that it came out at the perfect moment. We had finished our first-year exams at university in Bristol, but term hadn’t ended. Those few weeks were the best years of my life. And the Roses were the soundtrack. Not just my soundtrack, but everyone’s. All the windows were open around the Quad in Churchill Hall, Ian Brown’s voice appearing from every one of them. Life was a film. 

Sally became Sally because of The Stone Roses. I think that was me being me. She was born in the summer of 1996 and Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger was already ubiquitous.  So, everyone asked if she was Sally because of that song. But she wasn’t. That would have been the wrong story. Too neat, too predictable. She was Sally Cinnamon, maybe as a memory of the importance of The Stone Roses. I still wish I’d won the debate about her becoming Sally Elizabeth Cinnamon Hayward. But whatever the certificate says doesn’t matter, I know. And she does.

Now I can see that my musical memories hadn’t moved forward. Sure, I was listening to new music, I kept doing that. But the music that resonated with me was the music of the 1980s. We all think that the music of our coming-of-age years was the best music. Mine certainly was. I listened to the new, but if I wanted to really listen to music then it was The Specials, or Japan, or Talk Talk, or Billy Bragg, or The Smiths, or The Stone Roses. Different versions of my 1980s. Adolescent me, with juvenile intentions.

Then I found Italian indie music in my fifties. Who said you can’t step in the same river twice? I could listen to music that was somehow familiar, but with a different hinterland. I didn’t necessarily understand the words, but then I’m not sure I ever understood everything Morrissey was telling me forty years earlier. I understood how it made me feel. One day, I was driving to my Italian lesson in Guildford, with Fuori dall’Hype by Pinguini Tattici Nucleari playing at teenage volume in my car. “Perché noi siamo, FUORI DALL’HYPE… FUORI DALL’HYPE… FUORI DALL’HYPE.” I was busy singing along, trying to get my accent right and at the same time not really caring. So I forgot there was a speed camera there. The result: a speeding ticket and a £60 fine. Worth every penny for the memory.

Which of these people are me? What’s the thread running between the young boy dancing wildly to The Entertainer and the man in his fifties singing along at full volume to Pinguini? I don’t have an answer. Or maybe I don’t want to think too hard about it and risk losing something that music makes me feel. Music can take me back to where I was and who I was at that time, and it can take me to who I am and where I want to be now. The same person, adapting to seasons and circumstance. With a banging soundtrack.