A Question of Time and Place

Context is everything. What can sound dangerous and subversive in one lifetime comes across as anything but in another. For instance: can you imagine a song like Relax causing as much fuss today? It’s about gay sex? Oh, that’s nice, dear, pass the corn flakes.

What got me thinking of this was writing a couple of short articles for a No Ripcord playlist on favourite cover versions. My selections included Al Green’s take on the Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand. As a 16 year old, I’d dutifully picked up the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 double albums, finding myself unimpressed with the early stuff up until Ticket To Ride. It all sounded so twee and nursery rhyme. But to someone like my Uncle (16 in 1963), it probably sounded like the beginning of everything, the same way Relax may well have done (sonically as well as in any lyrical meaning it may have had) in 1984.

(Of course, years on when I heard the Please Please Me and With The Beatles albums and their versions of Twist and Shout and Money, I realised they did have keep some of the bollocks they’d grown in Hamburg after all.)

Going back to whatever the point I was trying to raise – context. Music being old doesn’t always dilute impact. It depends where you’re coming from, and when I first carefully placed Joy Division’s Closer on my folks’ record player in the summer of 1997, I’d never heard anything like the screech of Atrocity Exhibition. Then unaware of Ballard, I thought the title brought up images of someone going mad with a chainsaw in an abattoir, which is what it sounded like, in the best possible way.

I’ve spent a lot of the subsequent 14 years chasing that feeling again. I envied the people who must have had their socks blown by the Sex Pistols in 1976 – after all, Never Mind The Bollocks just sounded like a very well produced rock album to these ears. Yet it and Joy Division were only separated by a couple of years, but sounded light years apart. It wasn't until he got Public Image Ltd together and made Metal Box that Lydon really dabbled with the extreme.

There have been times I’ve caught up with my own ambitions. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless sounded like the sexiest thing in the world, far, far beyond the groin thrusting machismo of more mainstream rock. Slowdive managed similar feats, principally on their astounding She Calls. On another level, I remember being insanely jealous when I first heart the Chameleons and realising somebody else had done that kind of music before I could.

As I clock on into my 30s, I worry I’m reverting to type as a grumpy old git. When I’m played music by new bands, I’m prone to saying "sounds like ". Maybe it’s a genetic predisposition to stop being excited by things, so that we do the sensible thing – settle down and have kids. But when the idea of that gives you a cold sweat, what’s there left to do but keep looking?