4. A track that you like but wouldn’t want to be associated with in public

If I were to go through my entire collection of music, checking each artist, each album, each track and analyse and classify them according to the stringent criteria that constitutes cool, I’d rapidly come to the conclusion that just about everything I listen to falls into this category.

I don’t really care. The only good thing about getting older (not that I am, btw) is that not only do you usually have at least one friend whose taste in music is as diabolical as your own, but you’ve also perfected the art of admitting something with a slightly shamefaced and self deprecating air, acknowledging with a gentle half smile that you know it isn’t quite the done thing to like this particular song but; like the ability to refuse chocolate or your habit of chopping up babies to make into pate, it’s one of those things that you have no control over and this slight aberration in no way affects the fact that you are otherwise quite a nice person really.

However, while there are some tracks that I’ll quite cheerfully admit to liking (albeit with the slightly shamefaced and self deprecating manner described above), there are three tracks the names of which have never crossed my lips – no matter how drunk, drugged or in love I may have been. Indeed the only thing that would have got these names out of my usually supermotorised gob would have been the threat of dire and unspeakable torture (just the threat would do – I have a low pain threshold and no scruples)

Having said that, the first one could almost sneak into the admissible. Traffic– 40,000 Headmen. After all, it’s got Winwood on vocals, it’s got that whole mellow hippy flute thing going on, it’s got circular guitar and a walking bass line, hell, it’s even got maracas. What more could you possibly require. People have done a lot more with a lot less.

It’s the lyrics that let it down (although I must admit that they’re the thing I like best about the song.) I know that in the 60’s and early 70’s lyrics often were a bit strange, for example there’s Led Zep talking about the dork on Satans daughter (or at least it sounds like that, it might also be on his doorway. It only goes to show…) and meeting girls in Mordor, or Iron Butterfly singing “in da gadda da vida” (opinion is divided as to whether this was so titled because singer Doug Ingle was so stoned he couldn’t enunciate In the Garden of Life, because the drummer was wearing headphones when he was told the name of the song and misheard it, or – my personal favourite- they all had accents like Tony Curtis and that’s how they pronounced it).

Then you’ve got Traffic and their obsession with 40,000 headmen. Take the first verse.

“Forty thousand headmen couldn’t make me change my mind,
if I had to take the choice between the deafman and the blind,
I know just where my feet should go and that’s enough for me,
I turned around and knocked them down and walked across the sea”

For a start, why 40,000? Thirty thousand would have scanned just as well (as would twenty thousand or fifty thousand) and what are headmen anyway? Do they mean the headman of a village? Is it a convention? Do headmen of small villages have conventions? Do they discuss things like “whither now for voodoo?” or, “the difficulties of being a witch doctor in a multi faith society?” Do they have best kept villages competition with shrunken heads displayed hanging from every lamppost? And, why were they so vehement about changing his mind? He obviously didn’t want them to - to the extent that he knocked them all down. How he knocked them down, I don’t know – the logistics of this would be difficult. You’d need a really big car to knock down 40,000 headmen at once and you’d have to do it at once because otherwise the ones that were left would either run out of the way or be a bit angry and go for you. I get the walked across the sea bit – if it were a conference then it was obviously somewhere like Blackpool or Brighton so the sea would be so full of litter that you could leap from one empty can to the other like a polar bear skipping across an ice floe – but I’m still a bit puzzled as to how you’d fit 40,000 headmen into a conference hall in the first place.

It does become a little bit clearer in the second and third verses. I’m not going to quote them verbatim but basically after he’s walked a bit then he sees

“three ships sailing towards a distant shore”.

Our hero then lights up a cigarette and “follows in pursuit”
and

“…finds a secret cave where they obviously stashed their loot”

Now I take issue with this claim because I am a smoker. And one of the things I’ve discovered about smoking on the beach is that you can never ever light up a cigarette. For a start and no matter how tropical the beach, the matches are always damp. Of course he could have used a lighter, but I’ve found that the sand always seems to block up the flint mechanism so that when you flick the wheel bit with your thumb all you get is a sort of clicky sound and then it doesn’t turn anymore.

And that’s just on the beach. If you were actually walking across the sea, then surely some of the spray from the waves would either dampen the cigarettes so that they wouldn’t light, or soak the matchbook so that they wouldn’t light. Possibly a lighter would have been more useful here, but all the times I’ve ever been on the sea there’s been a brisk breeze blowing and so the bloody thing would keep going out and you never get your cigarette lit and there would have to be a breeze because he saw three ships go sailing and although I know very little about ships I’m presuming that the fact that they were sailing means that they had sails and you wouldn’t have the sail out (or whatever the proper terminology is) unless there was a breeze. I’m not going to be pedantic and point out that he must not only have been a bloody quick walker to catch up with the three ships but he’d also have to be invisible too, because otherwise the crew would have seen him coming and either offered him a lift or made him walk the plank. I think it’s more likely to be the second option, as law-abiding citizens don’t usually have secret caves where they stash loot, although I’d have thought the words secret and obvious were mutually exclusive in any case.

Mind you, our hero doesn’t seem to be a very law-abiding citizen anyway. Possibly there was some provocation for him knocking down the 40,000 headmen at the start but on discovering the loot, he doesn’t exactly phone for the local constabulary and hand it in. No. In his own words…

“Filling up my pockets, even stuffed it up my nose,
I must have weighed a hundred tons between my head and toes,
I ventured forth before the dawn had time to change its mind,
and soaring high above the clouds I found a golden shrine”

Now this verse confuses me a bit too. You see the classic explanation at this point is that the band were completely off their faces, hence the allusion to stuffing it up their noses (unless of course they had really bad colds and the headmen had stolen nasal decongestants) I don’t mind that. Rock bands are supposed to be off their face, that’s why we have them. What concerns me is the portage of the loot. Either he has a lot of pockets, or the loot is extremely heavy. Either way, it would have to be quite small to fit up his nose (unless of course he had abnormally large nostrils) and in any case I don’t see how, if he weighed a hundred tonnes after he’d loaded himself up, he was then able to take off and soar high above the clouds. Unless of course, the loot was actually bits of a 747 which would weigh about a hundred tonnes (if not more) but he doesn’t mention building a jet plane so I doubt it’s that. The only thing I can think of is that he’s one of these extreme sporting types. In which case deaths too good for him and I wish the headmen (who seem to have disappeared) had got him but good.

I’m also concerned by the indecisiveness of dawn. It’s not that I’m averse to change but I do like some things to go on as they’ve always done. Dawn is one of them. I can’t say that I’m usually up to see it, but it seems to be one of those things that give a certain amount of solidity to ones day and the thought that it can be quite arbitrary about whether or not it appears is worrying.

The golden shrine I can take or leave to be honest. We only have his word that that was what was up there, but why not? It seems far more likely to have a golden shrine above the clouds than a potting shed or dry cleaners. Apparently though, he had an appointment there because the final verse mentions that he rang the bell “hoping he hadn’t come too late” Now up to this point he seems to be a bit carefree about how he spends his time. He’s engaged in discussions with 40,000 headmen, he’s walked across the sea, he’s tracked ships and nicked loot and soared above the clouds and now all of a sudden he’s consulted his Blackberry and he’s late for an appointment? I don’t think so somehow.

As if by magic all these people now start to appear. Well only one person (who I suspect is also moonlighting as the doorkeeper to the hotel California because they both seem to share the same deliberately obtuse way of talking – although everyone did in the sixties) and he’s told to “not waste his time”. You see. That’s what happens when you “lay out your treasure before the iron gate”, people think you’re one of those door-to-door salesmen types and they just don’t want to know. I reckon I’m right in this theory because the doorkeeper adamantly refuses to give his name and when our hero presses him for it, tells him “Just look behind”.

This is where things start to get really silly and I begin to suspect that our hero is a big fat liar. Because now we’re expected to believe that all this time the 40,000 headmen have been following him with thoughts of revenge uppermost in their minds. Apparently they fire

“…twenty shotguns each and man, it really hurt.
But luckily for me they had to stop and then reload.
And by the time they’d done that I was heading down the road”

Now I’ve fired a shot gun (best not to ask really)and they’re bloody heavy. I suppose that if you were really tough you could fire one from each hand, but there’s absolutely no way that you could hold 20 shotguns at the same time. Not unless you had at least 10 pairs of arms (I think- maths is not one of my strongest points) and even if they did each have at least 10 pairs of arms (which I doubt because surely he’d have mentioned that at the beginning of the song) then the chances of surviving a rain of 1,600,000 bullets is pretty slim and surely they wouldn’t all have fired at exactly the same time anyway. Either he’s exaggerating the number of headmen or the number of shotguns (fair enough I suppose that if you were faced by 40,000 shotgun wielding headmen at point blank range then it might feel like they had 20 shotguns each) but either way, dismissing multiple gunshot wounds with “man they really hurt” is a bit macho to be taken seriously. They would fucking hurt and he’d certainly be in no fit state to head down a road (lets not even attempt to ask the question of why, if there was a road to this golden shrine and he had to be there for a specific time anyway, he decided to take the scenic route)

I blame my parents (this is not new, I have done ever since I read about Primal Therapy but its ok cos they’ve read about it to and they blame their parents and we’ve lent the book to them, so the buck will end with Adam and Eve) I found the bloody album in their record collection and since I’d also discovered Led Zeps Physical Graffiti and Pink Floyds Dark Side of the moon there I thought that Traffic would be ok. It quite obviously wasn’t. Don’t even get me started on “in a Shanghai Noodle factory”.

Next one up has a bit of a back-story. You see, you might know them as the international rock gods in the making/popular music combo that is Smith 6079(or as I’m talking about only 2 of them should that be Smith 3039.5?) but when I knew them they were nothing more than annoying schoolboys with squeaky voices, mullets and Iron Maiden t–shirts.

Not to blow my own trumpet here, but all this music stuff that they’re now thrusting on an unsuspecting and undeserving public? It’s all down to me. Was I not then herebes older sister? (A state of affairs which didn’t last long as I decided to stick at 27 while herebe bravely ventured forth in search of bigger birthdays) Was it not my stereo that blasted out the scared (that was a typo and should have been sacred, but actually scared is probably nearer the truth) music? Should they not, even now, be worshipping the ground I walk on and cheerfully handing over all their royalties? Yes, I think so to (hey – worth a try).

I mean obviously I didn’t teach them everything. I didn’t teach them how to play guitar (is the trauma of listening to someone learning how to play Joe Satriani something that you can claim for and if so do any of you know of a lawyer who will take the case) and I don’t think that I taught them how to drink themselves into oblivion, although they may have learnt from example and I certainly didn’t teach them to like Iron Maiden as I was strictly an AC/DC sort of girl (but only with Bon Scott – no reflection on Brian Johnson who is a stellar man doing a sterling job - and a Geordie to boot) and it was the law back then that if you liked one then you weren’t allowed to like the other. But I still maintain that their (Smith 6079’s) current success is due to my guiding hand.

Of course I’m referring to the blogger that is herebemonsters and his indomitable sidekick AndyH. Or it may be the other way round – AndyH and his indomitable sidekick herebemonsters…either way, in those days they came as a pair (there are rumours that they still do) and very pissed off at them most of the time I was too. You see, they were widdlers of the nth degree. They widdled constantly and not well. To make it so much worse, they had a whammy bar and neither knew how to use it. Whingie Malmsteen, Uli Jon Roth, the great Kat. - you name it, they bought it and what was worse, they attempted to play it too. Hell, they even bought “Guitar magazine” which has got to be unnatural.

A typical Saturday would be spent listening to the sound of three bars of Joe Satriani’s flying in a blue haze being played on the tape player, brutally stopped, rewound replayed, rewound and then painstakingly replayed by them every which way but correctly. Once they got that Boss effects pedal with every sound known to man pre-programmed and ready to use at the flip of a foot, then things became ten times worse. Because even though they still didn’t know how to play the guitar, they somehow thought that by flicking a switch and making it sound like whale song it would somehow miraculously turn out right. It didn’t. Thank God we didn’t live closer to the sea; as the sounds emanating from the house would have played havoc with any whale’s sense of direction.

In short, they were music nerds. I’m not saying that they bought Japanese imports but I’d bet good money that they did. They went into Newcastle and, instead of spending the day chasing hot babes around record shops, they clustered over the trays and deliberated for hours as to which album they would buy and after that, instead of going to the pub, or sitting on Eldon Green getting canned on cider – they would actually buy an album and go home.

It was after such a shopping trip that Herebe returned, clutching a fairly innocuous looking tape. Entitled Flex-Able, it was by a guitarist called Steve Vai(and it had a big sticker on the front declaring it an Import – so I reckon my money’s safe enough) I knew who Vai was of course. He was the flavour of the month for guitarists (headline in Guitar magazine - “Steve Vai, Passion and Warfare…”), having played on Dave Lee Roth’s first solo album Eat em and Smile and transcribed Frank Zappa, which should have put anyone off music for life. No disrespect to Zappa, Louisiana Hooker with Herpes (to the tune of Lucy in the sky with diamonds) is the best Beatles song they (n)ever wrote.

Flex-Able wasn’t so bad. At least it didn’t have too many widdley scrang bits in it and it did have vocals. I prayed that one of them wasn’t planning on taking up singing although maybe they should have done - the range that they each had was amazing, going from sub-bass to castrato, often in the same word.

What the tape did have was a song called “little green men” which is undoubtedly one of the most annoying songs ever written…For those of you who are unfamiliar with Vai’s oeuvre, I should just mention that at this point in his career, he was convinced that beings from another planet were trying to communicate with us paltry mortals through the medium of music, specifically loud, widdly scrang guitar music. He believed that, and I quote “….these little green men actually do exist, for they are part of the eternal past and venture from all regions of galaxy to find homage in our earths centre…” The chosen people, those that are “pure at heart” (usually widdly scrang guitar players) have these alien encounters imprinted on their subconscious but there knowledge will only become evident to a dying planet when our civilisation enters the new age of “light without heat-t-t-t-t-t-t” (you have to have the echo on that bit) and (although he doesn’t mention this) I presume that at this point we would all become one with one another and float off to the great golden guitar in the sky.

This song. What can I say about this song? What can you say about a song that goes “we know you came a long way, we hope that your ship is ok…we hope you’re going to stick around, maybe to save the day” “little green men, they look so funny, funny green men I want one to have and to hold, silly green men where do they come from should we run away should we start to play” with backing vocals which go (as far as I can determine….libble libble libble libble libble libble libble” apart from the fact that when he wrote it Vai had obviously been eating something much stronger than yellow snow.

Are you still reading this? You are? Damn. I thought you might have given up by now. In fact that was the plan. Write pages and pages of waffle in the vain hope that anyone reading it would have way better things to do with their day. There must be some fluff you can dig out of your navel? No? What about the cupboard under the sink? I bet it could do with a tidy? No? Oh bugger… It hasn’t worked. OK, well…I suppose I’m going to have to come clean and admit it then. It will probably the last thing I ever write because admitting to liking this song is so terrible that once I’ve writ the name I’ll be forced to kill myself. You think I’m joking? I’m not. I just hope you can all live with yourselves.

Put it this way. It’s worse than admitting that I like Tyrannosaurus Rex (I do) and I don’t mean the Get it on”, “Ride a white swan” T-Rex. although that’s brilliant too. I mean the bongo playing, songs played backwards, John Peel reading stories about Moles marigold comedown “my people were fair and had sky in their hair but now they’re content to wear stars on their brows” Tyrannosaurus Rex (God they don’t make album titles like that anymore - you can’t get the drugs).

It’s even worse than my coming clean about liking Toto(not that I do of course – I mention them purely as a comparision). How about admitting that I’ve got It Bites on my iPod? No. Ok Worse than that? I love Steve Miller especially the one that goes oh ah didididdy… (fly like an eagle) Does that satisfy your unnatural demand for my humiliation and demise?

Look, what if I told you that I liked Journey? Or Foreigner? Whichever one wrote that song that goes “I ain’t missing you at all – since you been gone away…” Actually I think that this song was written by Boston and therefore that means that I like Journey and Foreigner and Boston….because I like that song that goes “I see you in a smokey room, the smell of wine and cheap perfume”and I also like “jukebox hero”… enough of this!…have I not humiliated myself enough already?…oh God, death take me now.

Ok. If I’m going out, then I’m going out with a bang (an attitude which, some would say, started all my problems in the first place) Can I have a drum roll please? And some glitter?

The track I like, but would never admit to in public is…“Stonehenge” by Spinal Tap

I don’t mean that I like the scene in the film where the megalith is lowered to the stage in all its vertically challenged glory – although I do, and despite the fact I’ve seen the film so many times that I know the script (of the whole cast) it still makes me hurt from laughing. I make my no apologies for this fact. When you have a sense of humour that I prefer to call ephemeral and close friends describe as none – existent then you have to take your laughter where you may.

I mean I actually like the song. Not as a funny jokey spoof weird Al whateverhisname is sort of song – but as a proper song. I’m sorry. All your illusions about me as being gorgeous, hip and cool have finally been shattered. Live with it - I’ve had to (and for a lot longer).

Of course divulging this means that not only do I have to admit to liking a song that was written as a parody of a whole genre, but I also have to admit to liking the whole bloody genre. So here it is. The admission you’ve all been waiting for. I like Prog Rock. Are you satisfied? I hope so. Admitting this is more humiliating than being locked out of my own 21st birthday party for getting home too late, more embarassing than getting…actually, I’m not even going to go there - my toes are curling at just the thought of writing this and therefore transferring it from my subconcious where it normally just bubbles up to the surface at that lovely stage in the evening when you’ve finished your nightly spliff, turned out the light, wished F and the real Hendrix Cat (both of whom are already well into dreamland) good night and are about to settle down into a lovely coal stoned sleep but instead your mind whirls round picking up every single embarassing moment and playing it back to you in glorious technicolour.

I just hope that you’re all satisfied now.

3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip

I’ve never been on holiday. Not what most people would call a holiday anyway. When we were children, dad was always offshore working and when he was onshore the last thing he wanted to do was live out of a suitcase. I suppose that mum could have bundled us up and taken us somewhere, but quite apart from the indelicacy of sending a “wish you were here postcard” to the person stuck in a sardine tin 4 days from the surface in order to pay for it, I can’t imagine that it’s much of a holiday to be trapped in a strange country with 2 children and none of the stuff you usually have around to keep them occupied. I’m being very charitable here by not mentioning the fact that mums pale and romantic colouring means that if she ventures outside in daylight, she turns as red a lobster and so the thought of being in any place where the temperature’s more than 2 degrees above freezing really doesn’t appeal to her.

That’s not to say that we didn’t go places. We were always bombing off to stay with someone (or someone was always bombing off to stay with us) and as we all had houses deep in the middle of nowhere then it worked out to be more or less the same thing anyway. But that was normal life not a break from it. So I have some brief memories of being in the car, zooming from one place to another with music blaring. The Wall Side 2 was a hot summer’s day crossing over the Pennines, with the top down and that rollercoaster feeling you get in your stomach when the car hits a bump in the road. I loved that. I used to yell “go for the bumps dad” as we rolled along and being a well trained dad, he’d accelerate just as we hit them so that the car took off. Or, finding a country road and doing donuts, spinning the car round and round, faster and faster till it was hard to tell what was squealing louder – us or the tyres.

Just as the sun always shone during the day, it always seemed to rain when we were in the car at night. I remember being half asleep in the back seat, watching the glimmer of the lights on the dashboard, the streaks of the headlights of cars going the other way, rising and dipping out of sight, following the curves of the road. It was comforting. Mum and dad in the front, the warm smell of cigarette smoke and music playing more quietly than it did when we were awake (herebe and I could sleep through anything at that point – I wish I could now)but still loud enough to hear. Peter Gabriel’s Games without Frontiers was playing the night we drove back from E’s, the rain sliding silver down the window and balancing in a little pool of light at the base – I loved that song from the start although I did wonder for years why Kate Bush was singing “she’s so funky yeah” when it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the lyrics. (She was actually singing “jeux sans frontières” but I was many many years older when I discovered that)

I suppose that I could have gone jetting off when I was a student – backpacking round India or something but I never felt the need. For me university was a holiday; no rules, out every night and only 2 lectures a week (I only got that you were meant to be studying the rest of the time in my final term) and they gave you money to live on. When it came to the vacation, I wanted to go home to see my friends. I’m the only person I know of who does not have even one person from uni that they keep in touch with. I never really spoke to anyone at uni, (it took the rest of my corridor 2 months to discover that my room was inhabited) because all the things that they were discovering for the first time, I’d already done and I didn’t see the point of hanging round the student union drinking watered down beer when you had the whole of London to discover. So my last day at uni was the last day I spoke to the people I’d been there with and I never went back to do the graduation ceremony thing – I just didn’t see the point. (Mum still hasn’t forgiven me for that – she’d bought the most amazing hat to wear at the ceremony)

As a grown up, a holiday has been one of the things that F and I have never gotton round to doing. When we had the time, we didn’t have the money and when we had the money, we never had the time. It’s only now, 9 years on, when we’re both knackered, that we’re talking about a holiday somewhere and even the thought of booking it is turning into a logistical nightmare. Partly too the problem is that we both live so far away from our families that when we do have some spare time they take priority.

I suppose what it boils down to is that I don’t have that much wanderlust, there are places that I would love to see – LA, the Great Wall of China, Siberia, Iceland and the Antarctic (for all I love to lie out in the sun and get brown, I have a real obsession with snow and ice) but that’s about it. Mum and I try to dash off to Paris for a few days every year but that’s not really a holiday – it’s more like circuit training with espressos. One of my abiding memories of the first trip mum and I took to Paris is sitting in the café at the Samaritans dept store (we don’t do queues so much of our trip is spent wandering round the shops – much more satisfying anyway) – looking out the window at the Seine while in the background a barber shop quartet sang (in French) “Satisfaction” It was quite surreal.

Probably the closest I’ve ever come to a holiday is the first time I went to meet F’s parents. F was between bands at the time and I wasn’t working, so we planned to drive down there and stay for a month. The night before we left was the night that Princess Diana was killed and I had the channels (I can never sleep the night before I’m due to travel anywhere – even if its just taking the train to Newcastle and dad once told me that the soldiers in the first World War had christened this form of insomnia the “channels” – I don’t know if its true or not, but it’s a lovely way to describe it) so I sat up all night with F watching the news as it came in. We left the next day and drove down to Dover for the ferry. I’d done the crossing years ago when I went on a school trip but this time was different. For a start I didn’t believe that France and England were so close together. You could see the lights from Dover until you were nearly in Calais. I sat there the whole crossing – entranced by this liminalness – neither in one country or another but drifting, until I mentioned it to F and he pointed out that I was looking at the lights reflected from the ferry windows. England had disappeared out of sight quite quickly. By the time we got to Paris (where we were to spend a night before driving down to the south of France the next day) it was dark. My abiding image of that first journey is stopping at some traffic lights in a quiet square bordered by tall shuttered buildings and seeing three elderly Arab men in incandescent white robes, standing in the spilled light from a café door. Even to someone who had lived in London for years, the scene was so foreign, so outside of what I’d ever seen before, beautiful and strangely for a city, so still and quiet. It was as if we’d stepped outside of time, outside of reality. I’ve always loved the otherness of a city in the dead of night, when even the shadowy people who inhabit the fringes of the dark have gone and all that is left is the past. That’s why I don’t like new buildings. They’re built with no thought. Buildings are no longer a testament to man belief, whether that’s a belief in God or a belief in commerce, they’re thrown up not hewn and the stones don’t breathe.

The thermostat on the car broke just outside Notre Dame (which, if you’re going to break down is as good a place to break down as any) so F jerry rigged it with a paperclip. ( I have no idea how he did it – it’s a man thing - apparently you can stop the thermostat on a car registering that it’s overheating by bending a paperclip a certain way and attaching it to something in the depths of the engine and therefore the car doesn’t blow up or something) This was where I discovered that the French for paperclip is trombone, which explained my blank looks when F asked if I had a trombone in my handbag. Though my handbag contains many weird and mysterious items, a trombone wasn’t one of them on that particular occasion although obviously I’ve carried one ever since - just in case. At this point we were also completely lost (or as lost as you can be while parked outside one of the great landmarks of a country) so once it was fixed F phoned V and she drove to meet us and led us back to her flat.

Meeting V terrified me. She had been F’s first serious girlfriend, from when he was 15 to the time he left for LA. Even after he’d gone she’d continued to live with his parents until she got a job in Paris and she spent every holiday back with them. I’d never met a French girlfriend before, much less one who lived in Paris, so obviously I envisaged her being all long red fingernails, perfect coiffure and way more sophistication than I had. All I can remember of the first meeting is that she was tiny, ballerina small, with the biggest meltingest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I was bundled up in a blanket before I knew what had hit me and slept like a baby for the rest of the night. I woke the next morning to grey skies, an alien landscape and an inherited terror. Ripping through the grey morning was the moan of a siren, swelling and expanding into the skies. An air raid siren. A thousand war stories rushed through my head. My grandparents experiences; bombed out cities and concentration camps. This was not my land. It didn’t even feel like my planet. I was uprooted, in a different time and place. I could quite easily be in a country at war. There was no mistaking the sound. We had to leave. Now. A city was no place to be. The survival instinct kicked in.

I woke F, who explained that France still tested their sirens every so often. That frightened me more. I’d grown up with the second world war being something that had happened in living memory albeit the living memory of my grandparents. Even the First World War had touched me. My great granddad had taught me the Hindustani he remembered from working on the red cross ships, I could remember us singing Mademoiselle from Armentieres (parley voos?) together If it hadn’t been for the war I wouldn’t exist – or at least not as me. Now, with this sound, the horror of what war was, bombing, bereavement, estrangement – the antithesis of being - was brought home to me. This land did not have war as a memory of growing up, dancing with soldiers and digging for victory. Nor, did it have the devil-may-care attitude Grandpa T gifted his time in the camps with – something that was so terrible the only way you could speak of it was as a game, watery soup, sawdust cigarettes, black market dealings. This land was the cold march of troops on tarmac, of tanks rolling down streets and the dread hanging horror of it happening once more.

We set off for the South and the sun came out as we drove. I was overwhelmed at the vastness of the land. I’d grown up in the Pennines so I was used to high skies, but at some point they did fall to meet the tops of the moors. Here there was not that delineation. The horizon wavered miles before us, unreachable. We drove all day, chasing a sun that seemed to be so much stronger and so much further away than it was at home. Stopping off for coffees at roadside cafes, watching as the fields gave way to vineyards and the horizon became broken by a line of mountains. When darkness fell, we passed a nuclear power station. Vast it was, suspended darker than the dark, lit by great floodlights of white and red, carved out of mountains which dwarfed it and made of us something less significant than ants. Sirens and nuclear stations, mountains taller than any I’d ever seen. This was a strange land, we would never stop travelling, just F and I in a small car moving through the night.

Looming larger than the rocks on either side of us was the knowledge that each mile was bringing me closer to meeting his mum and dad. After all, it wouldn’t be under the most auspicious of circumstances. The summer previously, F had gone home. To be married. I’d seen the photos. Now, a scant year later he was making the same journey home. With me. Despite the circumstances we’d met in, I’d never thought of F and I being together as being wrong. It had always felt like the universe had gone through a slight hiccup to put things the way things should be – realigning so that we could be together. Yet as we grew nearer, I realised that others might not see it the same way. His parents hadn’t taken the news of his marriage break up as being especially good news (I don’t think they were being particularly unreasonable in this, they didn’t know me and my own family weren’t exactly thrilled that I’d broken up a marriage, no matter how brief it had been) and though they had always been unfailingly polite to me when I’d spoken to them on the phone, it was a guarded courtesy.

It was essential that they like me. Not for myself, although I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t want to be liked for me. But if F and I were going to be together - and I was sure that we were – then it was important for our future, for the life we’d make together, for any children we might have, that our families fused too. Sure, F and I could live quite happily without their approbation. But that wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. Family is very important to me. I don’t have any false picture of a family as a happy-clappy Brady bunch, I understand that a family is a howling wolf pack, ripping and snarling at each other in an unending battle to become top dog. Interfamily wars are one of the great joys of life – after all who will watch your back as well as someone who has a vested interest in sticking their own knife in it? I don’t think that you have to like them, see them or speak to them if you so choose, but at the same time, I know how it feels to be alienated from your family, a part of your heart constantly open and bleeding. You get used to the ache, you can laugh through it, feed the fire of self-righteous anger, but it never goes away and the pain permanently bubbling up to the surface has such an accompanying feeling of wrongness that it taints everything you touch.

It seemed right somehow that I’d meet them after a long journey through a land that I didn’t understand, felt no pull towards, had no roots in. It seemed right to, as we drew up beside their home and were met in the hall, that F’s mum seemed to be cold and forbidding, greeting me with a formal kiss. I remember going up to the apartment in the tiny lift and the heavy wooden door with their name on it. I remember their cat, Popeye, sitting on the dining room table – and that he got me through the first 5 minutes of frantic greetings once we were inside the flat. I remember entering a strange kitchen – so tidy and organised, and the spaghetti Bolognese that I was too tired to eat. I remember waking the next morning in an unfamiliar room with a tiled floor and heavy iron shutters on the window. I remember struggling with the unfamiliar catch and the sunlight pouring in as I swung them open, the unfamiliar shape of Mount Faron overwhelming the view. I remember that I didn’t in the least feel uncomfortable or ill at ease as I usually did in a strange house, but swung into my clothes and wandered into the kitchen, helping myself to coffee and rifling through the cupboard until I found some brioche. I didn’t know I was looking for brioches because I didn’t know what a brioche was. I was looking for croissants as obviously all French people only ever ate croissants for breakfast (apart from F who never ate breakfast).

I was just at that nice stage; halfway down my second coffee and my first cigarette and all was well with the world, when F and his mum came into the kitchen. They’d been in the basement - F had left a pedal there when he’d gone to America and though he had been home several times since then, it became of paramount importance for him to find it that morning. I understood that. There are places you have to touch when you go back home just to make sure that though the wallpaper might be different, the vital things remain unchanged. It was nice too, not to be treated as a guest but to be left to find my own way around the house, not to be the centre of pressing attention but to float amongst a language I didn’t understand. I think that the joy of discovering this is the reason that I’ve never really properly learnt to speak French. I can get by, I can follow a conversation, but to not have to make conversation – even of the briefest sort – is so restful that I look forward to my time there as a time to switch off the world.

The days passed in a progression of sun and sea and sand. A long slow breakfast of bitter black coffee and then F would begin his pacing with the phone, chattering twenty to the dozen to one of the countless musician friends who’d discovered that he was home. I’d sit at the kitchen table while his mum prepared the lunch and, in between peeling and paring, she’d tell me the history of her family. Stories from the past: of F’s childhood, of her own and her husbands, family histories. Who was who and what they’d done. It was important to me to know his past as well as I knew my own, to have stories that maybe one day I could pass on from my own kitchen table.

It had never occurred to me that maybe F’s mum had felt as nervous of meeting me as I had been of meeting her and that her view of an English girlfriend had been the same as my view of a French one. The reality was that my own ignorance of French custom had taken the formality of the first greeting as her state of mind towards me when that hadn’t been the case at all. I was used to the North East – where people either spoke to you or didn’t, depending on their mood and where introductions are something you do if you remember to in the split second before a character judgement has made all future negotiation pointless. The reality was that F’s parents had accepted me from the first.

After lunch we’d grab out towels and head for the beach, usually Hyere and spend the afternoon lying in the sun. I lapped it up like a lizard, getting warm into the marrow of my bones. Then, at sunset we’d return to the flat for F’s mum to shoo us off for a siesta as “the sea air is very tiring”. .

Some mornings we’d wake very early and go fishing with F’s dad. Though he spoke no English and my French was limited, we had long silent conversations, in which a single glance spoke for hours. I hadn’t realised until F told me some time later, that the frequency of my being on the boat was a mark of his regard as here; as in Newcastle, a woman on a fishing boat was considered unlucky. I discovered a knack for it, splitting still writhing scarlet and green worms with my fingernails, twisting them round the hook and casting off, feeling the most delicate of shudders on the line and spinning in something that for the weight on the line seemed so incredibly small. On one of the trips I caught a starfish. F’s dad dried it in the sun for me and, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and balanced on my knee, it survived the long drive back to London. When I dust the shelf its on, I’m always tempted to resubmerge it, as if the touch of water will bring it back to being that miraculous scarlet star – as if a ruby had suddenly sprouted legs and gone skittering off across the seabed.

The rocking of the boat on the Mediterranean; a sea so much warmer, so much more maternal than my own cold North Sea, the tug of the line, the heavily occupied silence that surrounds fishermen and arching above it all, a sun so bright the sky was white. Then, when the weight of the heat became too much, to jump off the boat into water so clear it was like swimming in light, searching for sea urchins, their prickly shells hiding the tiniest slivers of bright orange, salty sweet.

Worries about life (what I intended to do with it), job (I didn’t have one), apartment (see job), bills (see job), had all faded in this dreamland I’d created for myself. I felt protected here. Safe. Nothing could touch me. It was not my language, it was not my land. I’d made it all up, it was a mirage fashioned from sun and sea.

After dinner in the evening – languorous many coursed meals – we’d wander along the “>main port stopping at one of the cafés and lingering for hours over an espresso. By now I’d caught the French way of drinking coffee – holding the sugarcube just touching the top, watching it inch up the block one grain at a time and then crumble – continually stirring and smoking and chatting and only actually knocking the stuff back in the minute before you got up to leave.

Other nights we’d meet up with F’s friends for a jam. Sometimes this would be in a bar and F would be dragged up to play a few numbers, more often we’d drive deep into the countryside, past Cézannes mountain trailing long country roads until we found whatever barn had been requisitioned for the night.

The sheer number of people who turned up each time amazed me. Fifteen or twenty people all loaded with food and wine and instruments (including a guitar for F who never travels with one on the basis that there are a people planted on this planet whose sole purpose in life is to loan him guitars when he pitches up in their part of the world. I’m not joking here) I wasn’t used to someone having that many friends – much less from a place he’d left years before. Some of them I already knew. Big O (the bass player) so called to differentiate him from little O (the singer) had both followed F to London when he came back from America and had lived with him in the tumbledown house on the North Circular, C the chef who’d ended up in London (and therefore the tumbledown house on the North Circular) after taking a wrong turn on the way to Tibet. R, the jazz pianist who looked like Jesus and refused to learn any of the standards lest his own ideas be polluted but who could play like a dream when the mood for melody struck him (and who had also stayed in the tumbledown house on the North Circular for a while).

It was nice to sit there. By the fire, outside. Like being caught inside a painting. Listening to the muffled thump of the drums cutting through the stone, the faint shadow of laughter and conversation, the continuous wavering of the crickets melting the darkness into soft wet indigo, secure in the knowledge that the language barrier meant that no fucker would even try to attempt all 163 verses of “Like a Rolling Stone”.

I think it was after one of those nights that we sat on the bed and talked until morning. No particular conversation – just a jumble of memories and stories and then the decision to open the door of the bureaux, surprising a whole stack of tapes that F hadn’t seen for years. All the bands he’d been in – from the first French band when he was 12 right through the LA years to the last still sealed envelope containing the masters of his last band. His past. Literally on tape. So we listened to them all and then, somewhere towards the bottom of the pile was one that wasn’t his.

I had no idea who it was. But from the first notes of the piano, I got goose bumps. From the utter perfection of the playing, no tune, just raindrop notes plucked out of the air, falling between the rise and fall and tears of the voice.

And so we rewound the tape and played it again. And between the rise and fall and tears of the voice was the rise and fall of my mans voice - translating…

…I shall invent
senseless words
which you will understand.
I shall tell you about
those lovers who
saw twice
their hearts
go up in flames.
I shall tell you
the story of this king
dead
for not having succeeded
in finding you

Ladies and gentlemen. I give you Jacques BrelNe me quitte pas. If you only check out one song of the twenty that I shall (eventually) get round to putting up - make it this one.

Of course I could go into this whole spiel about how music is subjective and not objective but it would just be a lie. Or, I could have spent the week looking up pieces of obscure music which would build up a picture of me as an intelligent and sensitive soul with exquisite taste. Or, I could just be honest and mention the fact that the music I like is not cool, has never been cool (even when it was cool) and will never be cool. I’m going for the third option.

The music I like is not cool, has never been cool (even when it was cool) and will never be cool. It’s not my fault. I blame my parents. Nothing to do with their musical taste – they’ve always been way cooler than I am – just the fact that they aren’t American. You see I should have been American. It would have made much more sense. I’m not saying that my musical taste would have been any better or that Americans have bad taste in music, but at least there’s a social group that I could have belonged to - White Trash.

Look, just go here and you’ll see what I mean. Are you back yet? Good. Understand now. Despite the fact that I spent years in London, fully immersed (some would say drownded) in the music scene, I wasn’t the cool one. I just basked in the ice reflected from F. As long as I looked fierce (and kept my mouth shut) I passed for one of them. It wasn’t that I hated the music of the indie scene, it’s just that everyone took it so damn seriously. Obviously the bands had to take it seriously – it’s their job. But the audience? I know everyone has a band they listen to when their depressed – you know – the one best listened to in the dark with a large bottle of wine and the knowledge that you are but an insignificant cog in a gigantic wheel. But surely, when your out on the town, dressed up in your best (or worst – with London fashions it’s often difficult to tell) surely then, you need something a bit high octane to bop to.

So if you’re expecting an insight into new and exciting bands. Forget it. I don’t have any. It’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant new and exciting bands out there. I just don’t know of them. From the music I like – I’ve gone backwards not forwards, looking up what influenced them, where they came from and how it all links together. Not that you’ll get any insight into that from these questions. They’re all slanted to capture a certain moment of time and it’s just bloody typical that the soundtrack to my biopic is one that you could use for an episode of Miami Vice.

1. A track from your early childhood

Although I have hazy fleeting memories of a time when I had no memory – brief glimpses of sensations and emotions: a dark room, the light of a door opening, the bars of my cot against the shine and the feel of feet encased in socks against sheets – my earliest proper memories are of music. Apparently though it started even earlier than that. My Nan has a tape of my dad playing and me singing/lisping along to “blackbird singing in the dead of night”. I couldn’t have been more than three and a half at the time. The strange thing is that I remember being told about the tape and I remember hearing the tape years later (it’s the sort of thing your grandma is bound to dig out of the cupboard, when you take a boyfriend to visit for the first time) but I don’t remember the lyrics other than first two lines until I looked it up to put the link on.

I can remember standing in the front room of my great grannies house engrossed in Bohemian Rhapsody video when it first came out (she died when I was 5 so do the maths but I stopped counting at 27) being almost hypnotised by the combination of the music and the strange swirling pictures in front of me.

Or walking along one of the lines (a netball court or something like that) painted on the school playground of my infant school and singing Ray Charles Hit the Road Jack. We moved away from that particular school when I was 7 so it must have been before that. I have no idea where I heard the track – probably on the radio, as it wasn’t my parent’s sort of thing at all – but the repetition of it must have stuck in my head. I remember being there so clearly. The dull wet grey of the playground, the sandstone wall in front of me, and more than that, my first perfect memory- being so totally engrossed in the moment, balancing along that painted line and singing/speaking the lyrics to myself.

I suppose it’s hardly surprising that herebe and I are obsessed with music. We grew up surrounded by the stuff. Piles of albums littered the house, albums often bought for the covers (Roger Dean was a favourite). A 24 track sat atop the dining room table; the sliders, knobs, and dials, wildly tempting to tiny fingers. The shelves on the far wall held glowering reel to reels, miles of tape whirring and spinning and making a weird catching clicky noise when it reached the end. Keyboards, the primitive sort, great walls of patchbays rising above them, were stacked up in layers, their keys kicking a heavysoft thump when pressed. Sofa’s and chairs were littered with guitars and there was usually a drum kit kicking around the place (most often in the bathroom – all those tiles make for good acoustics) The dining room itself was papered with egg boxes to muffle the noise of the stereo that was linked up to a stage PA (which had speakers bigger than I was – a fact that awed and amazed me when I was little) which was never turned up past 5 unless we were in the garden – otherwise you didn’t hear the music anymore – you just felt the vibrations.

The joy of it was that none of it was forbidden “grownups only” territory. So although there was a brief storm when herebe decided to test the sharpness of his new buck knife on the mixing desk (I think he was all of 5, but had a weapons cache he could have used to equip a guerrilla unit), for most of the time and provided we treated the gear with respect we were shown how to use it and left to our own devices.

Everyone we knew played something. From Spider who didn’t know the name of the notes but if you showed him where to put his fingers could play better than Stanley Clarke to S who thought (mistakenly) that he was the Mahavishnu orchestra, a typical weeks house party would involve some sort of album being recorded: tracks being laid down, tapes being spliced, rewound, stuck together backwards, forwards, inside out and upside down. The finished product would then be shoved into a drawer somewhere - in keeping with the times, the destination was not as important as the journey. We had the technology, and if we didn’t then mum and dad would take themselves off to the Manor and use theirs (thus giving rise to one of mum’s (many) immortal lines “Mike Oldfield? God, he was an annoying little so and so”).

Strangely enough, the two songs I would associate most with my early childhood are both songs I didn’t know the names of until I was much older. The first of these is lady elanor by Lindisfarne. It’s a classic song of its time – taking more than a few liberties not only with Poes the Fall of the House of Usher but also (if you get a copy and listen to the backing vocals) with the concept of singing in tune Apparently when I was little, this was my lullaby – complete with guitar accompaniment. I don’t remember this, but I do remember that when I heard it played years later (at a new years party given by jboys family when the inner circle – his parents and ours and us were sitting round the table, drinking and singing and generally taking our own liberties with the concept of key) from the first line of “glassy faced musicians…” I knew all the words. Its now one of the songs that I’d take with me to a desert island, not just because of all the memories it holds, but because of the wonderful circular (you would think that living with a guitarist I’d know the proper term for it and I did ask F and he explained something complicated about changing time signatures) guitar which keeps goes round and round and round, almost catching itself each time (apparently the first instance of this is Jeff Becks take on Ravels Bolero and the technique was then taken up and used by Jimmy Page in Kashmir. I’m paraphrasing here so excuse any important omissions. It is – or so I’ve just been told – hardly surprising that this was the case as in both instances you have a drummer, Keith Moon in Beck’s Bolero and Bonham in Kashmir, who elect to follow the guitar rather than holding to a straight rhythm with the bass line. In fact, when it comes to the Who – the reason they had such a unique sound is down to the fact that in that band it’s the bass and drums that take the lead – Keith Moon playing to the orchestra he has in his head and cueing in the horn sections he was hearing – while Townshend and Daltrey were left to keep the engine going. This apparently why Townshend never degenerates into long and winding solos. So now you know)

A month ago, the BBC ran a series of programmes on the development of British Folk Music. I watched them avidly. Not because I was so desperately interested in the development of the British Folk scene – although I do admit a sneaking fascination to it, especially once it stopped drinking real ale and started taking acid. The real reason though was that the piece the Beeb used as a lead in was a song I hadn’t heard for years. It was the piece that dad warmed his fingers up with when he first picked up a guitar on arriving home, the one song that could be guaranteed to get all the musicians scattered round the house playing as one. But for xx years I had no idea of what it was called. Now, thanks to the wonder that is television - I know.
Davy Graham’s Angi (later changed to Anji to fit better with the whole Eastern trip that everyone went on around that time). Up to that point, I didn’t know that it was a ‘proper” piece of music at all. Throughout (and despite) all the music I’d listened to, all the albums and bands I’d explored – I’d never heard the piece being played anywhere except in our house.

Obviously, the old adage “you always prefer the version you hear first” is correct. I could tell you that I prefer dad’s version because it reminds me of the long hot summers, no school (we were rarely sent to school when dad was home – partly because we saw him too infrequently for normal rules to apply but the reality was probably that having to be back in time to pick us up from school was too restricting for our parents schedule at that point) and the whole golden force field that we tend to put around out childhoods. To a certain extent that’s true. But the reality is that I prefer dad’s version because it’s faster and not so sweet.

2. A track that you associate with your first love

Bloody hell, which one? I’ve had several first loves. This isn’t because I’m a shallow obsessive person (and anyone who knows me and feels the need to interject something sarcastic at this point can just fuck off). Far from it, it’s just that I believed so profoundly in the idea of love being something that you only ever experienced once in a lifetime that every time I fell in love, that was it, and all the other times before that had been merely chimeras. As you can imagine, this led to an emotionally draining couple of years. Luckily, once I’d untangled the hormones (mine and theirs) from the emotions (mine – men don’t have them – at least not the ones I dated) then things got much less tiring (although then I had to cope with all the nice girls, who didn’t – or at least didn’t talk about it)

Following the line of thought that you only fall in love once, then the person is F and the song is hooked on a feeling from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack (although we all knew it as the Ouga Chaka song) At the time F was living in a house with god knows how many other Frenchmen (and Jgirl). It wasn’t exactly a squat because they all paid rent (at some time or another) and it wasn’t a commune because there weren’t any lentils, but the principle was the same. You slept where you found a bed, all food was shared (mostly food parcels sent from France – I do remember making pate de fois gras sandwiches with Asda saver white sliced bread because we didn’t have anything else in the house to eat) and there was a party all night, every night. We’d start off slow. A few songs, a bit of playing and singing (mostly old Rod Stewart as little O had a voice that was a dead ringer for him) and once the alcohol had taken effect then the bad 70’s disco would go on. By the time we’d got round to the Ouga Chaka song we were all already on the floor giving it our best Travolta moves. When day broke most of the furniture was too – so we’d pin a sheet over the window to shut out the light and carry on. The parties usually ended at about ten when one of the Frenchmen would brew up some fresh coffee and we’d sit around, sipping expressos and discussing politics and Balzac, a conversation that I was usually barred from due to the fact that I don’t speak French, I don’t do politics (at least not like the French who treat it as an ongoing soap opera), I hadn’t read Balzac and I was usually nursing a hangover the size of Russia. Happy days as my auntie V would say.

The thing is though, you’re going to get awfully bored with this, if for every mention of love I talk about F. I’ll go a bit further back and try to sort out something different.

So, shall I tell you about the charming Robert Plant look alike that I was absolutely besotted with when I was 16 (this was it – wedding bells and happily ever after as far as I was concerned) and who was equally charming to the twenty other girls he was two timing me with at the same time, despite his protestations of undying love. You know the one. The one that would waltz me round Greys monument in the middle of the night. God he was gorgeous. Thick as two short planks but who cared about that. He was a great kisser and could spout more sweet nothings than an explosion in a confectioners. Oh, I could tell you all about him. But it would be so embarrassing to admit that his particular soundtrack was the Whitesnake album (you know the one that had the bint doing aerobics over sports cars on all the videos) that being the album he left behind when he vanished into the night. Well not so much vanished – it would have been less mortifying to my already shrivelled to the size of a walnut psyche if he had –instead he just decamped to a girl who had her own flat and was therefore a safe bet. Looking back I don’t blame him. It must tend to put a crimp into ones burgeoning sexuality to have your girlfriend’s mum shouting, “do you want a cup of tea” up the stairs every 5 minutes (though it will be a trick that I will use should God ever hate me enough to give me a daughter.)

Or, there was my first boyfriend – no my second (they sort of overlapped a bit – I was going through my Janis “you got it today you don’t wear it tomorrow” phase). He was a glam. Or was it a goth? It was difficult to tell at times. No, I was right the first time – he was a glam, but the purple eyeshadow meant it could have gone either way. He was completely obsessed with Nikki Sixx but despite this, the only thing on his stereo was WASP. Actually though – now I come to think of it, I’m not sure that he counts as a first love because I don’t remember any emotional yo-yoing of my heart about him. I sort of dated him a couple of times and then we split up – although I did agonise over breaking up with him (I’d never broken up with anyone before and so ended up using the time honoured method of a message carried from my best friend at the time to his best friend at the time). To be honest, I think that I only dated him cos he asked me to, at that point I didn’t realise that when a boy asked you out – you had the option of saying no. I was working on the much more pragmatic principle that if you were asked then it might be your only ever offer so you better take it. So. No. He doesn’t count as a first love. (And it’s nothing to do with the fact that I utterly refuse to have WASP – Animal Fuck like a beast, as a song to associate with my first love – especially when he didn’t even get to first base.)

What about my first crush? That’s probably more like it. All the girls had a crush on him. I’m not sure why. He wasn’t especially bright, he wasn’t especially witty, he wasn’t especially good looking - he had that rubber lipped Jagger/Tyler thing going on but that was about it (now I come to think of it though, he had quite nice greeny blue eyes, oh and pretty hair – but this was the late eighties- all the boys had pretty hair then and he looked good in jeans and biker jacket too so I suppose he had quite a lot going for him really…) It wasn’t even that he was a particularly nice person – in fact he was shit. Actually that was why all the girls had a crush on him. Because he was a shit. But he was so charming with it that somehow you didn’t mind that - it was just part of his personality. In any case it wasn’t so much that he was intentionally shitty – it was just that he inhabited more realities than we did and on each of those realities - the steady girlfriend who was only around at weekends, the married woman (who was herself scooting round the space/time continuation as she was seeing him on the side of her husband and her regular lover), the girl he was actively trying to bed but who was a devout catholic, and a couple of others – he was a nice person. It was only when reality converged that things got problematic.

My best friend (at the time) and I first met him when we started hanging round Eldon Square on a Saturday. For any non-Geordie reading this, Eldon Square was/is a shopping mall and if you were into rock music (and you had to be – the alternative was either to be a NME reader and who wants to wear a polo neck and trenchcoat all the time, or to be into chart music and therefore a trendy – we call them chavs now) then it was de-rigueur to spend your entire Saturday making a slow pilgrimage round the record shops. Not that you ever bought anything – you never had any money. But, if you were too young to get served in Trillions (the local rock pub) then that was all you had available in the way of entertainment. Saying that, for you not to get served in Trillions you had to be in a pram – I used to bunk off games and go there in my school uniform and I never had a problem getting served (which made for some really interesting English lessons which was the lesson after that).

Anyway, there we were. My friend and I, taking our first faltering steps into the world outside of “people we knew from school” and there he was. (With the obligatory nice but not as sexy friend) For some reason he started talking to us. It soon got be a bit of a habit that we’d meet him every Saturday, and then – all of a sudden – all these people we’d watched wander round the record shops and who were the people we’d wanted to know almost more than anything in the world (I say, almost more than anything in the world because obviously we wanted to know Guns n Roses more than anything else in the world) suddenly became the people we hung out with. I must admit, the novelty of knowing them soon wore off, but that’s life – people are way more interesting when you don’t hear them speak.

I fancied him rotten. But he was much too occupied with his girlfriend, the married woman, the catholic girl and a couple of others to be interested in me. So all we ever did was the usual staring too long at each other, giggling (me) and hair flicking (both of us) and what I thought were some pretty fierce come on lines but in retrospect were as innocent as saying hello. (But can you remember the days when a “ hello” from the right person was a fierce come on line.)

Now if I were to stop the story right here then I’d have to admit that there wasn’t really a song. Because when you’re walking round and round a shopping mall there’s not usually a soundtrack or at least not one that I’d remember. So, the song up to this point would have been Metallica’s Master of Puppets because that was what was painted on the back of his jacket. However there is a final chapter. Although once real boyfriends drifted into my life we stopped meeting on a Saturday, we sort of kept in touch – if by keeping in touch you mean saying hi when we met in the Mayfair (local rockclub – now alas closed down to make room for a cinema or something) and I went off to university. Coming home for the first Christmas holiday I went out as normal on a Friday night and bumped into him in a bar.

To cut a long story short: the absence of any parental “you will be home on the last bus or else you’re grounded for a month” restrictions, feeling fabulous because I’d lost nearly 2 stone after having starved for the past term – because after all if it’s a toss up between food and clubbing which would you choose (at that age?), and generally revelling in not only my new found freedom but also enjoying being blasé about Newcastle because I now went out in London (the ultimate goal of course was to move to LA but London was as far as I could get on a student grant) coupled with the fact that he looked just as good in a denim jacket (times change - even in Newcastle) as he had in a leather one… reader I went home with him.

Sitting on the floor (there wasn’t a sofa, or at least not one that I could see), where so many girls I knew had sat before, playing with cooking fat (his cat – not a euphemism – he did have a cat called cooking fat and another one called Suzy. It was so called because everyone was always tripping over it hence ‘ that cucking fat” – you need the accent to get it right) while he made us a cup of tea (hey this is Newcastle –tea is always served at moments of high emotion. Someone’s dead - I’ll put the kettle on. “Your mother’s just run off with a crack smoking, jailbreaking gal from sunderland? - Do you take one lump or two?”. “You’re pregnant and the popes the father? – I’ll break out the rich tea biscuits, this is going to be a long night”) and there was my song. As if made for this moment. Dan Reed Network – Rainbow Child.

(Its still quite an embarrassing song mind you– but it’s less embarrassing than “in the still of the night” or animal fuck like a beast, or master of puppets.)

The old saying, “be careful what you ask for, you just might get it” I never applied to myself. Maybe I was just ahead of my time in stating my needs so clearly (I always figured that a no was simply a word used by someone who hadn’t given in yet,). Maybe as the most righteous MC Grandma S of the WI posse once definitively stated, I was just plain spoilt - although how she can reconcile that statement with the fact that she now buys pop for her younger grandchildren when we older ones were only allowed one small glass a week (as a special treat after Sunday dinner) I don’t know. Maybe it was just that I had the logic of the truly self obsessed and had figured out that if I was asking for it - then I wanted to get it - that being the whole point of me asking for it in the first place.

Until last week. Last week was when it all went pear shaped. I’m not blaming anyone. The only thing that saves me from complete and utter egotism is that when the chips are down, the jig well and truly up, my back’s against the wall and the final cigarette’s stubbed out– I’ll take my medicine like a man and stand firm against the crashing tides of the (usually blown up out of all proportion) consequences. I asked for it. I got it, and being brought up in the belief that if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime, (but always have a good lawyer on retainer) then I’m not going to whinge about it (well not that much anyway).

It’s certainly not CH’s fault for starting this. I was the one who said “please please please, with a cherry on the top, please tag me to do this twenty tracks thing – it sounds like fun”. And being the really sweet and nice and wonderfully kind person that she is, she tagged me and it’s not been fun. At all.

Bad enough to choose twenty tracks out of the hundred you have scattered around your head, even if you are given subheadings to file them under – they don’t make it easier at all. For example. First question – “A track from your early childhood” Do you mean the track I knew all the words to and could sing before I have any proper linear memories of being alive? Or, do you mean the track that I associate with my early childhood? Or, do you mean the track that was constantly played throughout my early childhood? They aren’t one and the same thing. Or “a track that accompanied you when you were lovesick” That presupposes that you’ve only been lovesick once (or that you played the same song each time). Man, throughout my teens I was lovesick at least twice a week. And because I truly believed that love was a once in a lifetime thing – that was it. I was doomed to the dark unyielding emptiness of a life spent alone and without love. Forget the butterfly turning on the wheel, my heart was a Limoges swallow that had been knocked off the mantelpiece and lay amongst the ashes on the hearth of despair, my aorta an advert for superglue. And each particular occasion had its own signature tune, endlessly played, depending on the personality of the heartbreaker, the mode of heartbreak and how humiliating the experience had been overall.

Difficult too, dealing with all the other memories that these questions unreeled. All those archive boxes we have in our heads – they’re like big boxes of old photos. And once you unpack them, you’re done for. You end up sitting on the floor, surrounded by a carpet of snaps, engrossed for hours. People who aren’t around any more, places you haven’t ever been back to, places that no longer look the same even though you go back regularly, people who have changed, people who never will no matter how much you may want them to, and not forgetting how much you’ve changed over the years. Some of the memories have been along the lines of “hey wow! I’d forgotten about that!” and some of the memories have been along the lines of “oh shit! I’d forgotten about that” and it’s tricky to say which of those statements is the most painful. So it’s been difficult dealing with the memories that these questions have brought to the surface. Harder too, to actually put yourself back in certain places when you play a certain song (and obviously I’ve been trawling through the playlists for the past week) and sometimes harder to leave that place once you’re there.

What I’ve realised this past week is that I’m obsessed by music. I don’t mean obsessed in a material sense. I don’t haunt record fairs (do they still have record fairs these days? Probably not) searching out bootleg copies of tracks that are exactly the same as the copy that was released by the record company except for a slight misspelling of the second engineers name on the cover notes. Nor do I buy obscure ezines featuring strange bands known only to themselves, their mum and a small group of strange people who meet once a year and drink real ale. I’m not hip or trendy. The music I like has never been cool, even when it was cool. I’ve only every bought NME once – when there was an article on the band that F was in at the time – and I would have been less embarrassed buying a copy of Razzle from a newsagents run by the little Sisters of the Sacred Heart. I’ve never done that take-an-album-out-of-its cover-by-only-letting-your-fingertips-lightly-touch-the-edges-before-blowing-upon-it-gently-and-reverently-placing-it-on-the-pristine-needle-not-worn-down-at-all turntable which has been carefully calibrated by a German master craftsman. In fact, it used to be a miracle if I put an album back into its cover at all – most of the time they were frisbeed across the room and on with the next one. I always figured that albums were like jeans – the more beat up they were, the better. The CD age didn’t change that one jot – and I can still pick out the tape I want from a pile of identical unlabelled cassettes, simply by looking at the way the tape’s wound.

This obsession is nothing to do with the fact that I live with a musician. Although many would disagree (anyone who’s ever been in a band with F while he was dating me, for a start), for the record, I’d like to point out that; being fully cognisant of the fact that I’m obsessed by music, secure in the knowledge that I always know best about everything, even things I know nothing about, coupled with the desire never to do anything which might make me look even faintly ridiculous (I haven’t always succeeded at this), the one thing that I’ve always been careful to avoid being is a Janine. This means that any firmly held opinion (I’m referring to the Spanish knife throwing incident here) that F might hold is entirely his own opinion and nothing to do with the satanic power I wield over him. It’s his job and I tend to take as much notice of it as I would if he were an accountant or a lawyer or whatever. I don’t thank him for saying things like “wouldn’t that look better in orange?” or “why not use a different word” so why the hell should he be thrilled and enthralled if I suggest that it might sound better if he recorded it without dobley (and yes, the misspelling is intentional). When he’s working to a deadline, I may I occasionally throw him a cup of coffee but most of the time I don’t – I stick my head round the door and ask him to turn it down. I rarely venture an opinion on what he does. Chances are that if he’s playing guitar then it’s perfect (there are only so many times you can say “I like it” and sound sincere) and if he’s scoring something then to be honest, once you’ve heard the same track played non-stop for 24 hours, the opinion you have of it is not something that you’d care to repeat out loud – not unless you were a fishwife anyway.

Neither do I have any deeply rooted subliminal desire to be a musician. If I had, I’d be one. I’m not completely tone deaf. I play the violin – badly. I gave it up in disgust when Johnny picking up the dough beat the devil, who I always thought was a way better player, although I always suspected that the devil let Johnny win because he couldn’t bear the sound of the fucking red neck fiddle for all eternity. But I took it up, not out of any deep seated desire to play the thing but because it got me out of double maths and thus was the lesser of two evils. When we swapped schools I took up the flute for the same reason. Show me a microphone (and feed me a few whiskeys) and you can’t get me down with a gun, but that proves nothing. I’m exactly the same in front of a camera. I’m self-obsessed but at least I admit it. And I’ll confess that I felt disappointed when it became apparent that I was never going to be an infant prodigy but not because I particularly wanted to be one. It’s just that I’m so damn competitive that I hate to be in a race that I’m not dead certain I’m going to win. Forget the quiet satisfaction of achieving a personal goal – I want the medals, the ticker tape parade (with majorettes and a brass band) the keys to the city, the eternal thanks of a grateful nation and a pizza, and I want them now. I don’t have the patience to do things badly. I know that this sort of thinking is anathema to most people and they will quite rightly point out that if you chose to do only the things that you can do – then you are limiting yourself. That’s true. There’s a lot to be said for genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But you need to have the flash of inspiration there in the first place, that burning picture of what you want to create and when it came to music I never had that flash.

Possibly that’s why music is so important to me. It’s the one thing that speaks to me solely through the emotion and not the intellect. Something that I’m not saying, “oh, that’s how they did it” or “ Christ a three year old can achieve the same thing if you leave them alone with a set of magic markers and a clean wall” about. I’m glad of that. I can get my ideas down in a form that satisfies me in most other mediums, which means that there are very few works that I approach only through the heart. There are some that do. Van Gogh (apart from “sunflowers”) makes me cry great choking, heaving, wracking, sobs as soon as I see one of his paintings and it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it before – but it has to be the real thing and not a print. I think its something to do with his brushstrokes – they hit me like razorblades. There are paragraphs and poems that leave me uplifted or gobsmacked or howling with laughter or plunged into the depths of despair but there is nothing that does it as regularly or as deeply as music.

Maybe obsession was the wrong word. Addiction is probably closer to the truth. Having music around is like having the key to a pharmacists and the ability to compound your own pills. I discovered at an early age that music could change not just my mood but also my entire outlook on life, that a certain sequence of notes could leave me happy, or sad, or beautiful, or afraid, or invincible. That a certain song might make me want to paint or write or smash something. It’s like a Pavlovian reaction…when the song plays – you will feel this emotion. And I do. I have playlists entitled “happy”, “sad”, “painting”, “writing” “drunk” “stoned” “memories” “angry”… you name it – I have a playlist of it (and in the days before playlists I had tapes – and still do. In fact I transferred most of the contents of these tapes to the playlists). Take everything else away from me. Brushes, paper, pens, books even the computer, but as long as I could still listen to music, I wouldn’t give a shit. And even if you did take away the music it wouldn’t matter because it’s all in my head anyway so I can run through a favourite album at the drop of a hat, lyrics, solos drumbeats weird keyboard sounds, the lot – its like being mainlined into my ipod (which is where you’ll usually find me anyway).

CB has tagged me with this 20 tracks thing. It’s turning into a bit of a serious psychotherapy session and could take some time – and several episodes. Just to let you know that I’m working on it….