I hope that in the future I can come back to this and continue the music-related posting, but for now, it's not something I can do.

FURTHER NEWS AS IT HAPPENS!

Comments

This is not strictly true, I'll admit. But as I understand it, here's how it works; you put up with your parent's tastes until you either buckle under and start to like it, or you develop musical tastes of your own. More often than not, the later option is done in such a way as to rebel against the sort of stuff you've had to put up with for your-life-so-far.

And, after all, why not?

Music is - at least, in my opinion, and you may disagree - all about rebellion in the first place. It's been with us since we first learnt to bang rocks and ullulate our voices together, and it'll be with humankind as long as we're around, because, goddamn it, we love the sound of our own voices as much as we love the sound of other people singing. When the first manned probe goes to Mars, the astronauts will spend their downtime listening to whatever they like.

When we leave this solar system, be damn sure we'll do it to our own beat.

Music is honest in a way that a lot of other media forms aren't, and that's what makes it a liar. Video can be edited; books can be edited then reprinted; hell, right now, there isn't a form of media that can't be 1984-ed until it says exactly what someone wants it to.

But music will, quite possibly, never escape it's live roots. Because of this, music is honest, because if a band plays a song differently live to how it is when it's recorded, people notice. Oh, yes, there are little variations that make the song more interesting, but at the end of the day 99 times out of 100 it's still the same song, which is the reason why people rush out and purchase it on 8-track/vinyl/cassette/CD/MP3 download; they know what they're getting, and it won't wriggle under the microscopic scrutiny that only the most dedicated music fan can provide.

In an uncertain age, maybe the only thing to trust is the song.

Or, of course, maybe not. Because musicians are tricksy bastards at the best of times.

So, this being the here and now, you get to put up with some more of my musings on the music that, for better or worse, has shaped my life so far.

Let's go way back. Deep into the mists of time, into the forgotten age - or, at least, the age that should be forgotten - the 1980s. I'm not talking about the cultural strip-mining that's been going on since around 1999/2000 that made an effort to make the 80s look cool - or, at least, look as if they were cool at the time, because every single decade has to suffer that sort of thing. I'm just surprised that there isn't a 101 50's hits out there at the moment, or some sort of post-war music revival, the way things are treated at the moment.

But the 80s - and whisper this, lest it be heresy - weren't actually that cool.

Fine, mark me down as a musical min. Do as you like. But to view the 1980s as solely a musical period of interest is an appalling way of doing things.

As I said above, unless you're very lucky, you don't get to choose the sorts of music you get to listen to as a child. Or, at least, you didn't way back when; nowadays, it might be different for you young whippersnappers.

Let's put this in context; Way back then, when only the adults owned stereo systems worth a damn and had jurisdiction on what got played on themdn't get to choose. Oh, sure, there were cassette tape walkmans, and as you got older you might be lucky enough to get your own radio - or possibly even cassette recorder - but right there, in those crucial early moments when you start to realise just how cool music is? Not a hope.

Which is why my first musical memory, curiously, is of the Pet Shop Boys.

Oh, lordy, yes.

I don't really recall what my parents listened to - one parental unit, as has been previously mentioned, had tastes that varied with the direction of the wind, and the other never particularly talked about it - so this memory is of one of the first albums I ever - technically - owned.

This was the 1980s. Why, oh why, could it not have been Talking Heads - which I discovered about ten years later - or, shit, anything other than electro-synth-pop guilt with undertones of heavily sublimated homosexuality?

Please don't get me wrong. I like the Pet Shop Boys. There, I've said it, and I'm only marginally embarassed. But unless you were part of Certain Circles, let's be honest, they weren't cool.

It's not just this, though. Music should be a thing of joy, and your first exposure to it should bring that about in such a way that you'll always remember it.

Instead, my musical childhood was soundtracked to It's a Sin.

Uh-huh.

I reckon I still feel guilty even now, about nothing in particular. It's that powerful a piece of music, because it's one man - Neil Tennant - baring his innermost feelings, and the strength behind that is a little humbling.

And, see, here's the thing - it stayed with me for a long time afterwards, whether I wanted it to or not, simply because it was the first music I could claim personal ownership of at that time to define myself against the world.

It stayed with me, in fact, up until 1995 - 1997, or, as people seem to like to think of it, Britpop. But that's another story for another time when I'm ready to talk about Country House and other such things.

Maybe.

Comments

You almost got a monologue on the Pet Shop Boys. You probably still will, if the idea isn't gone by the next time I want to write.

No, today we're going to talk about a single song, rather than an artist's body of work. This is kind of unusual, because normally there's not enough water to be drawn from a single song's well to irrigate an article. There are notable exceptions - say, for instance Hallelujah - but today, let's work with something only slightly less well-known.

Last night, I was at - and this is a bit of an understatement - a social event, wherein - eventually - I was able to drink. This is rare.

After the music had finished - the DJs having packed up and gone - only the hard-core drinkers with local accommodation were still hanging around, clustered around two tables.

And, for some reason, I found myself singing a duet with a young, crushingly pretty girl. Granted, the prettiness wasn't exactly an issue, as although she was sat next to me she was:

(I) Sat on her - charming, erudite and interesting - boyfriend's lap

and (II) - well, let's put it this way, she's premier league and I, by comparison, am Isthmian League

- but for a few minutes, a lot of fun was had. What were we singing?

Sway.

Sway is a complicated song for me, because the first time I heard it, it wasn't the original; it was a strange, but compelling, dance cover by 'Shaft'. I'm not proud. But I liked it then with absolutely no knowledge of the original.

Except that, depending on how you look at it, it's not the original - like some of the best music out there, it's not quite a cover and not quite stolen from another artist, but close enough on both counts to argue the toss, as it comes from Quien Sera by Pablo Beltran, not forgetting, of course, his orchestra.

And so all was well, until I heard the original - at least, Dean Martin's original version - in full - for arguably the first time last year. Again, I have to say, I'm not proud of how long this had taken.

Some people are lucky, some people are blessed, and some people are synesthetic, because they're able to ascribe traits to songs to describe them in cross-sense terms. This doesn't happen often for me - not many spring to mind, but those that do, bizarrely, include wrong impressionby Natalie Imbruglia (a song that made me think of capuccino froth, but that's for another time) - but with Sway, for some reason, I was treated to a full-on synaesthetic experience. It's one of the few times I can say that a song has actually transported me somewhere mentally - again, the only random comparison right now being live bed show by Pulp - and the only reason it did this, I think, is because Sway is one of the saddest songs I can think of.

It is - to me - a song about a dying relationship, one that the singer wants to keep going for as long as he can but knows - knows - that it's failing, and eking out a few last drops of pleasure is all he can expect to do.

Then again, dancing has always carried with it conflicting elements of enforced closeness, social conventions and, yes, "a vertical expression of horizontal desire". So, of course, a song about dancing is going to carry that with it.

The singer is in love - love that is, it feels, no longer reciprocated. The music paints the necessary tropical picture; an open-air dancefloor beside a beach, a bar in the background, the sea spreading out ahead. And it's classy, rather than seedy, necessarily.

So this is a last hurrah for a relationship on the rocks; a return to a place of security and happier times, and a chance to dance a last time before going their separate ways, to the man's despair. It's necessarily languid, because it's just the wrong side of balmy, and the 'other dancers' indicate there are other people there, too.

And the singer doesn't want it to end. Ever. Which is an unhealthy way to deal with the end of a relationship, but, right now, it seems like "only you have the magic technique", and implores the other to "make me thrill as only you know how". Right now, the other person is the singer's workd, and that world is leaving them behind.

Like I say, it's one of the few times a song has given me a vivid mental image that's stayed with me ever since. Whether you think I'm wrong or I'm right, well, who can say?

But for a few minutes last night, surrounded by very drunk, interesting, people I knew (and a few I didn't), I ended up singing that song with the aforementioned lovely girl.

And in the final analysis, aren't the songs we can still remember when we're drunk the ones that have made the most impact on our lives?

Comments

At the time, I havered, wavered and wandered, but in the end I didn't go for either. I was, and still am, to an extent, a Pulp fan. Of course, it's not something you give up and walk away from, but bands change and shift in ways that others don't. For some, it's a natural progression; for some, it's a rude interruption, but if you're in a band, your time in the sun is always limited, and always predicated on things you can't control.

And this is, in the end, what bothers me about music. I can remember the late 1990s' with perfect recall, but ask me to name a significant musical event since, oh, say, 2000, or a band that stand out, and, well, right now, I don't have anything much I could flap in front of your face and say "see! Music still mattered, and was significant, and wore the coolest clothes!"

Of course, given that right now I feel damn old and creaky, this is probably not a surprise to anyone reading this born after, oh, say, 1991. Not that I suspect there are any readers of this age. But suspicion shouldn't exclude the possibility, and so, I offer this, a warning, to young music fans everywhere:

In ten years, it's likely the music that matters to you won't then.

And if it does, more power to you.

The point of all of this is that I finally started taking notice of music properly again last year. I have no idea if anything in particular caused me to actually start caring again, rather than just analysing new music to see what it sounds like from eras gone by - and this is the last refuge of the dying music fan, wherein everything sounds like everything goddamn else - but I think, if I had to make a guess, I'd say it was this.

That link is just for the music. There's a reason for this. Because, in the main, it's the music that matters, not the band, not the videos, not the PR, or the press, or the narrative behind them; all of that will burn under public scrutiny before long, leaving behind only irrelevant ashes, whereas the music doesn't burn. Pulp faded away over time; they had a difficult struggle to prominence achieved by a single catchy tune that took the zeitgeist down the pub for a drink and rolled out at closing time, pissed. With fame came problems; This is Hardcore was, for no apparent reason, too sleazy even for devoted fans, coming as it did without a single purpose or coherence behind it's tracklisting; how exactly do you make the leap from "Help the Aged" to "This is Hardcore" as singles? After that, there was one more album, and then it was into re-release hell, as much as it is a level of hell, and of them all Jarvis Cocker, having cocooned himself in a strange kind of fame, is the only one still in the public eye in any form.

Six years, arguably, in the blaring heat of the limelight, before things started - and your mileage may vary on this - going wrong.

Which brings us neatly back to Reverend and the Makers, who are doing, functionally, what Pulp did 13 years ago; class commentary with catchy rhythm, clever lyrics against addictive sounds. But, if I'm honest with you, something about Reverend and the Makers scares me, and I'm not exactly sure what.

From my understanding of Pulp, it was all about inclusivity, whether across class boundaries (Common People), so-called boundaries of intelligence (Mis-Shapes) or even just about finding something you may not have lost but will always be searching for (Disco 2000). There was a point behind their work, and the point, to me, was that people will always self-define their world into groups, 'similar' and 'different', 'self' versus 'non-self', and even if these groups exist - even if we make them exist - Pulp seemed to me to be about highlighting some of the ridiculousness of this idea. It was a sweet idea, really; Common People was always a song about the inherent stupidity of the British class system, and the pointlessness of it to boot.

Reverend and the Makers, however, seem to have inverted this, or turned it on it's head, so that the division is only ever going to be about self versus the rest of the world. I hear bitterness in their songs, but not the sort of bitterness that will ever actually achieve anything other than galvanising people into realising how bad their lives might just be and how hopeless they are to change them.

All set to a catchy melody.

I'm not saying there's nothing to it, but watch the full video to Heavyweight Champion of the World, and try to see it as anything other than the self being battered down by the outside world until it becomes something so small, and so insignificant, that it almost ceases to matter.

But at the end of the song, it becomes a - and I know I'm overusing the word - catchy chorus, destined if fame takes the song properly in hand, to become a post-pub shouted songline without - crucially - any irony.

For instance, let's compare. Firstly, watch this, which is, frankly, scary in and of itself rather than setting out to shock. When I first heard this song, it crawled up my spine and stayed in my head for two solid weeks, unable to budge. Now, when I hear it, I wonder what the actual point of the song is; yes, teenage, young or unwanted pregnancy takes someone's life and screws it up be changing everything, but there's another layer there which I want to think of as self-referential mockery of their previous single, but, somehow, it's not. In the end, it's one line that picks apart the whole ball of socio-cultural commentary yarn;

Wish you weren't a story of the also rans

That makes things so difficult, because it strips away the individuality of the song's subject, relegating her to being just another 'also-ran' bringing up a child and missing out on what all of her friends are doing.

With, yes, a catchy melody. Which is my point; compare He Said He Loved Me to, of all things, this song, which also stayed stuck in my head for much longer than it should have. It's all in the melody; That's not my name has no, real, point, but it's catchy, and, of all things, fun, whereas He Said He Loved Me is just the bleakness of an apparently wasted life set to the sound of gum-chewing and a bassline that finds you, grabs you, and doesn't let go.

Now, I'm conducting a lot of my music listening via Youtube, which has it's own issues, not least the user comments. I don't feel comfortable commenting on comments, especially from somewhere like Youtube, because every single person on this green earth of ours is entitled to their opinion. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder what makes people think their opinions are worth posting. In regard to He Said He Loved Me, user Auroh wrote:

This is Porn of the Ears.

To begin with, fair enough. They like the song, it gets them curiously aroused, fine. The capitalisation is theirs, which initially made me wonder if they were trying to claim that the song is only a cover of a song by a group called Porn of the Ears, but I've discarded this theory because it's only a one-use joke. Now, this is not the comment that I'm interested in; I am in fact interested in commenting on the reply to the comment, made by user burstmatress, who said;

eh yea if ur into child porn or gay pron...totally horrible!!!! I hope this band get assinated especailly the lead singer. they are shit...

Uh-huh.

Let's pick it apart.

(I)I disagree with your opinion
(II) I think because you like this song so much you're gay, or a paedophile
(III) I would like the band to be killed
(IV) Especially the lead singer.

I wish I understood the internet. In my day, far back in the mists of time, comment boards weren't as prevalent - unless you were a usenet user, something I missed out on - and the internet as a whole was just kicking into gear.
Now, ten years on, you can insult people you'll never meet, and insist that their favourite band be killed, just because you feel like it. The question is, if user burstmatress hates the song that much, why would they be checking it out on Youtube? The answer is, of course trolling. Soon, I believe, to become an olympic sport.

My point, which I've wandered away from, is that the music I thought I used to like was bitter, but hopeful. Now, music just seems to be bitter and accepting of that bitterness, as if nothing will change, and I'm wondering; what happened to change things in this way? Is the world that much worse a place now than then that we're seeing reflections from a glass, darkly by the bands out and about at the moment?

One last thing to dispel the bitterness; I have a new song that I can't get out of my head. It's this song, and whatever my opinions of the band, their style, and the way they deploy their influences, it's annoyingly addictive.

See what you think.

Comments

Almost.

You see, this is a little like therapy for me. No, not Therapy?, just, well, therapy.

Not everyone gets to pick the significant music in their life. This isn't an abdication of responsibility, because I made every attempt to go out and find the band or artist that sung songs that might help me define myself, odd as that may sound. But it didn't really work.

However, I didn't get there direct. In the same way that a train runs into a siding, I ended up being immersed in Dido's unique brand of MOR grief-songs by the same route that many others did, I guess.

When I was younger - yes, so much younger than today - I was surrounded by middle-class white kids much like myself desperate to 'get' rap. In some ways it was admirable, and in some ways it was a little sad, but it was their 'thing', so, more power to them. The whole reasoning behind this, I suspect, was because small-town life, while safe and happy and blah, blah, blah, was also fairly boring. Rap, in the mid-90s, represented to the average suburban kid an entirely different world, one that they could access without fear of any of their parents or peers really knowing much about it. It would have been unique, it would have been special, it would have been, above all, interesting - for them, at least.

I like rap now, but at the time I had no idea. None whatsoever. The closest I came to interacting with rap at the time was via Coolio or Puff Daddy - as he was then - and their mainstream crossovers.

And then this dude came along and kicked all of that into touch. A white rapper? Who wasn't annoying like Vanilla Ice? Shit, wait a minute, you mean with catchy melodies, Dr Dre producing and a good PR machine, rap music might actually become accessible?

Well, maybe, maybe not. But he had my attention, at the time, for a long time.

Then this happened.

See, I got into Dido the same way I got into Moby for a few years; by letting my guard down. By not caring. By not worrying about the music I listened to, as long as it was new and interesting.

In an infinite number of other worlds, No Angel died on the vine after it's first release through lack of attention. It was first released in 1999, to no particularly great acclaim; if I remember rightly, Thank you got some exposure by being on the credits of Sliding Doors in 1998, of all places and times.

But then suddenly a white rapper in his ascendancy samples your record, and, well, shit, you'd better re-release it.

Licence. To. Print. Money.

I mean, you have to admire the skill of it, really; take an album that's got potential but not an audience. Take that album and deploy two of the songs - one with the aforementioned rapper, the other on a Buffy contender TV series that had, at it's height, an average of 3-4 million viewers in the United States, plus a cult audience in Britain. Get the songs out there and known.

Re-release album. Rake in cash. And now, here we are, over fifteen million copies sold worldwide later.

Not bad for a girl who has, to be fair, six names. `

And so, thanks to Eminem, I found myself temporarily shunted down a musical siding into Female Singer-Songwriter land, a strange place for a young man to find himself.

Not that it was entirely Eminem's fault, of course. You can also blame Faithless, whose influence on my later teenage years you can blame entirely on a crush on a brainy girl I had at school.

As a sidebar, I used to be a big - massive, huge - Terry Pratchett fan in my younger days. Now, if I remember correctly, Mr Pratchett had a theory about how inspiration works, involving a theoretical particle that sleets through the universe until it encounters a mind. Often, the particle comes at the wrong time, or hits the wrong mind, or just doesn't work. But when it hits the right mind in the right place at the right time, boom, bang-a-bang, inspiration takes hold.

I like to think that if my life had been a little different, I might not have been such easy prey for mass-marketed MOR grief pop-rock. But I was, at the time.

Which is why I now can't listen to No Angel without some very specific cultural signifiers coming to the fore. Not that I do listen to the damn album; I can't remember the last time I did, which is probably a good thing. But at the time - oh, such an odd time - it was the soundtrack to my life in a way that I don't think another album has been, apart from maybe Different Class when I was a teenager.

Ugh.

Remembering that time is a little like tasting ashes. I don't mean this in any sort of hyperbolic way; but as many will know, there is a time in a young person's life where the clay of their childhood is fired in the kiln of their teenage years, and they're supposed to be making their way out into the real world as fully-fired, ceramic adults.

This didn't really happen for me. My clay was problematic, and my kiln was set too low. So by the years 2001 - 2002, wherein I should have been readying myself to emerge from the searing heat of my teenage years into the relative coolness of The Adult World, I wasn't ready.

Perhaps nobody ever truly is, all evidence to the contrary.

And so, when I was living in a bedsit flat with three other people - two of whom were friends at the time, but those friendships were evolving day by day because, right at that time, I really wasn't that likeable - and the third was, at the time, the person who I ended up in a doomed relationship with.

Let's be honest, who can sing about doomed relationships better than Dido? So, without even realising it, the soundtrack to my life was also the soundtrack to an ill-fated relationship stumbling along on the inability of the two participants to see just how bad it was for either of them, because the alternative - being alone - seemed just, so, much, worse.

Which is why I became a Dido fan, and which is why it's been so difficult to shuck that MOR scaffolding from my musical life. Up until now, I believe.

I don't think I'll ever be able to listen to the album without being transported back to a small bedsit in south-east London, filled with people who are starting to hate me (although they got over this, for the most part, later) and someone starting to love me for oh, so, many wrong reasons. The album is intimately connected in my brain with trips on the DLR to Bank, with walking for twenty minutes along an unlit canal path to get to somewhere that I didn't, at the time, want to go -

- that is, until I had to take time away from it, at which point I really did want to go, but that's because, well, I'm stubborn -

- and it's connected with too much takeaway pizza, too little social exposure, and, as I mentioned in the previous article, a growing tendency to see journalism as an excuse to freeboot rather than a platform from which to launch myself. Other, little things spring to mind; a mirror breaking, an addiction to Diablo II among other games, David Gray's White Ladder, and failing almost everything I tried to do. No, scratch that. Failing everything I attempted.

I got over it, in case you're wondering.

So I managed, by accident and design, to intertwine my personal grief with the shared grief of everyone listening to No Angel and getting the point - or at least thinking they were getting the point. I couldn't disentangle myself, no matter how hard I tried, for at least a year.

I maintain now that it's not a particularly bad album - the production is faultless even if the Faithless touches are obvious at places, the lyrical work is intelligent and well-designed, and the voice, oh, well, the voice, that'll stay with you for a long time.

But it's addictive. Being able to selectively access your personal grief and deploy it without thinking is powerful, and occasionally useful, but addictive. And like most, if not all addictions, if you don't take it in hand and sort yourself out, it'll take you over.

So we are here, and this is now, and I think I'm cured.

There are two happy codas to this tale of grief addiction.

The first is the release of Life for Rent. By the time this comes out, I'm in a much better personal place, working, studying, being as social as I can, but A Big Thing is approaching where everything changes; and I'm nervous, because, up to this point, my existence for the last year has been good, and I've got everything more or less balanced.

I'm working in a bar, and I get on with the majority of the people there - I've been there the longest out of almost everyone. Almost everyone, that is, bar one other person; someone I like, and respect, and who I realise now had more of an influence on my life than I knew then, because she - yes, it's another unrequited crush, but hey - was smart, in a sensible way, and knew how to... I don't know. She knew how to make me laugh, and she had a smile that stays with me even now.

Soppy? Oh yes. But I trust you'll forgive me that.

Now, at the place I was working, the staff changing room is up two flights of stairs, along a corridor and through another door, to a pokey little room with a sink, a rack of unused lockers, and a wonky table with two chairs.

One day, when I was ready for my shift, I changed, left the staff room, and headed downstairs. On that day, this person was working in the kitchen, which you had to walk through to get to the bar. So far, so usual.

But on that day, she was singing. I remember it, because it was unusual; she was a little shy, and I'd never heard her sing before. I don't remember the particulars of her voice, but I suspect she was a good singer. I listened, for a second, because I didn't recognise the song on the radio that she was listening to.

It was White Flag, which was just starting to get radio play.

As soon as I went into the kitchen, she stopped, and looked embarassed, and I didn't know what to say, so I suspect I said nothing, smiled, and went out to the bar. And, a month or so after that, The Big Changes happened, and here I am now, wondering what she went on to do with her life, and, hell, wondering what I went on to do with my life.

But that's a happy memory - of someone I knew well, uninhibitedly singing - and even if the song is one of unending unrequited love, I can live with it, as long as I remember emerging from that kitchen with a smile on my face into the full August / September sunlight.

The other coda is shorter, you may be glad to hear.

Towards the end of last year, there was a new Dido album. I approached it with some trepidation, but I was, in a caveman-sensing-fire sort of a way, intrigued.

I heard Don't believe in love. I liked one or two aspects of it; some lyrical cleverness, a nice bridge.

Then, having heard it a few times, I realised, I think, that I was cured.

I think.

Comments

In some ways I think I may have always known, but never have been able to admit it; I'm hoping post-hypnotic triggers may have been involved, but I suspect the truth is just that much more mundane.

It's taken me ten years to make this admission, but it appears - to some slight shock and surprise on my part - that I Like The Stereophonics.

Granted, I want to make this more specific; I like the Stereophonics in the same way that a Sleeper Agent likes the country they're planted in; I like them because, in some ways, I have no choice.

Let's rewind a little.

And begin with the fact that I would very much like to believe in Phonomancy. I really would. I love the idea of people being able to access magic and make it work via music; it's, well, nifty.

Even if Phonogram is fiction, by it's very existence it names something people have long suspected to be the truth; music is - or can be - magic, or magical, depending on how you choose to look at it.

In terms of Phonomancy, two things seem to matter; knowledge and roots. Knowledge allows a user to pick apart a song for the power it has and can provide, and the ability to use that power to their own ends; roots are the particular strand of music that the user is embedded in. For instance, in Rue Britannia, David Kohl, the protagonist, has his roots in the goddess Britannia, and draws his power - at least to begin with - from works related to her, for isntance Britpop and late-90's music.

The 'knowledge' part I understand. But the 'roots' part always, on a personal level, bothered me, because, musically, I'm rootless, through a combination of environment and genetics.

Both of my parental units are big on music, but one is more so than the other, and tends to seek out the New, Novel and Ingenious across genre rather than stick with one particular furrow to plough. So the household I grew up in had a wide variety of music cross-genre rather than one particular path I could walk, which made, as you might understand, rejecting my parent's tastes - as any teenager is expected to do - more difficult than it should have been.

By the time I developed my own awareness of music, Britpop was in force - or, more accurately, enforced - and I was only able to dip my toes in. I became enamoured of Pulp - and, to a lesser extent, Suede - and I sat on the sidelines of the Blur vs. Oasis battle, wondering what all the fuss was about, really. Other than a lasting liking for Pulp, my teenage years haven't yielded much of anything in the way of lasting musical taste. (Well, maybe, maybe not, but I'll come back to that later.)

But, when I went to University, all that - by necessity - changed. Gone was rooting through the cheap single racks at the tiny local newsagent to see if anything interesting was passing me by. In fact, with the budget I was on, gone was buying CDs all that much, really, but then I managed to get on to the student newspaper and blew my musical world right open, so that wasn't always a concern either. That's another story, though.

As I say, I feel curiously like a sleeper agent right now. This is because I was in a Popular Supermarket last night, wherein I saw Decade in the Sun, and something clicked, plangently, in my head.

This is because there's an odd dovetailing between the Sterephonics musica career and my self-musical-awakening and evolution. More power to me, I guess, and I'm not claiming them as anything other than The Band Of The Time. So this is how the songs worked for me.

Local Boy in the Photograph

In terms of resonance, this song has a complicated pattern. To me, not only is this the sound of Xfm's first year and a parental unit taking an interest in the band because of the song - no, it's also the sound, technically, of my final school year and, over a year later, the song that reminds me of getting a train home from London with a girl I achingly fancied but was smart enough to know I never had a chance with; the train was so packed we ended up sitting in the 'corridor' section. Aptly, it was Radio 1's 'song for travelling home' that summer, I seem to remember.

I didn't notice this until yesterday, however, but this song is more impressive than I thought, because it is, in effect, a 3:22 long howl of grief disguised as a pop song, and, to me at least, the disguise held up for a long time. This disguise theme is one I'll come back to.

The Bartender and the Thief

Ties in to my time as a Student Journalist, or - and this is a better way of saying it - Promotional Freebooter, because I received a review copy of Call us what you want but don't call us in the morning and held off reviewing it at the time because of a combination of laziness and dislike; the only thing I truly remember is the 'making of' the video for this song. Lots of napalm, lots of Apocalypse now references, not a great deal of point, at least to me.

A Thousand Trees

Reminds me of a V festival - possibly V99 - which is slightly embarassing, as the V festivals have always been the grown-up, respectable, suited-city-worker of the festival world by comparison to the others. At least this was true until around two or three years ago, wherein the majority of festivals now seem to wear suits, albeit some self-consciously.

From here, I would like to self-consciously skip by Traffic, having already skipped More Life in a Tramp's Vest as I missed that, and also to give little consideration to Just Looking, because - even though I remember it - it has no significance in particular attached to it.

In fact, let's break for a moment. Yes, I'm being selective. I'm not a Stereophonics fan because I particularly want to be; I don't love them, cherish them and honour and obey them in any damn way. But a majority of their songs have been present at a lot of times in my life, whether I particularly liked it or not. And so, here we are.

In fact, maybe I've been over-egging the pudding somewhat, because I think there are only three more songs that need dissection herein. But then again, even if I'm not bowing and kowtowing to the whole back-catalogue, I would struggle to find any band who have had six songs that I consciously remember and which have impacted on my life.

So there. But the next one is a doozy.

Mr Writer

This is where it gets prosaic, because this song is the sound of me flushing a relatively promising journalistic career down the toilet, because of a combination of interpersonal relationships, a self-destructive impulse, and basic stubbornness. At the time, I was working as a student journalist while still on academic sabbatical; this is not strictly accurate in terms of chronology, but it's more that the song - and the album it came from - were on permanent rotation in my personal life. And so, going on sabbatical, getting dumped, and metamorphosing from a journalist to a freebooter (although, if I'm honest, that had begun a while ago and gained unstoppable momentum by then) were all nicely coming together with this song as the background. Not just this song, but also

Have a nice day

Oh, irony. I'm so aware of the irony that I could spit. Lastly, and most complicatedly,

Dakota

And this, being the most recent, is the most complicated, I think.

To my mind, this is one of the ultimate songs about a relationship dying, and alternating between dying shattered on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and dying slowly after finding poison in the champagne. But given that the relationship it reminded me of died at least three years before the single came out, that's not so relevant. It also reminds me of a friend trying to find the way to tell me to stop fucking around, get a decent job and get back into the world at large and failing not because the words weren't there, but because they didn't have the heart - or the strength - to say them, which is a little sad. The video, also, is in my top ten, I think.

I've still not stopped fucking around, I haven't got a decent (or, at least, decent-paying) job, and I've not gone back into the world in any meaningful way. But at least I realise now what he was trying to say then.

I think that's something.

I thought, somehow, that this would be longer than it is, but I guess my linkage to the Stereophonics is not as strong as I thought it was, even if it definitely exists.

This Is A Good Thing.

To get back to the point, I believed, when I started writing this, that my musical roots were tapping the wrong water table; I've always been concerned that my shiftless musical upbringing had led me to seek the comforting, boring stability of MOR. (At least, I wanted to believe this was why I liked the occasional Dido song. But I didn't just say that.) I honestly thought that my roots were in generic rock.

But now I'm not so sure. And I'm happy with this result, because even if I'm not sure where my roots are, I now at least know where they're not, which gives me something to work with.

Six songs, though. Six. It could have so easily been Travis instead - indeed, Writing to reach you spins off a lot of subsidiary memories every time I hear it - or some other big band of the time. But I got stuck with The Welsh Sound Of Grief which metamorphosed over time into something quite, quite different.

Much like we all do.

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So far today, I've helped someone put up posters for a worthwhile charity - for which I was rewarded in tapes, seen family I haven't seen for a long, long time, created a new creature on Spore which is now succeeding in annoying me as much as I enjoy it, which is a little bit of a shame, and I've seen the X-Files movie, and in a lot of ways wish I hadn't.

With the latter point; the problem with the movie is that it was completely aimless. It shouldn't have been - it had plenty to aim for. But it wandered along, at a slow pace, until the inevitable conclusion involving the transplantation of a gay Russian organ harvester's head onto a woman's body.

Yes, you read that correctly. And if you're worried about spoilers, well, oops. Trust me, you're better off with me spoiling it for you and saving you having to see it than going and seeing it yourself. It was a bizarre mix of a film; an attempt to get back the credibility the early seasons of the TV show had, wherein you were never totally sure if it was the paranormal or the criminal that was the cause, and instead, in this film, there was a muddled mish-mash of both, involving two-headed dogs (kind of ick, trust me), and Billy Connolly as an priest defrocked for buggering many, many altar boys, who is now having psychic visions.

And, that's, about, it. For nearly two hours, we get to follow Mulder and Scully as they traipse aimlessly from set to snowy field, back and forth, back and forth, including a questionably-put together sub-plot involving a child with brain damage and the merits of stem-cell therapy against the evil that church men do.

Ugh.

Seriously, ugh.

This morning was fun, though. I'm new to driving. I love driving, but I still drive like a lovestruck teenager; fast and slow in the wrong places, and, occasionally, way too much thrust. I love my car, though, even though it doesn't reciprocate this love in any way.

If you want retro, though, you'll go a long way to beat my late-nineties tape deck, simply because it is such an ass-pain to get tapes for it now we're in The New Millenium. But tapes for it I have found, and thanks to today, I now have tapes from someone who, worryingly, seems to have had much the same taste in singles as a teenager as I did.

So I now get to drive along to Touch and Go and Shawn Mullins.

Yes, you can touch me.

My tape collection is now at a worrying level, especially since if I ever change my car, they'll go back to being useless hunks of plastic unless any of them are so, damn, valuable that I decide to copy them over to MP3, which is, to be fair, incredibly unlikely.

Anyway...

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I'm going to ask you to take the next couple of sentences on trust, because I have no way of proving to you that they're true, which is a shame. But I had a dream, a couple of weeks ago, that inspired this. I dreamt that I woke up on my first day in the halls of residence at the university I went to knowing everything that I know now.

It was terrifying. In my dream, I knew who I could trust, and who I couldn't; I knew what was going to happen, and didn't think that even knowing, I could change anything, in any way. Not that that would stop me trying. It was, subjectively, a short dream, but the feeling of odd terror remained with me for the rest of the day, and then, after about a week, the dream started to fade.

It was only this week, when I heard a debate on the Jeremy Vine show about students having a negative impact on neighbourhoods that I suddenly realised how much of me is still, in some ways, sympathetic to students, if not that I still feel like one.

Five long years have passed since I graduated. I'm gratified to think that I can say that I was part of the last intake of students to begin in the last millenium, because that sounds somehow epic, even though in reality it was less than a decade ago.

So I was wondering what advice I could provide to new students, because I keep hearing about it being the start of the new academic term. And then I thought; I don't really have advice. I don't have wisdom. What I do have - reams and reams of it - is experience. So if you want to read this and take any of it away, be my guest.

It was a little easier for me, though, when I began, because my school-leaving generation had Sunscreen to give us advice on, well, everything.

Anyway, I present:

Experience tells me you can sleep through almost anything (Or, the SR New Student Advisory Pack)!

Firstly, let's get the important one out of the way first. Look up Imposter Syndrome. If you're going to university, you're going to be away from your friends, your family, and your peer group (until you establish a new one, at least). This means all you have to compare yourself to are other new students. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that you've been lucky, or flukey, or other ways of believing that you shouldn't be there and sooner or later they're going to discover this and throw you out, or you're going to fail in an epic fashion.

Listen to me closely: this is not true.

If you're at university, you're intelligent enough to be there. However you've done it, you've got your foot in the door. They wouldn't offer you a place if they didn't want you, so it's just up to you to prove that you belong there rather than believing you don't.

You will, in all likelihood, have to work harder than you ever have before. But if it wasn't a challenge, how would it be worth it? Rise to the occasion. Screw the media, talking of easier exams and higher entry rates. Screw the critics, consistently complaining about dumbing-down. If you're there, for now, you're meant to be there.

Now that the most important point is out of the way, there are some things I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, over a beer.

A few things to bear in mind.

(I) If you sleep with anyone on your course in the first month, you're going to have to sit in the confined spaces of lecture theatres and seminar rooms for the next eight months with them. If it leads to a lasting relationship, fantastic. If it's a one-night-stand, not so much.

(II) Money is always going to be difficult to manage. Always. The student loan is a lovely thing until the realisation that you have to pay it back hits you, but don't worry about that just yet. Unless you're lucky - and therefore rich - expect to be watching the pennies for a long, long time.

(III) Become a good judge of people as quickly as you can. Friends will come and go, good friends less so. At the end of the day, every, single, person on your course in your year is in exactly the same situation as you. If anyone acts like they know it all, they don't. Confidence is fine, but arrogance is really unattractive.

(IV) When it comes to finding accommodation for your later study years, don't - honestly, don't - live with your friends, your coursemates or anyone close to you. You never find out more about someone than when you live with them, and in my experience, it's not often that you like what you find out. Close proximity breeds contempt like nobody's business. If you can, live with people you can tolerate and meet your friends elsewhere. It may seem like odd advice to recommend not living with people you know and like, but if you still know and like them at the end of the year, you're the exception to the rule.

Out of all the people I lived with in my university years, I still keep in regular contact with only one of them. A few others I keep in irregular contact with. The rest proved to be so horrific as roommates that there was enough mutual enmity at the end of the year to power a battleship, and I've not spoken to them since. (This rule also works for sharing tents at festivals, to a lesser degree.)

(V) You will get used to eating bad food, because it's cheap. This is not in itself a bad thing. But don't overestimate the joy that a relatively balanced diet can bring. Fast food is fine as long as it's not every day. This goes double if you get any bar work with major pub chains; the half-price food is an enticement, but you will pay for it later.

A corollary to this: Mr Coffee, contrary to popular belief, is not your friend. Coffee is fine, coffee is good, coffee swiftly becomes an addiction. There are some people that say that if you need to be staying up late, cramming or deadline chasing, you haven't planned your time efficiently, but they're patronising, and we will ignore them.

What does matter is whether you're constantly needing caffeine or stimulants to keep you awake enough to function, because then, there's something wrong. I nurtured a coffee addiction in my first year up to the point where my body rebelled and refused to let me drink it any more without - oh, let's just leave it at 'bad symptoms'. It's not pleasant to describe. A friend of mine - who started at the same time as me and went on to work on their PHD - nurtured an addiction so strong that only quadruple expressos in the morning would help. Burnout becomes a very real possibility, quicker than you might imagine.

Similarly nicotine - smoke if you want to, but who can afford to nowadays?

Also, a word on sugar. Mr Haribo was my friend for a lot of my studies, as were Mr Chocolate and all his friends. Sugar is just as addictive, though, and stays with you for a longer time than you'd think.

Bad food is fine. Caffeine is fine. Sugar is, more or less, fine. Bad food, caffeine and sugar in one diet will do you more wrong than a thousand lovers.

(VI) Some advice on friends. If people are saying to you 'Oh, university, that's where you make the friends that will last the rest of your life', I hate to tell you this, but they're lying.

They shouldn't be. It should be true. I hope, in your case, it turns out to be true. But university is one of the places where people change personalities more often than they change socks. (I wish this last part weren't true.)

The people you know in one academic year may change so much over the year that you may not feel you know them the next. By all means, make as many friends as you can, but don't weep when not all of them stay that way. I have a few people I class as close friends that I keep in contact with from my university years, and a few more that I have abridged contact with, and I'm happy enough with that result.

(VII)

If I hear the phrase 'Town and Gown' again, I may go crazy.

If you're living somewhere, you're part of the community, whether you like it or not. Never think for one second that you're separate, or special, or different, and don't have to contribute anything. Don't treat the people living around you with contempt, or disdain, or, worse, indifference. They have to put up with enough students who do this, so don't be one of them.

Living near inconsiderate students is tough enough on anyone. There are enough tales of raucous parties, bad hygiene, and such already, so don't contribute to them. This is your chance to prove that students make good neighbours, and, as we all know, good neighbours become good friends. I was fortunate, I guess, in that in the shared accommodation I lived in I rarely saw my neighbours. You may not be so lucky. Respect your neighbours, and respect your local community.

Let's take a break for a second, anyway.

And we're back!

The one thing I know is that all this is going to sound, to a greater or lesser extent, patronising. If not, it may sound like every other student advice website or book out there, and if so, I apologise. Maybe my experience was generic. I don't think so.

Over the course of my degree, I changed courses three times, and took a year out mid-degree to sort everything out. I lived in seven different places, five of them student halls and two shared accommodation. I developed my passion for music, working at the student newspaper - which meant I could get as many free CDs as I wanted, until I was deposed - trust me, this word is accurate - for doing so, at which point I moved on to getting free PS2 games, until I moved on from that.

I was in relationships that lasted an afternoon, a night, and almost a year, and a few others besides. I had friendships that lasted between a week and several years, and sometimes I wish some of the former had been the latter, but, fortunately for me, not vice-versa.

In some ways, I wish my university experience had been generic. Typical, even. But it wasn't, thanks to the things I've been trying to outline above.

It's impossible to write advice without sounding like I think I know it all. I don't. Not at all. I can't stress this enough. The problem is, if you're starting university this year, whether you like it or not, you're formed clay. When you began school, you were unformed clay, and you've been moulded into a shape by your parents, teachers, and friends. Now, at university, you're being shaped, baked and glazed, and once you're done, you should be the finished article, ready to face the world.

You may not be, though. I don't feel like a finished article, half a decade on. Glazed, maybe, but not finished.

I graduated with a decent grade. I wanted to continue my studies, but I realise now that at the time, I wasn't ready. I was still a little immature, bad with money, and had a pretty bad attitude.

Five years on, and I'm more mature. My attitude is better. I'm still bad with money, but I'm earning my own wage, so that's something I can work on.

But here's the thing. My job sucks. It really does. I took it on to pay off crippling student overdrafts that I shouldn't have taken out. That achieved - in short order, I'm proud to say - I stayed on, because it was better than quitting for no reason.

I don't earn enough to get on the housing ladder, my job has no prestige, and it'll never make me rich. If I had gone to university believing I would graduate and immediately find a high-paying, prestigious job, I would have been sorely disappointed.

But, believe it or not, right now, I'm happy. When people say that Money Isn't Everything, hold back on the urge to slap them for being self-righteous, because, believe it or not, they're almost right. Money is a great deal of everything, but not all of it. It helps, certainly, but it's not worth devoting the totality of your time on this planet to chasing it.

Also, a final thing to consider. Having graduated, I was convinced that I could have done so, much, better. I beat myself up over it for years. I wondered if I could go back and do another degree, dump myself further in to debt, and walk away with something I could use.

This feeling left me, eventually. But not totally.

In the end, I asked my employer nicely if I could continue my studies and work full-time. And because I asked nicely, I'm now undertaking postgraduate study with the Open University. I wish I could close this by saying that I'm now a model student, but I'm still a deadline-chaser, and I always will be.

I'm really tempted to finish this with a cheesy ending, like 'But, most importantly of all, good luck!' or some other platitude. But I can't, because that really would be patronising.

Here's the thing. Whether you like it or not, you will only ever get out of your university experience as much as you're prepared to put in. There's no multiplier. When I look back now, I kind of wish I'd joined more clubs and societies, taken up a sport, joined a band, had a lasting relationship - it's possible, believe it or not - but, now it's done, with every day that passes, I'm more at peace with how I spent my time at university.

I have to go back there in October. A close friend, who is still studying there, has their final examination on that day, and I've said I'll be there to meet them when they're done, pass or fail. They are truly my last link to my old university, and once that day is done, and I get on the train and begin the journey home, I'll have no legitimate reason to go back there. This thought makes me a little sad; I spent around a fifth of my life there.

But part of being a good student is the art of knowing when exactly to move on, of course.

And in case you were wondering, the title is true. As a student, I developed the ability to sleep through, in no particular order:

Punjabi MC at full volume
Psychotic flatmates breaking random things at random times
Fire Alarms designed to wake all but Sleeping Beauty
Random Sexual Noises from the next room
The full version of Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel's 'Come up and see me'
Partial versions of Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel's 'Come up and see me'
The intro of 'Come up and see me', repeated at irregular intervals
I'm With You on repeat (Thank you, American Housemates)
The sound of a relationship crashing and burning (oops)

You may not believe any of my advice. But trust me on the sleeping.

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Such is life.

I have, however, decided to carry out a small experiment. Given that we all have photo ID cards at work, my hypothesis is that nobody actually looks at the damn things, because we all know who we each are.

And thus, I have temporarily replaced the photo on my card with one of Kurosaki Isshin, everyone's favourite fightin' dad, from Bleach. This one, to be precise:

Now, having mentioned this, I fully expect someone to notice tomorrow. But, then again, we don't have to show it to anyone, so it could be a long, long time before I have to actually use it as an ID rather than just as a keycard. I can see myself actually forgetting it's on there and introducing myself to someone using it.

This would, however, be a bonus, as the photo on there currently makes me looks like Satan's Acocuntant, Junior Grade; bad haircut, redeye, glazed but annoyed expression. It annoys me just seeing it. So I think replacing it is a vital step in my employee morale, as much as anything...

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It was designed by GC over at Afrenasia, who I do not hesitate to recommend for all your artwork needs.

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