Ten Years On
When you’re young you think it’ll last forever, all the moments that seem new, exciting and powerful also seem like they are limitless. How many times can you hear a song and know that it basically was written for you because it’s so perfect and it fits so well? How often will you stand in line for a gig or pressed against the barrier and breathe in the smell of a sticky, dark venue, and feel completely alive and completely happy? A hundred times at least, I thought, but probably more. But as you get older the colours fade, not everything feels as vital and strong. You no longer feel the urge to write the lyrics to your favourite songs on the front of your notebook so everyone knows how much it means to you It doesn’t seem to matter so much whether everyone knows that great band that’s getting popular you had already heard and loved last year.
It’s generally a good thing I think. If I had to live my life now feeling everything as much as I did when I was a teenager I’d be, well, still a teenager. I’m in my mid 20s now, so that wouldn’t really work, and I have the life I’d always assumed passively would come to me, without any realisation of how hard work it was to get here. I find joy in calm and order and knowing that the bus will get me to work on time. I don’t regret that, I had long enough living my life at 100 miles an hour to know that it can’t be sustained, and that there’s much to be grateful for in knowing how you’ll feed yourself next month and also where you’re going to be in six months time.
And there’s always music.
In just a few seconds of the opening bars of a song, I can slip back into that world, teleport myself to being 15 and believing whole heartedly that not getting tickets to a gig would be the literal end of the world and I would never get over it. I don’t want to live there anymore, but I will never take for granted the power that music has to let me visit. We store parts of ourselves in the songs that we love, never realising at the time that we are doing so until we turn to look back.
I’m going to see We Were Promised Jetpacks on Saturday because their album These Four Walls is turning ten years old. To understand why this is such a big deal, let me tell you about when I was a 15 year old living in a rural village in the West Country.
I wasn’t cool, I wasn’t totally nerdy either, I just kind of got by but I had this best friend. They were definitely cool, and they told me about all the best bands. I learned everything I thought there was to know about music from them, and also a lot of other important things about life. We went to gigs together and shared the excitement of getting to wear band t shirts to school in our final years. They got me into listening to a lot of Scottish indie bands, and it made me start thinking that Scotland must be pretty much the coolest place in the world to be. One of those bands, was We Were Promised Jetpacks. I can see myself sat in the back of my parent’s car listening to Quiet Little Voices through my headphones on my iPod nano, letting it fill me with the exhilaration and joy that it still brings me today. These Four Walls is the album that captured that blend of energy, joy, excitement and anxiety that defined by teenage years. I used to curl up in bed and listen to Conductor to lull myself to sleep, letting the melodies take away my pains and fears. It felt like a place to go, somewhere I could be to feel all the massive things you feel when your body runs almost solely on hormones and snack bars.
Music got me where I am today, sat on the sofa of my little rented Glasgow home. I came to Scotland, because of the music. When the time came to find a place to move after uni, all I could think about was how many times I’d sat and listened to Glasgow/Scottish bands, the way they made me feel. It had to be a place I would fit and love. Because of Frightened Rabbit and Dananananaykroyd and Copy Haho and We Were Promised Jetpacks and probably many others I don’t remember now. So I came here, and I didn’t leave. Four years later, I am proud of the life I’ve built myself. I maybe never got the career in radio that I thought I wanted, but I came back to music writing after a long period of absence and rediscovered the joy it gives me. I get to combine my love of archives and sound in my day job, which feels like the perfect blend of everything I ever wanted to be. I’m still not in my own killer Glasgow band, but I am working on it. And I have found a way to make peace with my past self, to celebrate the confusion and wonder of growing up, how it feels like it will last forever until one day you realise you’re an adult that pays council tax and finds it hard to get off the sofa to go to the same gigs you made your parents drive you to because it was the only way to go. I’ve found a way to understand myself better, to be complete and whole and proud of who I am – and it’s all there in These Four Walls. I can put my headphones on and be back there, standing face to face with myself and my life, the memories I poured into the music without even realising I was doing it. I have put part of myself into these sounds, and it is a gift to be able to relive it. Sometimes it gets a bit much, we all have bands or songs we can’t listen to because of how powerful the memories are – but what a wondrous thing that is. I might have deleted the embarrassing facebook photos or tumblr posts, tried to forget some of the harder parts of growing up, but I still have access to that world just by clicking play.
