A victim of my unfortunate first marriage was my love for music. It only occurred to me when the current Mrs Eclectic Blue (34 years and counting) put it to me that when we first got together I’d pretty well stopped listening to music altogether. Naturally, my initial reply was very defensive and snappy because why would someone who claims to be a music obsessive admit to having all but lost interest in it for a fair old period during the late 1980s and early 1990s? Reluctantly, I had to admit that, as usual, she was right. I dabbled in some music in the early 1990s – Prefab Sprout, Blur and would you believe fucking Oasis? – but in the main I listened to speech radio. The only good music that existed was released in the 1960s and 1970s, right? Well, almost.
Certainly, the 1960s saw pop and rock music evolve into the genres we have today. Love them or hate The Beatles – and if you hate The Beatles, I suggest you seek out urgent psychiatric treatment – they changed everything and very little of what we love today would exist without them. And the 1970s built on it, as we were treated to change after change until the 1980s, the decade the music died, or very nearly. (If you listen each day to Heardle, as we do, you will soon understand what I mean about the 1980s being so shit.) But my loss of interest in music had more to do with different priorities, like having to escape from a violent woman.
When I was set free from a disastrous relationship, I rarely heard music at all. It might be in pubs, where I spent an inordinate amount of time back in the day, as we say, but it wasn’t really anywhere else. Still in my early thirties, I became older then than I am today, at least in terms of how I felt about music. It’s all shit nowadays. Music was far better in the old days.
Slowly, I started to change. First through the 50 and 60-something year old world of BBC Radio 2, which plays more new music than you might think, along with the more comfortable slacks, slippers and dunk-your-biscuit-in-your-tea acts like ELO, Lionel Ritchie, Muse and, yes, Oasis. Better still, I found myself liking new music and wanting to hear new music and by the mid 2000s, someone probably said, “Have you ever listened to BBC 6 Music?”
My early life was definitely spent as a music obsessive. I was barely out of nappies when my mum bought me She Loves You by The Beatles and Not Fade Away by The Rolling Stones. Real life, albeit a very unpleasant version of it, got in the way. Freed from chaos and carnage, the love for music returned, never, I hope to go away again. Today, as I see my life pass by quicker each day – and trust me, kids: this is exactly how it feels as you get older – I find I have an insatiable desire to hear new music, along with the older stuff which I have grown to love again.
Today, I have been listening to 6 Music and the majority of the music played I had not heard before. Yet unlike the old me, that was just fine and dandy. I heard new music from Porij, The Smile (think Radiohead because this is a slimmed down version) and the brilliant Newdad this morning, all for the first time, and I loved it all. It was a real shift for me, albeit a wholly subconscious one, embracing new music rather than always falling back on the oldies but I do feel my life is better for it.
It was the late, great David Crosby who summed it all up for me. Croz, as we knew him, had a wonderful late career outpouring of creativity, releasing five brilliant studio albums in the last nine years of his life. I remember an interviewer asking him what had sparked this rush of activity. “New music, new life,” he replied. Yes, that’s it. New music, new life. That’s how it feels to me, too.
