I love music, that is a well-known fact. It is also a
well-documented fact, when I say documented I mean face booked, twittered and
blogged. I have blogged about my love of music and where it started, I have
blogged about how I believe people should be fearless in their love of music,
not ashamed, not embarrassed but totally and utterly immersed in what they
love, regardless of if people judge you for it. I certainly don’t care, if I
did I probably wouldn’t be so vocal about my outright love of Michael Ball for
instance. However, and be warned this is
a peril of the industry, you can make music your life, and then you can forget
the point of music. Let me be clear, you can never really forget, because the
instant you hear the opening notes of a song that means something to you, you
are incapable of turning off the emotions that will flood through you. That is
as obligatory as growing older. What you can forget is the all-consuming,
passionate desire to sing and dance along to something. The inescapable sheer
delight of abandoning yourself to damn fine music.
This whole blog has to be dedicated to Rock of Ages, it
brought me back to when I was 18, when I could forget everything, the time,
that my feet hurt, that I had to get up the next morning, that anything else
existed. That is what live music is capable of doing to you. I can distinctly
remember standing in a bar called 49ers, watching a band having so much fun,
and putting so much into their performances that I danced and sang until my
shoes broke and my voice was hoarse. That gives me the same feeling as I got
when I stood in front Tom Jones at the age of 8 and realized what live music
really was. This followed me through concert after concert and night after
night in rockbottom. It’s what makes me tick inside.
I remember, and I am sure my Mother and Father remember very
clearly, my first ever night out ‘clubbing’. I was to all intents and purposes
at the cinema. Unbeknownst to my Mother and Father, I was in one of Newcastles
dodgiest bars (the only one I thought my brother wouldn’t see me in) having a fine
old time. The next day I was duly grounded, my brother and his all-seeing
network of friends were a little concerned as to why on earth his 15 yr old
sister was in a bar called Bonkers at the weekend. Cue 2 months of misery, a
month of being grounded, then more weeks and days of being grounded for
refusing to speak to my poor brother, who I blamed with a massive passion for
being restricted to barracks. At the end of all the teenage kicking off and
moaning, my Father asked me had my one night in a nightclub been worth all that
hassle and I calmly replied that yes, indeed it had been. He looked aghast and
I explained that I had danced, sung, danced, twirled around and had the time of
my life, and whilst there were bottles of two dogs on the go, that wasn’t my
main reason for being there. It was the music. A plan was formed, and my
brother became my guardian, taking me clubbing and allowing me to dance my
little socks off in such places as ‘planet earth and legends’, fast forward to
Dubai, and bars with real life people in them singing music. Old school music,
heaven.
From then until now live music has been a part of my world.
However I haven’t recently found myself in any situation where I have lost the
sense of who I am, where I am or what I am doing. That’s what a real live
concert should do to you. I watched Rock of Ages and I watched Tom Cruise
capture the old school Rock Gods with perfect sweat inducing, jack daniels
drinking strutting perfection and it made me yearn for a wild night out.
Watching the shots of people crammed in bars having the night of their lives,
made me wish to be in a bar, sweaty and tired and smiling like a kid at
Christmas.
Tom Cruise looks into Alec Baldwins eyes and tells him he
wants to set his club on fire, I get goose bumps, that kind of
insane night out has eluded me for awhile, maybe it’s because I am no longer
22, maybe it’s a lack of the right kind of night out. It led me to think about
todays music, and what will happen when I have kids. How I will apologise for
our rubbish generation of music. My Father introduced me to Foreigner, Tom
Jones, Hall and Oates, Doobie Brothers, Alexander o Neil, Def Leppard and many
many more, that genuinely changed my life. Can you imagine the scene in my
house in a few years, come on Redding Junior sit here and mammy will get you to
listen to some music, this is Kylie, she spins around. This, right here, is
J-Lo, she’s just Jenny from the block, very deep. Don’t forget this one here;
LMFAO, he is sexy and he knows it.
Followed up by a little Beyonce, who suggests that if boys like ‘it’
they should put a ring on it. It makes me sad. You have to dig deep for the
greats, the Alicia Keys, Oasis, Adele, who by the way is starting to get
annoying. Stop over exposing her and let me enjoy her goddamn music. I will be
telling my children to delve deeper, go back further and enjoy a time where
Musicians wrote their own music, where they once upon a time had to carry their
own instruments and gigged in bars for no money and lived on mates sofas.
Unlike this nation of self-made, spoiled brats who wouldn’t know a snog lyric
if it smacked them in the face. Call me maybe ? I’d like to call you something
and it certainly won’t be ‘maybe’. You haven’t actually lived until you have
owned and played an LP. This makes me sound old, and a bit of a wet blanket,
however I don’t care. I just can’t get up the same enthusiasm for watching a
man press play and play music he made on a computer to thousands of people,
when I could don my boots, and go dance and listen to an actual musician growl
into a microphone, telling me something about his life.
I will take songs, music, with depth, and history, and
passion over One Direction any day. The new Beatles ? Please.
