Mourno Journo
I haven’t got a fucking clue how the hell I’m gonna pull this off…
No one ever hired a blind photographer so how the hell is a deaf music journalist gonna make it? Reason decrees the right to try, just don’t expect success.
Oh but I love music and I love writing. Perhaps I don’t write like anyone else, pompous, addicted to adjectives and I certainly don’t hear music the way others do: I’ll never win The Lyrics Board.
Thanks to my parents’ penchant for Sunday papers, at the age of nine the voracious reader in me knew what ‘zeitgeist’ meant, why Graham Gooch was in disgrace and the going rate of a cocaine-fuelled prostitute orgy. Thanks to my parents’ penchant for good music, I learned to hate U2, Thin Lizzy, Therapy? Nirvana and Radiohead. I snuggled under my duvet with Robert Jordan or Irvine Welsh or Christine Pullein-Thompson, a glass of milk and ketchup sandwiches while my younger sister spent hours pouncing on ‘pause’ before DJ chatter resumed and ruined her mixtapes. What music I did listen to was diversely crap: Bryan Adams, Take That, Goldie, The Offspring. Naff tunes.
After the birth of my daughter in 2000, everything changed. With the onset of post-natal depression that has continued to this day, I set about evaluating life down to lost friends and last CDs. Responsibility is a massive cramp on style and re-thinking choices from a parental perspective led to re-thinking everything. There’s a profound sense of smallness, magnified by the vulnerability of your child. Without the teenage notions of eternal freedom, life seemed to short to waste on sugary beats and CDs dwindled to a stack by the stereo for washing-up to.
Allow me to explain a little about my hearing loss. It’s only severe by my own standards. I was diagnosed in 1988, shortly after our family emigrated to London. No root cause has ever explained why sound-detail is lost before reaching my cochlear, or why tinnitus distorts the remainder. But you know what? I like it. Without hearing aids I can converse easily with those whose facial/speech patterns I know. White noise from washing machines and tvs create rumbling lullabies while midnight serenades of tom cats and other irritating soundtracks are buffered out by a glorious force-field of static which only the loudest blare can pierce. It’s very soothing but also means I spend far too much time cushioned in my own thoughts.
Music has never whispered past my ear on its way from a stranger’s iPod or passing car. Those people who mime the words to songs at gigs: I’m one. However earphones and volume set to 7 is all I need. Most strangers’ speech is audible, made coherent by lipreading and trusty digi-aids. I fucking hate facial hair though; the old chestnut is you need a cunning linguist to decipher those lips….
People pick up the greatest songs on Earth from tv ads and TOTP2. Ask anyone the tune of Stairway To Heaven, they’ll hum it. Ask them when they first heard the song and few can actually pinpoint it. For hearing people, music’s always just there. I have to actively hunt it down, corrall it with headphone wires and read the lyrics on the net at the same time. Laborious but worth it, I set about saving a few quid from my dole each week to buy a bargain bin CD and explore those oldiesnow safely forgotten by my parents.
I fell aurally in love the first time I heard ‘Would?’ by Alice In Chains.
Pearl Jam’s Black became the first song I could ever pick out the individual instruments from. It was 2005 and I was in a world of Nineties’ pain.
What changed all that was blagging a few days’ work exp at HotPress.
Music wasn’t my aim: any kind of journalism would do. Who the fuck were the Flaming Lips, anyway? I aimed high and got lucky…except I didn’t. The placed was crammed with journos: what they needed was someone to help with Photography.
From never going to gigs to gigs almost every night, my world took a seizure and never recovered. Constraints of money disappeared as the office iTunes library revealed its riches…
Music journalist: free-spirited, bohemian occupation for the naturally cool that screams glamour, conjures fantasies of backstage parties and smoky chats in hotels. Envied by many and loved by few, these hobo writers track stars with dictaphones, guestlists and flimsy paper, orbiting one end of the world to another, fuelled by expenses all the way.
How is it possible to type when a snatchy beat’s holding your feet to ransom? Eerie guitar riffs have a soporific effect on me; I can’t help but sigh and drift/bounce into a reverie.
What a brilliant life, the kind you imagined yourself capable of, way back when the ink was still wet on your yellow canvas schoolbag.
There’s a place directly across from our stiklbrik building, I can’t imagine anyone aspiring to work there. The men wear ties and it doesn’t look like anyone ever cranked desktop speakers up to 11. People choose to crunch numbers all day when they could dunk biscuits and belt out Cherry Ghost for a living. Go to shows, stay up late, meet a rainbow of people, never wear a tie or ill-fitting court shoes again.
Maybe I should go and put this indulgent energy to a more productive use. Fuck sake, I feel guilty writing about myself in my own blog *rolls eyes*