Back to Black

Let’s get this out of the way before we go anywhere else. I am not a hipster. I don’t have a beard. Beards don’t smack of style to me, they reek of Action Man Adventurer, Geography teachers of Grange Hill, and men trying to hide their chins.  I did once have a beard, but that was because I’d broken my ankle and couldn’t stand up to shave.  After three weeks I was very hirsute of face. As is common to men with beards, I did not look the sine qua non of style, I just looked rough. A cross between Cat Stevens and a particularly lazy suicide bomber.  I don’t like beards, I don’t do beards.  Like Alexander the Great, I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to not feel the need to stick it on my face like a circus sideshow.

Similarly, I have neither sleeve tattoo, German footwear nor an appetite for quinoa and locally sourced meats. I am not a hipster.

What I do have is a newly acquired acquaintance with vinyl, - the round grooved type, not the cheap, practical flooring material.  Here is where I intersect with hipsters in the Venn diagram of life.  

And, I suppose, I owe those bearded, sleeve-tattooed, craft-beer drinking wankers a debt of gratitude. While I’ve been away for the last twenty years in the easy world of digital, the Hoxton wankers insistence on being Bona Fide has kept the coma-ridden, semi-cadaverous playing of records on life support.  So, twats of the world, thank you.  Without you, there would be nothing to return to, and my collection of choice platters would be as useful as the two-hundred TDKs I buried in landfill last year.

My conversion to CD wasn’t straightforward.  As a youth, I bought a lot of records.  Obsessively so at times.  I have All About Eve singles on five formats.  I have box sets of songs I didn’t particularly like, but whose packaging lured me into purchase like a shiny fly to a stupid fish. I’ve got albums I still haven’t played, but still plan to one day*. When my peers were turning to CDs because ‘they sounded cleaner’ I stuck to my ancient ways. 

Until idleness took over.  The true advantage of CDs was that you didn’t get up halfway through to turn them over.  While this wasn’t a problem most of the time, it was a particular burn with Pink Floyd albums, for reasons I won’t spell out.  See also Jimi Hendrix, Late Beatles, Hawkwind, Screamadelica, Smokers’ Delight, You Lazy Fucker, Get a Job and Stop Laying Around and Too Stoned to Move. It was a revelation from which I did not recover for many years.

People of a certain age will remember being told that CDs were indestructible. TV shows were riddled with demos of them being smeared with jam, used as coasters, spat on and shat on**. The host would then wipe down the disc of wonder, insert it into one of those VHS player sized CD machines and –hey fucking presto – the unjammed, coffee free sounds of Dire Straits.  It was always Dire Straits, Brothering their fucking Arms.

Yes, we were told they were indestructible. The Incredible Hulk of the musical formats. We were lied to***.

I have hundreds of CDs, and mostly they skip like a schoolgirl on meth. They are less useful than the proverbial chocolate teapot, because at least a chocolate teapot can be eaten. They don’t even make particularly good Frisbees. Shiny discs of corporate theft.

So I’ve bought a record player, I’ve resurrected my collection, and can now be found wandering junk shops in search of hidden gems, elbowing beardy, sandalistas out of my way. Ebay is a new danger in a way it never has been before. Do I need This Charming Man in three different formats? No, of course I don’t, but I’ve bought them anyway. Three versions of Atoms for Peace? Yeah, why not.

 I suspect my love of vinyl is going to kill me financially.         

 

Luckily, while I was still buying vinyl in the mid-nineties, everyone was else was buying CDs. It means that all my Oasis records are now highly sought-after, as is my Aphex Twin brown vinyl and a variety of other things I’ll never listen to again. Ebay taketh away but Ebay also giveth.  I can flog old to hipsters for stupid money, and buy new.  

Wanna buy a copy of Me and my Beard by the Geography Teachers, squire? First pressing – scratch n sniff organic meats and beard oil? Yours for fifty son…

* Zodiac Mindwarp, I’m looking at you.

**Maybe not this one, lthough I could still hear traces of faecal matter, so I’m not ruling it out.

***The motto of the 20^th and 21^st Century, surely.

Standing on a Beach

The first time I stood on a beach, and saw the sea, endless and magnificent. I was about seven, and it was like being smacked full in the face with a metaphysical, heavy-bottomed frying pan. I was on a day-trip to Blackpool, home of seaside rock and beachfront misery, and wasn't really expecting to have such a life-affirming epiphany. Mostly because I was only about seven. My life revolved around colouring-in and Vimto.

The steely, grey-cold plane of water, stretching into an infinity made me feel like I was standing on the edge of forever, staring into oblivion, facing down God*, and both growing in strength and shrivelling in fear simultaneously. It was a feeling such as the Romantics would later term The Sublime, but at that undeveloped age, with my small vocabulary and limited knowledge of classical French philosophy, I merely stared, and, pointing to the edge of the world, said to my mother, ‘There’s the sea’.

I was always perceptive.

I’ve loved beaches, and the sea, ever since.  They are reminder of the unfathomable possibilities of life on Earth, of the journeys we might take, the places we may visit.  The sea in particular invokes a sense of connectedness, as the water which leaves Blackpool is the water which laps the shores of Brighton, crashes into New York harbours, purrs around the sunny shores of South America and imprisons the convicts of Australia.  Staring at the sea is staring at the world, and remembering that we all live here, now, on this rock, at this time in the history of the universe, at this pinprick in the scope of existence.

And, while I genuinely love a sun-washed party-beach, fringed with ramshackle bars selling cheap unidentifiable booze and banging out soulless, plastic techno-pop, I’ve reached an age where the dark melancholy of Northern English beaches is coming into its own.

I took the old mother of earlier Blackpool fame to Formby beach for a Mother’s Day outing today. The sky was thickly grey, the sea  sheet of heavy black.  A cold nip needled the air, the sand was damp and chill. It was gothly lovely.  As when I was seven, the sensation of being strangled by the enormity of existence fizzed around, and the sea, the same sea I saw thirty five years ago, held all the above meaning, but more.

Because I realised that the seas had been there for billions of years, in one form or other, and probably would be for many to come. But the time here for me, for everyone else on that beach, in Formby, in Liverpool**, in the world, was very finite. And I realised that the attraction of the beach/sea combo is a paradoxical one – one of feeling connected to the universe, and one of knowing that our place in the universe is very, very temporary.

And it’s at these spots, reminders of our mortality, our worthlessness, that we choose to spend our free time, that we spend our hard-earned***money visiting.  We actively go out of our way to be reminded that we’re nothing and we’re going to die.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  Because if we realise we’ll eventually be gone, but the world will continue, and hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now, other little boys and girls will see the sea for the first time, and they, too, will marvel at the hugeness of everything, and feel the connectedness with all that lives on this planet, and all that has come and will come, maybe we’ll stop fucking up the planet and the people who live on it.

And if not? Well, the sea will surely survive.

*On which note, God, if you ever want a scrap, I’ll meet you on the grass down the bottom of the park. I’ve got a few bones to pick.

** To be fair, this particular detail didn't feel quite as serious. 

***Or stolen, inherited, found etc