HARMONY IN MY HEAD

There's a Harmony in my head. It's not my favourite Buzzcocks tune, I'm more of a ‘Sneaking in the back door with your dirty magazines.’

But anyway, I digress. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's a background noise that pops its head out at the strangest of moments... stops me in my already meandering tracks. ‘Talk to the Savage sea, it's the only direction for you and me’...though, most of our coastal towns are way more savage than the vista that Mark Stewart's visceral vocals told us of.

I never spend a moment without music, it’s a companion that I drag along, it's always been that way. When I say that... I include the never silent silences that Cage presented to the assembled....4’33”.... I hear those too.
Even now, writing this, I have Felt piano muttering through the silence, a gentle aroma of music... non-committal but no less present than Venetian Snares in full flow.
I remember a few years ago, well, a decade really, standing in Covent Garden, the full pedestrian flow of consumer madness pelting by at breakneck speed! I froze as if kidnapped by the muddy swamp of it all. I put the ‘Tenth Circle of Winnipeg’ on through my headphones and, in a very strange way, the frenetic cacophony of the music counteracted the frenetic blur of the moving bodies and created.... silence...a calm dwelling place where I could linger and smile at the sheer, ambition of it all....the desperate ambitions of a scuttling crowd... me included, despite my protestations.

I played Jilted John to my 13-year-old daughter the other day....watched it on an old Top Of The Pops. We laughed a lot…’Gordon is a moron’… and I discovered that the singer was the same bloke who does John Shuttleworth! So we dived down that rabbit hole and we... laughed some more.
My daughter has the best playlist I know. No Agenda.... just years of saying “can you add that Daddy” or “who is this.” Eclecticism is a much-neglected ritual of growth don't you think? Or maybe you're thinking ‘shut up you knob, who gives a fuck!’.

‘Do they owe us a living, course they fucking do!’
I've been knackered of late... the less I do the more it creeps in...it can instil itself as a sort of petulant dogma. Not for long of course, and it's a certain kind of ‘what fuckery is this’ that emerges from accepting the physical inconveniences that drown us slowly as we age. In fact, it's more than that natural adaptation (or mutation?) of the physical body... it's the exhausting weight of existential justification....of self... of selfishness... of selflessness... of self sufficiency... of self acceptance... of Soul Self Satisfaction...of self absorption of the self.

‘These boots are made for walking’.... or perhaps a gentle meander down the garden path....get the spade out from the non-existent shed and dig a hole.... plant myself and hope for growth... head peeking out of the soil with the Bretton wind stinging my cheeks.