From the album ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ (2016)
Perhaps you noticed, though you probably didn’t, that I haven’t posted much over the last three weeks. There was a good reason for this – I was, sharp intake of breath, moving house.
As the picture above suitably illustrates moving is as dull as the cardboard boxes you use for it. It’s a miserable endeavour as you’re overwhelmed into a frenzied rush to do everything too quickly, as there seems to be so much to do when armed with the faulty perception that time is dissipating fast. The rushing about leads to even more bruised knuckles and ankles than you’d normally suffer, plus the pulled back muscles from moving furniture up and down flights of stairs. Actually, moving a king sized mattress is the worst, it’s murder, given how heavy and difficult to balance it is.
Why do we fall into such a destructive pathology when moving? It’s partly irritability at the upsetting of settled routines and processes you’ve tailored to a specific home environment that you’re now willingly vanquishing, married with the temporary uncertainty of their revival at the other end. Pre-occupied by concerns that in retrospect are frivolous and ridiculous, you then develop temporary malaises and queer obsessions that corner you into making illogical decisions, because god forbid it’s a terrible error that you should have to double-handle something. And after all of this comes the worst part; the utterly demoralising prospect of sorting through the chaos and of unpacking stuff you just packed earlier that day. As an experience this only favourably compares to solemnly unwrapping a shit Christmas present you bought for yourself.
I’ll miss Maryhill, for its mutant squirrels, that I could hear the River Kelvin running from my window, its widening demographic and its hodgepodge schizoid topography caused by misguided forays into modernism. I’ll miss Maryhill Road, mainly for its shopping convenience and its abundance of buses and fatal accident inquiries. Watching the drivers on Maryhill Road squabble for parking spaces outside Jaconelli’s is sociology at its most fascinating, and witnessing the bus drivers all trying to avoid potholes created by small meteors, or, more likely, a combination of cheap Glasgow City Council tarmac meeting the rancid contents of stomachs being evacuated on a Saturday night, was the definition of light entertainment.
Anyway, so on to Knightswood. Maryhill it is not. Knightswood is the surface of the dark side of the moon. Its many streets are all indistinguishable from the next, filled with rows of identikit ex local authority council housing of same the size and design, clad with the same robust but cheap rough casting, and painted in that agonising hospital waiting room colour palette that we all privately despise, but within such a milieu we’re loathe to see the monotony of this characteristic broken as we’re often pray to being comforted by our conformity to uniformity.
In time I’ll reconcile with the truth that it was all worth it. I now not only have a garden, but a south facing garden that will see the sun on the fourteen days a year it appears for more than an hour at a time (or I’m I being too optimistic?). I’m no Sarah Beeny, but there’s plenty of scope to convert the attic space into another room, perhaps a master bedroom with en suite (maybe a bidet too?), or two smaller bedrooms to increase the appeal to some cunty nuclear family. These are manoeuvres that intend to add value to the property, but to realise it I’ll need to move, won’t I? The scars caused by the last move haven’t even formed scabs yet – literally – so it’s far more likely I’ll be motivated to do the loft conversion for the kind of living space I’ll use constructively.
Plus there’s Swans in Knightswood Park. They’re fascinating creatures, with their thousand yard stares, exaggerated robotic poses, and that they’re fed better than nine percent of Glasgow’s weans. Seeing Swans sleeping at night for the first time was a macabre sight, they appear as headless vessels floating seamlessly on the water, but this may have been abetted by the additional presence of two dogs being walked near the water’s edge, both with flashing collars (just in case you shouldn’t see the act good detail), generously sniffing each other’s ringpieces.
In truth this is just a filler piece to inure myself to one of my old processes: that it’s time to get back down to writing regularly. I now have a place to sit down, think and to write, so no excuses. Plus, I’ve just been reminded of another motivation – WordPress are charging me £65 to remove the ads on my blog for the next calendar year. This will only benefit my three and a half readers or whoever is unlucky enough to happen across this blog, but still, I’ll have to make that extortion count, even if this additional cost for blogging, nor my content on it for that matter, isn’t helping me pay off my mortgage. C’est la vie.
From the EP ‘Quadrant’ (1993)
From the album ‘Pedigree Mongrel’ (2015)
Coincidences occupy a strange void, where reasonable and rational explanations, even logic, are often found wanting. One occurred recently, I was listening to ‘Fame’ by David Bowie when I heard that he’d died. Macabre yes, but could anything by more apt or more Bowie?
Of course this wasn’t a coincidence in the truest arcane sense. I was well aware he’d just released a new album and I was gearing myself up for it with a process I reserve for the legends – a refresher of releases past, to see where their new release fits in the hierarchy of their canon.
I’ll admit this seems a bit pointless due to the endless, varied scope of ideas that guided and built Bowie’s career. I’ve yet to properly delve into his final album, and I may wait a while before I do. Indeed, the idea of starting from the beginning and working my way through his whole discography in chronological order, instead of drifting to and from eras, albums or tracks randomly, appeals now more than ever.
Most people of my age (born in the early eighties) only caught on to Bowie with the benefit of retrospect, his legend came fully formed and we were told (rightly) that he was past his creative peak. During my teens it was appreciation by proxy, I was listening to bands that revered, and in a way betrayed, him, so my opinion of him was of a legend, but only for the preceding generations. I felt that those who witnessed his drastic, sudden metamorphoses at the time, in context, had a stronger kindship and investment in what Bowie and his music meant, as they went through the process of finding the explanations for Bowie’s shifting phases and why they were needed. Those indelible marks left on the witnesses helped foment the next musical trend even if Bowie himself often made sure not to join them.
When he did appear in the nineties he offered a glimpse, only a glimpse, of a mythological figure often wielded by boring arseholes to complain (rightfully) about the state of contemporary music. For the likes of myself, too young and impressionable, he was all too easily lost in a morass of vacuous pop niches and trends, many of whom, ironically, claimed him as an inspiration, all grasping for the abundant oxygen provided by the advent of the internet and today the three main squalid social media platforms. How big would Ziggy be in today’s world, could he even exist? I suspect not in the way he’d want, as Bowie’s penchant for privacy, and that back then it was easier to preserve, afforded him the time, distance and secretiveness required to flesh out ideas, maintain personas and allowed his reinventions to truly retain the potency of the unexpected.
The strength of Bowie’s catalogue didn’t begin to fully resonate until my early twenties. The middle of the last decade, was, by and large, a fucking toilet boil (see, now it’s me being a boring old arsehole and a generational tourist to boot), so it helped fill that void.
I offered a full appreciation of Bowie to my mum around the same time, who, being roughly the same age as Bowie, was around for all of it. Her response made me wonder whether the perception of Bowie’s influence in today’s culture was matched by the adulation he received back then. She thought ‘he did write some good tunes’, but that this was undone by his sheer cynicism, ‘a failed actor’ whose reinventions and personas were a ploy to get people to buy his records. You can’t please everyone, but I defy anyone to listen to ‘Gene Genie’ on their headphones as they walk down the street and not feel as if they’re ten feet tall, not be beguiled by the opening lyrics to ‘Life On Mars’ or fail marvel at the sheer depth of brilliant song writing found on Ziggy or Aladdin Sane. Christ, I haven’t even mentioned the Berlin trilogy yet.
Being removed from the time of Bowie’s creative height of the early to mid-seventies allows us to view his albums in the abstract, and minus the claustrophobic peer-pressure of any mass worship that surrounded them and him. Most of his albums are simply too good, too interesting to be cynical. One Direction is cynicism. Kings Of Leon chose cynicism. Jools Holland and his assorted endeavours are cynical. My mum was an independent thinker and very right-on, so her take struck me as odd, and yes, cynical in itself. I’m going to give her benefit of the doubt here and say that she was wielding a technique that Bowie used so effectively – to offer the contrarian perspective to notions and ideas that were reverential and cemented, even if they were previously new and his.
More than the music Bowie’s greatest legacy is that he made forms of artistic otherness seem accessible by constantly probing the strange, esoteric idea of what we think identity, namely our own, should mean to other people. In this sense he was an ironic figure, removing the shame from expressing individuality by being someone other than himself, all the while being himself and never betraying who he is and what he wanted to be – a man of ideas.
On his penultimate album “The Next Day” he asked ‘Where are we now’? Well, now that he’s gone, we’re culturally, intellectually and creativity worse off. ‘Time may change me, but I can’t trace time’. Not true mate. Adios Starman.
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