NEW COLUMN – MWJ – De-Formative Years

My salad days were better than your salad days.  except they weren’t, they were all good, because they were ours and they will always have that special place in our hearts.  Whatever made music click in your head to be a lifetime obsession, the friends who shared those fresh discoveries with you, maybe your own dabbling in bands to recreate those exciting vibes or go off on whatever tangents were possible, the local scenes and crazy times that created, all good, all valid.   and whenever, often in teenage years, when you’re finding and defining your own identity, it coincides with wider world tides, waves, and eddies in the seas of music that were about at the time.  Incoming tsunamis, explosions in the sky  Dive in and soak it up.

But that was then.  and now the floods have risen, the seas have become an internet ocean, all is diluted and the flame of your early passion is in danger of  being drowned out there in the vastness of it all.  So you cling to this raft of safe nostalgia of the good old days that may or may not have actually been that good, whenever they may have been for you, and nothing can compete, or recreate it.  Then everything new is inclined to be inferior or foreign and besides all those friends are now in different places and we’re all living different lives so it won’t be the same cos you’ll have no-one to share it with and there’s boxsets to be watched and work in the morning.  Suit yourself, wallow in the shallows of memory like a luke-warm three inch deep bath, get wrinkled and cold, dissolve like your memories.

But maybe don’t drag everyone else down the draining plughole to the past with you.
Let others dip their toes, paddle, and swim to a myriad new islands of musical experience (sometimes known as gigs) in hope, even with little expectation for all the more to be pleasantly surprised, because lo and behold, things are as good as they ever were, always have been, always will be.  Even if the combination of drink and drugs is all jaded,  and the camaraderie and just the newness of it all has all faded. Even if there are ever more obstacles to the experience (conjured up in some government lab, I’ll bet… ;), there are still bands channelling that majick musical essence right now.  Creating some twist and tweak on the formula that just works and is electrifying and exciting.  they are out there, so should you be.  Pull up a socially distanced deckchair on the post apocalyptic beach and bask in the warmth of a cranked up amplifier.  Soon.