You can use music for many purposes. I'm currently channelling it as something of a restorative. To take me back to times and spaces. Particularly childhood but not only . Places in my life which are increasingly distant in terms of time and frankly it feels, space.
I come from a family unit of seven. We've since been reduced to five and the loss of the two who have departed is still a source of pain and loss to the five of us that remain. That's not a negative conclusion to draw I don't think. Just a basic facet of life, A passage of experience you never completely come to the end of.
When I was nine my family moved from Nottingham to London. To Richmond Upon Thames to be precise. House prices had not exploded to the ridiculous degree they proceeded to. We moved into a cramped house close to Richmond Station, My three older siblings got the three bedrooms on the top floor as they were approaching their mid to late teens. My parents got the front bedroom on the first floot and my sister and I shared a room and I eventually moved into my own block bedroom at the back of the first floor a few years later when we moved beyond the au pair years and my sister and I got to the stage that we were relatively self standing. I walked my sister to school and back and my mum and dad could relax a bit.
The Sixties were not really completely over in Richmond in my area. The house next door was ours was home to a group of young people in their twenties and thirties who had an air of slightly grubby bohemianism about them, They threw continual celebratory partues late into the weekend nights, much I suspect to my mother's chagrin,
There were conspicuous squats all the way down Church Road the route I and eventually my sister and I and I took to my Infants School. A glorious walk for me from eight to ten to vusialise mow. All the way up Mount Ararat and right unto The Vineyard and the teeming scrum of childhood noise. Football,conkers, cricket when we used our fisted hands to punch a tennis ball past crouched fielders and run between brief wickets. The screaming riot of constant noise enveloping us in the cocoon of blissful and unrepeatable childhood. A passage of time to experience and then forever try to recover.
One of our teachers Miss Collins was a distictly hippie type. I seem to rememer her wearing a wig or at least having a glorious permme a fair bit of pastel make up and she wore fabulous multicoloured costumes. Beads and flares. Scarves, Earrings. She followed no apparent curriculum but allowed us to paint and draw pctures all day. Write and tell stories and when she'd run out of ideas lead us out into the playground to play french cricket at the end of most days. Bliss..
These are incredibly hypnotic moments of lost youth and while writing them what's the soundtrack been ? I'm using to carry me back there to the secret garden that everyone can access if the moment and soundtrack are right.. If you set the conditions. Like some DIY ouija board.
Santana's first. It's a magical record pure and simple. A glorious freeform indulgence from distant history.A good six years before the period I've been documenting but it feels incredibly apt to describe just how exciting and freewheeling being that age felt from 1975 to 1977 for me and how it feels now reliving it in writing.
A period where a whole different set of values challenged the given ones and the idea of freedom was actively sought, explored, enacted and celebrated. This a record I've only recently bought a battered second hand copy of on a whim. I play it quite regulrly and it always casts a spell. The lion's head on the sleeve describe the martialled. chaos and purest ecstasy of the album itself . It's cast its spell on me for the last couple of hors and guided my typing digits.
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