Are you a singer with lots of exciting new music that you ache to share with the world? An up and coming band, with a press release announcing your ‘jangly guitar sound’ and your ‘breathtaking Beach Boy-esque harmonies’?
Well keep it down will you? I’m listening to side two of Abbey Road, again.
I’ve reached it. The tipping point between the proactive search for new music and the realisation that my brain has just run out of musical space.
I’ve worked out the numbers. My parents encouraged me to listen to music from the day I arrived (in Chiswick – still no plaque! I know! A scandal!). Last week, I ‘celebrated’ my fifty-fifth birthday. Let’s be conservative; two hours of music every day – that’s 20,075 days, so 40,150 hours listening to music so far, in my time on your planet. That’s 1,672 full days, just listening to music (most of them Beatle filled, I suspect).
And, I’ve given myself the day off for every February 29th.
Any sensible and considerate musician would recognise that there is only a limited arrangement of notes and chords available, and give up on the grounds that all the good ones have been taken; but no, new music appears every day. No – every hour, every minute.
I don’t want to hear it. Take it away. Leave me here with my Joni, Todd, Laura, and McCartney albums.
London Calling, Pet Sounds, Tapestry. That’ll do. No more ‘new’. Thanks.
We’ve never been in this position before. We baby boomers are the casualties of the easy availability of musical instruments, and low cost recording.
There was a time when the anticipation of a new Beatles single, Todd Rundgren or Elvis Costello album, would give me butterflies. Now I don’t want any of them to record anything new, ever again. I just want ‘old’.
I don’t listen to music radio. I rarely go to gigs, other than to relive the ghosts of my life, the heritage acts if you will.
Those CDs that come with the magazine subscription? Unplayed.
My mind is full to stretching point with tunes, sounds, voices, from over five decades. Unless Steve Jobs or Bill Gates devise a USB memory stick for the human brain, I’m at my limit.
So don’t send me a link to your MySpace page; keep your promotional CD, and I don’t want to see your YouTube clip.
Mind you... that Band Of Horses album is rather good; I enjoyed seeing the Wutars earlier this year, and what’s this? Prince is giving away his new album this weekend?
Dammit! In fact, Double Damn! I can’t let go.
Terence Dackombe, July 2010
