Things that get better with age. Sharing experiences with people whose company you enjoy and have interests in common with. Music. Definitely music, Friendship. For me personally teaching. It's what I do. What I've done since I graduated. Oh and Magazine.Magazine certainly get better with age
By Magazine I don't mean those glossy periodicals you scatter artfully on your dining room table as a conversation starter when your posh neighbours come round for tea. Or the ammunition storage you slot into your Luger before heading out for a night on the town.
No - not those magazines. I'm talking abut the Manchester Post Punk band. The one that featured Howard Devoto, John McGeoch and a cast of changing but continually creative and innovative musicians who made some of the best records released in Manchester, or indeed anywhere in the late Seventies or early Eighties.
I didn't greally get into Magazine properly until I got to university. Though I was aware of them. Rod, the guy in the room next to me was a huge fan and they were just the kind of band I was ready to fall for. I may have had a copy of The Correct Use of Soap. I was guided by NME dictates back in those days. I did what Barney Hoskyns told me to do.
But I was ripe for what Howard and the boys brought to the table. Paranoia, The Cold War, the Thirties, espionage and modernist fear and suspicion. Darkness, mistrust and betrayal. No, of course I didn't want to undergo the actual anguished emotional experiences of those things. I was and still am essentially an innocent. But the idea of them I became fascinated by..
I have strong associations with albums and their puchases. Connected to the time I bought them. I bought Magazine's Best Of complilation After The Fact went out in Ealing or somewhere similar and got very drunk with an old college friend of mine. We started getting very friendly and she very kindly invited me back to her flat for the night.
I was tempted to but remembered just in time that I was actually going out with someone else already.Someone I loved. So I made my way back to the family home in Teddington instead. I still feel guilty when I think back on it.Whenever I listen to After the Fact. It's all rather Magazine frankly. Near betrayal. Guilt.Emotional anguish.
But Magazine get better to my ears with every passing year and earlier today I was delighted to find an affordable second hand copy of appropriately Secondhand Daylight. The second Magazine record, which came out in 1979. I don't like to compare records. What's the best. What's second best.
But it's another excellent Magazine albim. They were a band that rarely took a misstep, were appreciated by the critics and cognoscenti, and generally ignored by the general public. So often the way..Meanwhile thousamds froth at the mouth at the Backstreet Boys..Can anyone explain ?
I put Secondhand Daylight on for the second time as darkness fell just now. Magazine always sound best when night is falling. Something is about to happen any minute over the border. I remember Julie Burchill ridiculing the idea of being Shot By Both Sides. She rarely wrote a line as good as this herself. A line as good as many of Devoto's.
Each song has atmosphere and dark craft in spades. Magazine weren't a hugely influential band so that you listen to other artists and think 'that's Magazine'.. As is the case frequently with Television, Joy Division or The Fall. Radiohead is Magazine's most immediate legacy. Radiohead frequently sound like Magazine. Lyrically emotionally and musically. They're haunted, in a similar way.
Secondhand Daylight is a feast for the dark imagination. Magazine are a band with tentacles and muscles.Sinew. Their immediate contempoarries were Wire, Gang of Four, The Cure, PiL, Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division The Bunnymen, The Fall. That was a glorious period of music that spat forth no end of absolute masterpieces and magical bands. Magazine stand as tall as any of these hunched giants. .
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