"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time has come,
The song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say..." - Pink Floyd, Time
In 1995, two seemingly unrelated events took place. My school in Bristol started giving me 'prep' (homework to pretty much every other school in England) and my loving parents bought me a Sega Saturn for Christmas. (A Sega Saturn! What a way to show my age!) I'd never owned any previous consoles, having only experienced them wonderingly at neighbours' and friends' houses, but as the occurrences of the first event became rather more regular as the school year dragged on, I found myself unable to enjoy the second event as much as a ten-year old boy should. When you have a demon of a maths teacher like Mr. Evans, you don't dare turn in your algebra a day late just because you were trying to set the Mountain course record in the Lancia Delta in Sega Rally.
However, by pure accident, I managed to combine the two. The Saturn was stationed in the 'playroom' by a charmingly clunky Acorn CRT monitor, a hangover from our old Atari ST, not far from a battered old sofabed which I would wearingly unfurl every evening and cover with old-fashioned exercise books and ring binders. One evening, when I was particularly frustrated with an English essay that had started but simply refused to end, I took a break and started rooting around the desk, toying with the idea of taking on that ridiculous fifth boss from Panzer Dragoon again. (I was so close!)
Instead, though, my eye caught a glimpse of a CD cover lying on the desk. I hadn't remembered putting it there, and had only vague memories of my Dad mentioning it. It simply bore a stylised ray of light shining into a glass prism and refracting into a rainbow. It was undeniably striking, especially to a ten year-old, but it didn't even reveal the artist or the album title. Intrigued, I turned the Saturn on, let it run through to what was then the thoroughly modern CD screen and slipped the disc into the tray. I pressed C on the joypad and returned reluctantly to the essay.
That night was the first ever time I had listened to music on the Saturn, and it became a ritual that I adhered to for as long as I remember grappling with homework. I eventually added other CDs to the roster - Billy Joel's An Innocent Man and its brash reworking of soul and Stax; Dire Straits' easy-listening giant Brothers in Arms - but those records were in the rather unfortunate position of having to follow Dark Side of the Moon. I'd never before heard alarm clocks or cash registers or disjointed voices layered together in music. I'd never heard an instrumental, much less one with a single female voice improvising a horrendous yet melodious cry to heaven (or with titles like "The Great Gig in the Sky"). And I'd never heard anything so fatalistic and final as the closing song cycle of "Any Colour You Like", "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". My small childish brain was simply blown away by what I still consider the greatest (non-classical) album ever committed to disc, and I have spent the rest of my life trying to find something to equal it (and have some fairly close with The Who's Who's Next and the Floyd-esque Ten Silver Drops by Secret Machines).
I had the opportunity to revisit those early memories when my girlfriend surprised me with tickets to see Brit Floyd at the London O2 yesterday evening. Various extenuating circumstances meant we could only see the first half, but they were note perfect from the outset, sensibly dividing guitar and vocal duties across the band and keeping the inter-song chat to a minimum. Particular highlights were the monolithic "Welcome to the Machine" and a sensitive, studied "Us and Them", although both Jo and I found the visuals, while appropriate, slightly disconcerting at times.
I left feeling as if I had rediscovered a small part of myself, reaffirming my faith in music and its power not only to delight in the present but also to transport to the past as well as any sepia-toned photo album or battered train ticket. My Saturn may have bitten the dust a long time ago, but it opened the door to my current obsession with music, and to lose that would be to lose a part of me too precious to replace.
