250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 126 Travis - The Man Who

                                                        

   'I want to feel forever young.'

In 1999 I was between spaces. I'd moved back in with my parents. Done a PGCE but that hadn't worked. I was working at a language school in Canterbury. I had a circle of friends but a general lack of direction. One day I met a guy who offered me a job and a new road which I took.. I just remember him as unshaven and slightly shifty. With a shabby suit and a generally quite offhand and slightly rootless manner. We met in pibs. Smoked cigarettes. Drank pints. He tried to convert me to Stalinism. I resisted and changed the subject to The Jam.

He was the kind of person you meet in the English as a Foreign Language World. We're drifters many of us. Dreamers. 'I'm not really a teacher. I'm a musician. A writer. Would you like to read my great unfinished novel. Let me introduce myself. My name is Ronald.'

His name definitely wasn't Ronald. I can't remember now. But he could see I was at a loose end. He said to me. Would you like to go to Catania, Sicily  for a year. Work with a client of mine. He introduced me to a Sicilian man in his sixties who was in Canterbury to see if his students were enjoying themselves at summer school. A tall man but stooped, Something out if a book. Clearly even dodgier than  the English guy was. They were both just shady. But  I said, 'Catania? Yes Please?' Before I knew it I was on a plane with my desk top in the hold. On the way to Sicily to write my own unpublished novel. Resetting my course I realise as I look back.Sometimes you lose your coordinates. Then you reset them. Start again. 

All that time I was listening to Travis The Man Who on a cd. It was the era of cds I can't help but feel slightly melancholy looking back on them. I'm listening to it now on vinyl. I've just coming to the end of Side A. I'll turn over and listen to Side B. My bath can wait.

These are well played songs. Hearfelt. They came at a time Post Brit Pop where music was seeking its own direction. Travis filled a slot until Coldplay came along to seize the crown. Why Does It Always Rain on me? It doesn't mate. Get on with it,