Music Stuff

[redfiona99]

Nicky Wire said something very interesting a few weeks ago on Later With Jools Holland. Jools was asking something about musical influences are Nicky said something like “you never love bands the way you did when you were 16”. He was saying that, in many ways, your musically formative years are 16-21 and that older than that you don’t connect in the same way.

I can’t help but think he’s right. It’s not that I don’t like new music but that burning ‘my band until death’ feeling isn’t there anymore. I’d widen the age boundaries, probably 11-21 but that’s because I found the Manics when I was 11 and, you know, they’re the band that saved my life. So I was trying to think who the last bad that I felt like that about, and it might be the Killers but even by then I’d probably hit the age of not believing, as it were. A band like the Arctic Monkeys, they came that little bit too late for me, because I recognise that they’re good, musically, lyrically and give a good performance live, but I don’t feel the world-shattering genius thing that gets thrown about over them. At the same time, I freely acknowledge that teenage me would have gone mad for them.

The other thing I’d add is how the bands that were your world at that age, when you hear them and see them now; they still do that to you. Because seeing Travis live, I wasn’t 28 year old me, I was the 14 year old that bought their singles and any music magazine that had an interview with them. When I await the Manics’s new stuff*, it’s the younger me ready to tear it apart to try to extract all the meaning from it.

*I’m not so fond of the latest album. Or rather, I love the music, not so fond of the lyrics. Eagerly awaiting part 2 mind you, JDB doing Neu and Kraftwerk.

Also, as an example of the bands meaning that little bit too much, I was, several years ago, thinking of changing my website name from Sehnsucht, not because I loved Rammstein less or because I liked the idea any less, I just decided that using German was pretentious beyond belief but then Nicky Wire released an album and one of the tracks was called Sehnsucht and it was a *sign*and I couldn’t change it and I realise that sounds mad but they’re my band.

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Until I was 16, there was only one radio station in my town. It played some Top 40 but mostly older stuff, and mostly not the good older stuff, either, just blandness. Then Triple J (Australia's wonderful public-funded youth station) established a local transmitter and suddenly there was Nirvana and Massive Attack and Silverchair and PJ Harvey and Tricky and it was so, so amazing. I (and just about every teenager I knew) went kind of beserk with delight for about six months. So nothing else has ever been that intense, but I don't think it would have mattered much whether Triple J hit me when I was 12 or 24; but it did and it was astonishing.