Somehow the wonder of life prevails

Friday Fragment #29

I spent several days away from phone reception and WiFi at the end of last week. I hadn’t anticipated that being disconnected from a world to which all of us are so slavishly tethered would feel so urgent a thing to take advantage of, but I guess so many of us learn or wish for that lesson too late. And that we too sparely heed its instruction. I spent four days in the company of good friends: cooking and eating, walking and swimming, talking. Food, movement, conversation: how did we ever manage or desire to make life so much more complex than that? One evening, we got onto discussing music, and Jon suggested we create a playlist to which each of us should add ‘their three favourite tracks’. Favourites are curious and fickle things. I chose a track by The Verve, one by Underworld and another by Scott Walker¹. My favourites? Probably not, but then to have been more exacting would most certainly have changed the mood of the evening and brought the derision of my friends. Playful mockery I am always happy to endure, but what we were really being asked was to choose something that would perpetuate the spirit of happiness and friendship that we had created around the dining table that night. For music is always inextricably about place and time, and about people (or, contrarily, a state of aloneness). My memory returns many different pieces of music that are not necessarily those I like best or listen to most, but ones which locate me in a certain place or time. Two first tapes: ‘tributes’ to the music of John Williams and the hits of Bucks Fizz, picked up, no doubt, by Mum from the discount bin at Woolworths or similar. Hunting High and Low by A-ha was the first album my brother and I owned in any meaningful kind of way. Its white cassette lived (and eventually died) in the family tape player, austere enough to dislocate a finger as you forcefully clunked down the play button. I remember Pet Shop Boys’ Actually in the back garden at the new house, during a heatwave summer when we sunbathed on the same concrete slabs from which we’d washed away the overflowing effluence of a blocked sewage drain only days earlier: one of the lingering poverty aesthetics of our childhood. At art college, I listened to ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ in the room of the girl who would become, just a few days later, the first to break my heart, or so I thought, but now realise that she was merely the first to reveal to me that it was beating. I still love Depeche Mode today. I remember the euphoria of Darren Emerson playing ‘Pearl’s Girl’ towards the end of his DJ set at the Hub nightclub in Bath the very same week that a longer relationship had broken and truly tested that beating heart one more. We arrived back to a friend’s flat and listened to Leftfield’s ‘Melt’ on endless repeat until about 6am whilst stretching out the last of his tobacco packet and his film-wrapped square of dope. Hours of Playstation with my best friend Stu to the sound of Moon Safari, Cold Water Music and Screamadelica. Walking back along the seafronts of Brighton and Hove, trying to remember every beautiful spiritual strain of the Sigur Ròs gig I’d just savoured at St George’s Church in Kemptown at the start of the new millennium. Walking the coastal path from Portobello to Leith, melancholy and immersed in the voice of two Mark Kozelek songs: ‘Ceiling Gazing’ and ‘Somehow The Wonder of Life Prevails’, salt and spray carrying on the wind from the water more than a hundred yards away. And last year: ‘The Adventure of Life’, forever now Mama’s song, describing and soundtracking so beautifully a family’s goodbye to my mother-in-law. Music wraps around and into all of those things and shapes something far greater than a simple harmony of sound or expression of emotion, something wonderful, something that prevails.

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1. ‘History’, ‘Pearls Girl’ and ‘If You Go Away’ respectively.