“New music,” said Stuart Maconie, this morning, on the Radcliffe and Maconie show on BBC 6 Music, “Is just music you haven’t before.” It stopped me in my tracks, or rather would have done if I hadn’t been driving at the time, but immediately I had heard something I know to be true. It was, in some small way, revelatory.
I am always banging on about how I love new music and I have become increasingly aware that there could be a “but you don’t” sneer when I say it. I don’t mean it to sound like that because that is not how I feel. Not only that, there was a time when I never ventured out of my musical comfort zone. I knew what I liked and saw no reason to like anything new or different. If I hadn’t discovered BBC 6 Music, I could easily be listening to nothing but the stuff I listened to in the dim and distant past.
To a point, my musical tastes stood still in the mid to late 1970s when I discovered girls. It wasn’t helped that BBC Radio One, which was supposed to be for young people, became absurdly old and dated, specifically the presenters and the music. Rather than demanding better, I retreated to what I already liked. And given that ‘new’ music was essentially – sorry, here we go again – dreck like Queen, the antidote to rock and roll music, I was well out of it.
I’d listen to the radio and wait for the songs I knew and liked and switched off when new or unfamiliar music came on. I missed out on so much. The change in my head was imperceptible. I found myself listening to great presenters like Radcliffe and Maconie, Shaun Keaveny and Lauren Laverne and it was like being at a music school. Yes, there was always stuff with which I was familiar but there was much more with which I wasn’t.
I still loved Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers but now I loved Thundercat, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Erland Cooper, Fleet Foxes, Beach House, Gwenno, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Porij and so many more. But I also keep discovering new old music, stuff I missed first time around. artists like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Bobbie Gentry (I mean, I did know about Bobbie because I fell in love with her legs when still a pre-pubescent boy, but I never realised the depth of her work) for example. And even now I’ll hear something by Coldcut or Nick Drake or Stereolab, all mixed in with new music from Julia Jacklin, Stevan and I.Jordan. I don’t know if music was my first love but it’s become my obsession.
We live in the best ever time for music. I genuinely believe that this is a golden period for music because you have all the new stuff that’s coming out alongside all the music that’s ever been made. Do not listen to anyone who tells you music is shit nowadays and it was better in the old days. People who say that are people like I was until I gradually woke up to new music that I hadn’t heard before. Opening my ears to new possibilities was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And the more music I find, the happier I am.
