Your Early Morning Blog

First one in ages I know and now I can't think of anything to write. Well to start off, the music is :-

Dance Hall at Louse Point by PJ Harvey

Bands at School.

In late autumn at our school, everyone wanted to form a band. Mostly they wanted to be punks but that all seemed too easy for me. Not one of the proto-bands which 'rehearsed' at lunchtimes, ever came up with any songs which you might call original. The sounds of that Christmas were bad covers of popular punk classics and unintelligible rants which might have been insulting the teachers. Bearing in mind that the non-disco coterie went from discussing Led Zeppelin to forming Sex-Pistol clone bands in one month. This was not rebellion; it was band-wagon jumping. Of course there were no shops around where any of these break-time rebels could get the correct gear. One guy managed to get hold of a pair of bondage trousers in bright Stewart tartan that some first-round punk had discarded on his way to the greatcoats of Joy-Divisionism. But of course these were not allowed at school and the only times we saw him wearing them were when he hung around on the muddy verges which passed for street-corners in our village. He does not show up on the radar of the Internet these days and, uncharitably I imagine he is in an Elvis phase at the moment.

I was too young to be interested in either 'the zep' or any of the first wave punk bands. I suppose New Wave was my thing but at its worst that brings to mind Steve Strange and early Spandau Ballet. No-one around the poor green land that I lived in had any money for electrical instruments. There might be the odd guitar and battered amplifier, even a set of sixties drums to give a struggling band genuine credibility but no synth band was ever going to start in our school. The posh lump in the top stream all had proper classical music instruments like clarinets and trumpets. Indeed, our school (and its attached middle school) had a passable Brass Band that performed at various local tented events. Now of course, the school has computer linked suites of instruments, enough musical fire power to reproduce anything from a Billy Bragg protest-and-portable-amplifier ranter to a Tomita-like light-and-sound-extravaganza. I imagine the village vibrates to all possible musics and the locals do their housework tapping their toes to the latest groovy sounds from the kids.

Now there is one thing missing. Not one of the kids (or should I say 'kids' and raise my fingers like rabbit ears either side of an invisible version of the word?) wants to protest any more. They all want to be a pop-idol. Even the raucous bands want to be Busted rather than the Clash. I dreamed once of a meeting in our village hall. It had been called to start revolution. It was raining and the soundtrack was a series of meaningful songs, protest songs or songs about great or terrible things. All now is retro. Future music will fade into nothing in a sort of musical entropy where all tunes have been used up. The solution is to write new words but everyone seems stuck on 'moon','spoon' etc. Enola Gay was a great song and can you imagine Atomic Kitten doing it. Maybe Andy will ask them to sing it one day.

Robert Brown is nearly 40 and likes watching politicians.