Twenty Years of Oceansize
Twenty Years of Oceansize. Goodness me. I’ve been no stranger to a totally heart-on-sleeve outpouring about how much I love this band since my discovery of them (thanks to the shameless internet piracy* of the MSN age and the drummer in my high school band…I wish I saw him more…that’s right, I’m referencing my own work here…), and I’ll let the twentieth anniversary of (I think?) their first ever rehearsal continue the trend. I’ll do a book one day. For your fucking kindle.
I’ll start back at that night. The one with the MSN piracy. The aforementioned drummer-in-high-school-band, aware of my love for all things turn of the century British alternative rock (The Cooper Temple Clause, Vex Red, Hundred Reasons, Muse, etc.), sent over an MP3 so enormous it took my cheap-as-you-like dial-up modem the thick end of probably two hours to get hold of the damned thing**. He promised me it would be, like, totally worth it. I can confirm that the time-slowing, mind-expanding, ‘holy shit, this is it, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard, this is EXACTLY what I was looking for, it is LITERALLY never going to get better than this’ moment that followed my first listen of the nigh-on ten-minute work*** was indeed worth it.
So much of my formative years are wrapped up in this band. Without trying to turn this into a completely duck-faced emo top-down profile pic****, seeing them play live (any one of the 40, yes, 40 times I did so) pretty much replaced spending any reasonable amount of time with a mental health practitioner throughout my later teens and earlier twenties. They were the last band my Mum ever dropped me off to go and see at the (proper) Birmingham Academy, the first band I saw after she’d died*****, the (live) soundtrack to my first kiss with my wife, and tens of wonderful nights out with friends and fellow devotees along the way. Notable highlights include pretty much every time they played the Stoke Sugarmill, that bizarre one-off special at a theatre in Bracknell where I finally met Dave from Reading, wiping the fucking floor with the Smashing Pumpkins at Manchester Arena, and that time at Leeds Cockpit when Forward Russia were the support******.
It’s still the music I turn to when I’m feeling lost. I remember one particularly dark night on a tour somewhere, a seemingly inescapable gloom was lessened firstly by a long call home to my wife, and secondly an hour or so of picking out the most life-affirmingly floaty and lyric-tattoo worthy parts of the band’s output. And of course, an overpriced bag of crisps from the minibar once I’d finally cried myself to being absolutely fucking starving. When I first started flying regularly (or should that be frequently?) for work, I had this ridiculously dramatic and morbid habit of trying to always have Oceansize playing during take-off and landing, because they are statistically the parts of a flight where you’re most likely to crash and die, and if that were to happen to me I’d want to make sure I made mine exit to the greatest music I’ve ever known. Into the sky you go, etc. Dramatic? Me?
These days I’m lucky enough, or maybe just persistent enough and sufficiently unthreatening in stature, to number much of the band amongst my friends, colleagues and peers. I’m sure though that they’ll always see me as the weird kid from the front row, red of hair, red of shirt (I really was such a fucking loser), no matter how much I might think my record deal and involvement in the upper echelons of pop touring through current employment might outweigh my former embarrassments.
I could go on, and on, and on, but I’ll save that for my inevitably self-published Oceansize biography, coming to a tax-dodging online store near you, one day before I shuffle off the Earth (lifus exitus).
The next time I’m a sufficient number of sheets to the wind to consider Jägermeister a good idea, I’ll be sure to toast this unbelievably fucking brilliant band, and all they did for me and some of my very best friends. Until then, I’ll just have some fizzy water.
Take extra special care*******.
*Given that pretty much every penny of my means tested Education Maintenance Allowance from the age of 16 to 18 went on either watching this band live, clothing myself with their wares (wears?) or buying multiple formats of whatever they released, I’m sure this is forgivable. And hey, these days we’re all happily paying to let our favourite bands be robbed fucking blind by the streaming services, so there’s a lot to be said for some good old-fashioned pirate turned obsessive fanboy action. In an ideal world, I’d be the (ultra fucking successful) fan turned peer, asked by the record company to collate a ‘Legacy Edition’ deluxe CD boxset, replete with hours of rehearsal room fuzz-thickened demo tapes, all housed in a fabulous sleeve with totally fucking heartfelt liner notes by, well, me. But this isn’t an ideal world, in so, so many ways.
**Honestly, some of you who may find yourselves reading this; you don’t know you’re fucking born.
***Women Who Love Men Who Love Drugs; the first thing I ever heard by Oceansize, and the last thing they ever played together. Oh god, I thought it’d take longer than this…where are the fucking tissues?
****Because, back then, words as horrifying as ‘selfie’ weren’t around, although the limitless narcissism of social media was already at full fucking throttle.
*****I think I’ve already talked about it being the tour on which they debuted the song Music for a Nurse, the timing and significance of which still absolutely fucking blows my mind.
******That was the first time I heard them play Massive Bereavement I think…I probably should have put that in the playlist. I ripped that song off absolutely fucking mercilessly on the original version of ‘18th’, released in about 2006 on some CD-R album I’d made in my bedroom.
*******Don’t act like that wasn’t always going to be the sign off for a blog post celebrating the tenth anniversary of the tenth anniversary.
