I need to start somewhere, so we'll begin in the back seat of my parents' maroon D-reg Vauxhall Astra. No, it's not where I was conceived (I hope). Rather, it is the site of my earliest memories of music, and many of my earliest memories full stop. The records in this playlist are unexceptional, in that they could have been thrown together by anybody, for any reason. For me, they recall journeys and transitions: episodes in my early life where I found myself lost in those deep patterns of thought peculiar to travel, with endless tapes and CDs colouring my memory. There are songs from childhood holidays here, and from later times when I travelled long distances alone by bus or train. Their assemblage here represents the simplest form of mixing - a sequence of songs with personal significance placed alongside each other for thematic effect/affect.
I want to explore
all kinds of mixing, DJing, playlisting, selecting, compiling and curation in this space, but
the personal, private mix is foundational. The moment you make a mix and
capture it for posterity you become a selector: you are the author of something unique, and have offered
the world a statement about you and your relationship with music. There are
limits to this form of expression. We are not playing an instrument, composing
or sequencing. These are the truly awe inspiring contributions of genius and,
frankly, I have never found them that interesting. The personal mix is a crude,
amateur, tentative, gauche undertaking, but in a very basic sense it is
absolutely music in the making. In our
advanced era of recorded music the selector is one of the art form's
fundamental protagonists, perhaps even its focal point: the industry's ideal
engaged consumer and promoter. This primacy is the result of a long history:
music culture, technology and economic factors claiming, rejecting and
reformulating the mix and the selector over time. There's a lot to get into.
In this blog then I
will be looking for these beats and rhymes. Its central conceit is to use a
single mix to illustrate each post. It may be a playlist of my own creation
such as this one, or a DJ mix, or a commercially released compilation. I am
looking for stories and synthesis. These may come together into a coherent
whole over time; they also may not. Let's find out!
Anyway back to the
Astra… As a kid we kept maybe a dozen cassettes in the car at any one time,
usually a mix of contemporary (mid to late 80s) albums and mix tapes of classic
rock n roll, including the Beatles. These would compete with BBC Radio 3 for play
time, and the odd brief dip into Radio 1.
My parents were, and remain, infectiously enthusiastic music fans. My
dad always honed in on sonically inventive, politically direct song writing,
such as Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Joan Armitrading, UB40 and Tracy Chapman.
I think he used to pirate most of his stuff from Leicester central library on
his dual cassette deck, sometimes splicing the odd mix tape together, but I
might be remembering that wrong. Mum was classical, folk, world music and rock
n roll (we could all agree on Chuck Berry). Either way, we had an extremely
interesting, grown up range of musics on our car journeys, which was a good
thing given the endless, beautiful camping trips we would undertake in France
and Spain at that time.
I can't say that I
necessary liked all of our car music.
Take Moorea by the Gypsy Kings. This is a beautiful, yet deeply lame recording,
which happens transports me almost whole to my 7 year old self, being driven
through the endless pine forest of southern France. I can smell, taste and feel
- physically and emotionally - that journey. I can remember what I was reading,
what my body felt like, what made me happy and sad. And I expect that I will
remember these things every time I hear this record for the rest of my life. It's just that I don't like it that much (Hotel California on the other hand…)
Every song on this
list works magic at this level. I get a strange anticipatory narcotic rush
listening to Dark and Long Dark Train - part of an album I used to listen to on
my frequent journeys up to London for all nighters way back when. Zero 7 kept
my aching bones company on an endless coach journey back from skiing in Tignes
in 2001 (they still took Francs I remember). Ms Jackson was playing absolutely
everywhere when I toured the USA on my own earlier that same year. Rhapsody in
Blue got rinsed on a trip to the Jorvik Viking centre in 1989 (don't laugh - as
a 7 year old history nerd this was basically the equivalent of a weekend taking
drugs in Amsterdam - see DJ Shadow for the accompaniment to the long, long
journey back from that little disaster).
It all stops at some
point, around the time I moved to London, when music stops seeming so old.
Before 2005, say, my brain appears no longer need synesthetic prompts to place
itself in a time and place. This was also around the time I adopted iTunes and began
religiously storing and categorising music. Maybe I just grew up a bit. The
fact that The First of the Gang To Die, from that unconscionable shitheel
Morrissey, draws an unexpectedly similar response from me speaks to my
vulnerable, emotional and ecstatic state around the time of my son's birth. For
that short drive, on my own, terrified, elated, with my phone on shuffle and
that flaming arsehole joyously singing my boy's name, I was as a child again,
on the road, moving and changing.
I may be at risk of
abusing your time with all this navel gazing. Like a selector, the blogger is
here to set a vibe and engage people, not usher you down some hyper-personal
memory lane. Nostalgia is after all the evil twin of history (I'll talk a bit about this kind of bad Djing
here as well!). I hope that I have got across a sense of what I am aiming at
with this blog - what mixing music means to me on a fundamental level. I have
many, many thoughts on this, as well as cool music mixes to share. Onwards…
