United By Fate After Ten Years

Author: DC

Date: March 2011

Word count: 1,060

When I go back to my parents’ house to visit, I often end up sleeping in the bedroom that used to be the Hobbit Hole where my little brother could be found. When Adam lived there it had all the signifying marks of the late-teenage bedroom, with its blackout blinds, Rage Against The Machine “burning monk” posters, unwashed clothes on the floor, and an inhabitant who was extremely grumpy to be disturbed any time before three in the afternoon. Now that he has moved out my parents have redecorated the room, with the gloom and disorganisation replaced by Swedish furniture and halogen spotlights. The only real reminder that it used to be Adam’s lair is a single bookshelf which my mother has never tidied.

The shelf contains mementoes and keepsakes that Ad gathered during our formative concert-going years. Many of them evoke strong memories; the signed Taking Back Sunday setlist from the first time that we ever saw the band that went on to become one of our favourites; the Hiding With Girls sticker from the show where we were the only paying customers to turn up; the AFI drumstick that Adam was so thrilled to collect at one of their rare London headline shows. If I could only keep one item, though, it wouldn’t be any of those objects, as fond as I am of the feelings that they bring back. Instead, the thing I would choose is a slightly battered, bent plastic Frisbee, embossed with an instantly familiar logo of a stylised boy and girl running.

We snagged the Frisbee in 2002 at the huge Reading Festival here in the UK, on our second or third trip there. I was 18 and Adam was about 15, and we participated in the full festival experience. We camped on ground that was either rock-hard or sodden and muddy, we drank too much, but most of all we saw as many bands as we could in the three days that the festival lasted. That year we saw Hell Is For Heroes and Biffy Clyro go on early on a tiny stage and blow the crowd away, we saw Finch and Thursday stun with the complexity and energy of their post-hardcore, we saw Jimmy Eat World as their star began to go supernova. The band that left me reeling was another new band, though its members had been around for a while, playing in several influential New York hardcore bands. The weekend of the festival they were celebrating the release of their second single, a driving but uplifting song called “Good Things”, and at the end of their set they threw promotional material into the crowd. Things fluttered down from the stage, a shimmer of stickers and flyers and, yes, white Frisbees.

The set that the band played that day was the perfect blend of harmony and fury, with swathes of slashing guitar and brutal drumming playing against the keening vocals of Walter Schriefels and odd flashes of sweetness in the sound. Even though their album had only been out for a few weeks, and the seminal single “Used For Glue” a few weeks more than that, a dedicated group within the audience knew the songs backwards, and the rest of the crowd were soon engrossed by the heart and energy that the band put into their performance. They made a cavernous tent feel like a small club show, and the 40 minutes that they were allocated by the organisers was over before people were ready for it to be.

The Frisbee has served to remind of two things since that day – first of all, that it is possible for a concert to be cathartic and transcendent even in the most unlikely of circumstances. The setting for the show was relatively inauspicious, with a new melodic hardcore band playing in the middle of the day to a crowd of tired and hung-over people who hadn’t even had time to build up a hair of the dog buzz yet. In spite of all of that, it was at the time and still is one of the best shows that I have ever seen. Secondly, the Frisbee has reminded me that sometimes you only get one shot at things, and after that have to make do with memories and remembrances. Rival Schools never released the second album that they promised in 2005 and 2006, I wasn’t able to see them on their next UK tour, and then they broke up. What I had to remind me of them was a fantastic album, a single brilliant live show, and a white plastic Frisbee.

All of this goes some way to explaining why my reaction to the announcement that a new Rival Schools album was to be released in 2011 wasn’t as joyful as I thought it would be. I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t more excited that one of my favourite bands was coming back, making a record, playing shows. It took me some weeks to figure out that I was worried that it would underwhelm, that it would erode and undermine the memories that I had of the band. That the Frisbee would come to mean less to me than it does at the moment.

I shouldn’t have worried. As the sports commentators say, form is temporary but class is permanent. Rival Schools have come back with a 10-track record called “Pedals” that is different but no less excellent than their debut “United By Fate” album. It is different, to be sure, with songs of a more reflective nature and a greater emphasis on atmosphere rather than angst and anger. But it is another intelligent, wonderful collection of songs that will stay with me. To complete the circle, I am going to see them play live in a month’s time, and I can only hope that they have the same effect on me in 2011 as they did when we were all much younger men in 2002. If they do, it’ll be easy to spot me on the way out of the venue after the show. I’ll be the man looking for a poster, a drumstick, a flyer, a ticket stub, or anything that I can take home and put on the shelf next to the Frisbee. After all, I need something to keep me going for the next ten years.

Packing Boxes

Author: DC

Word count: 820

March 2011

Three weeks ago my fiancée and I finally managed to buy what will be our first house together, once we decorate it and move out of our current rented apartments. I’m moving in first, with the lady following several weeks later, and my date to leave the tiny one-bedroom place that has been my home for the last two and a half years is rapidly approaching. Given that, I’ve been doing all the usual things that we’ve all had to take care of when moving – packing boxes, finding utilities suppliers, working out where in my new house my life-sized plush cuddly sheep is going to live. The important things, you might say.

Last weekend, I had a 24 hour blitz, trying to do as many move-related things as I could in a day, so that it wouldn’t eat up all of my evenings during the next week or so. There turned out to be one recurring theme that dominated that 24 hours: it quickly became clearly, visibly, and possibly scarily apparent just how major a part music has come to play in my life. During that day I took down record sleeves hung from my kitchen walls, rang people to change the delivery addresses for my Rolling Stone, NME and Alternative Press subscriptions, boxed hundreds of CDs and vinyl records, unplugged speaker systems and record players, backed up the iTunes library on my computer to avoid move-related music loss, put some signed concert posters into tubes, donated to charity a Phil Collins record that my friend Dusty had ‘hilariously’ bought me as a birthday present, filled bags with band t-shirts and took down from shelves concert DVDs and Behind The Music documentaries. I ordered the shelves that will be the new home for those CDs and DVDs, I planned to have the posters professionally framed, and I tried to work out whether I could buy some replacement, more powerful speakers without annoying our new downstairs neighbours.

All in all, I realised that music has come to dominate not only what I listed to but what I read, what I watched, what I decorate my house with, what I allocate space to, what I wear, and what I annoy my fiancée with. This left me thinking, and by now I’ve identified a number of possible things that this music overload could mean. Option One: I’m one of those people who are going to end up on a TV show called something like “Hoarders: Extreme Tales of People Who Have Died of Asphyxiation While Buried Under Piles of Accumulated Junk”, or “Stories Of My Divorce: The Husband Who Loved Vinyl More Than Me”. If that turns out to be true, please address all letters to my rehab centre, and don’t give me money to buy magazines with, it will only feed the habit.

I don’t think I’m quite in Discovery Channel territory yet, though, for one simple reason. So many of the emails that I’ve received from you, readers and commenters and friends, during the last few years suggest that many of you have a similar level of immersion in all things musical as I do. Sure, we all have different tastes and preferred formats, but it seems that the vast majority of people reading this column don’t just have a casual, transactional, “something to listen to on the metro on the way to work in the mornings” relationship to music. Which led me to Option Two: that for a certain kind of person, music becomes something much bigger than a soundtrack. It becomes something much bigger, oddly, than music, than that song you put on when you get home from work in the evening. Instead it grows, it shoots tentacles through many different aspects of our lives, and in doing so it becomes both a part of us and something else as well, something external.

Music, when you love it this much and are this interested in it, actually becomes a character in your life. It takes your time – time spent reading music magazines or searching for downloads or fixing the names in your iTunes. It can’t be neglected, as you wouldn’t want to miss the new song by your favorite artist. It can’t be put in a corner when you consume too much and become sick of it, as it’s on your walls and your clothes. It’s a part of who you are, and it’s part of what you have to do every day and what you see. And this may be where I cross the line back into Option One territory, but for the last week it has felt like music is a third person moving into my new apartment, putting its stamp and its personality on our space. I don’t love it as much as my lady or in the same way, but I adore it, and I have a feeling that many of you feel