'It was twenty years ago today. Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play....'
2024 has been an almost unprecedented year for me. I've broken free. After fifteen years of striving at the desk and in the classroom and meeting rooms of a ghastly, corporate, inert organisation that liked to consider itself cutting edge and ahead of the pack. But actually lagged behind in every real respect.projecting values which were actually almost feudal in their antiquity, archaism and ignorance. Never mind the sheer hostility and directionless aggression exhibited on a daily basis by management and 'colleagues' to one another and frequently to clients. I was glad to get out. Let's put it that way. .
I've broken free over the last twelve months. Working from my flat in Newcastle largely and developing possibilities of life as a digital nomad, it's been an exciting though admittedly also a slightly scary new frontier for me as I approach my sixties.
I've kept writing on It Starts every day. It's important to me to do so. Regardless of where I am or what's going on in my life. It's good to have a journal to organise your life and thoughts by and music is as good a guiding fulcrum for the experience of life as I recognise.
It's been a wonderful time for me. I've reconnected wuth fundamental emotions and people in my life. Gone to school reunions, swum in the Meditteranean and am starting to harbour thoughts of the Aegean in 2025 and exploring Europe again. There are creeping prospects of mortality all around me but I think fundamentally it's important to be positive if you can and music invariably offers that staff.
Life, whatever else it is, it's not dull. Existence in the 2020's if you're priviledged, and I still consider myself immensly priviledged, offers intense and incredible vistas of opportunity. So much cerebral emotional and mental experience can be harvested in the course of a single day. When The Beatles recorded Sgt Pepper, 'twenty years ago' seemed like a long time back. Twenty years ago from 2024 we were still wearing the same kind of clothing as we are now which wasn't the case in 1967. But in virtually every other respect we've fast forwarded into the future without fully realising it. Certainly much more than from 1967 to 1997.Yes I know that's 30 years for those who are pedantically inclined.
Musically it's been some year. I've expanded my countown of favourite albums to 200 this time tound. That could easily have been 300 and the countdown begun at the end of February. I'm not going to go there but it's an indication of how much fantastic stuff there is around to listen to if you care to look.
Kamsai Washington's Fearless Movement and Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee, (which I only discovered in recent days, thanks to the prompting of a friend), seem most to encapsulate the limitless vistas and frontiers of experience of music particularly in these strange new days.They're both nostalgia fests in many respects while also maintaining the sharp edge of the new In the words of Under The Radar which have just published their own review of the year. 'In 2024 mainstream culture is stuck in a nostalgia trip and has been for several years.' So much is immediately accessible through Spotify and YouTube and elsewhere that it can be slightly bewildering. But it's certainly thrilling. Onward and upwards. Back to the future !
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