Changes aren't permanent, but change is

A big question, a stupid life, cat prison, root down

A strange question to start with, but I might as well give it a go.

What does your brain do?

A three-pound organ positioned near the top of your head; a temperamental lobe that sits above it all — what is that thing doing when your face is glued to a laptop screen, or when you’re squinting at signage trying to navigate your way around a previously unknown city? What is its purpose when you’re watching a gig played at punishment volume, or trying to comfort a child who’s been upset by narrow-minded nothings at school?

A rudimentary medical knowledge of the body allows the average human a basic pencil-to-paper construction of the human form. In that pub-driven diagram — scribbled away in biro on the inside of a packet of B&H — the human brain sits there bang in the middle of the skull, that bony construction holding everything together at the top of your body. From that vantage point, the brain controls everything that goes on around it, within reason. My wording is a bit crazed there, but the root of it feels unarguable. The brain is what keeps us going. It keeps us up all night, every night, or lets us slip off to sleep by 9pm if that’s what it thinks is right for you. Supposedly made up of 70% water and 60% fat — statistical facts and figures that don’t quite add up, I’ll admit — the brain just about manages to get the job done.

Despite all the pointless stresses I’ve made my brain live under, I think the organ and I have generally got on. I’ll admit I’ve tested it in a vain attempt to work out what it does, how it does it, and how much punishment it is willing to take. Alcohol from bottles and kegs flowing all around it; drugs powdering it, usually snorted from the most unhygienic toilets that humans can construct outside of horror movies. Yet the brain — thankfully — forgives, albeit adding more than a kick of hangover the following day to remind you of where you really sit in life’s great chain of being.

The brain remains a filter for voices, for music, for speeding cars and the dawn chorus, for the ice cream van and the sound of war. It’s there on good days and bad days, like the ones where those aforementioned hangovers beg you to crawl back under the duvet and forget life for a few more hours. In fact, it’s always been there, ready with all the words that I’ve learnt, stacked like a Babel tower climbing towards the heavens. A brilliant weapon whenever needed, but more importantly, something to help you deal with all the colours of love. It knows which pulses need to fire in order to turn the clumsy splurge of words I’d normally manage into something closer to an unarguable seduction.

I’d like to think we are in unity, helping each other get through the days and weeks and months and years that pile up in front of both of us. The last two years have made me wonder how much of that still stands. Because all of those days and weeks and months and years happened before the brain tumour diagnosis.

Before diagnosis, the brain managed to get me from A to B. I didn’t ask much of it, so it just ticked away, a genius processor burning up energy in the skull, an AI machine made of fat and cells and water and proteins that’s kept me alive without being given a word of thanks. Since the diagnosis, then the operation, then the radiotherapy, then the chemotherapy, we don’t seem to understand each other like we used to.

My brain did not invite the tumour in. All the processes, the medical hoops that had to be jumped through during recovery — no part of my body would choose that kind of assault on its own reality. The weirdness of it all is like French sci-fi from the 1970s — a total trip courtesy of Métal Hurlant, with all of the good, the bad and the often very, very ugly close to hand at all times. Hard to understand, hard to process, it has the velocity and force of some mad sliding machine you’re strapped into at a fairground, where every second is spent praying that the brain will take charge and keep things afloat in the end.

A year or so after surgery, I found myself in conversation with a doctor about the slight hallucinatory effects that seemed to come from the deafness on my left side. At times, it feels like falling under a spell of psychedelics when least expecting them. And least wanting them. He looked at me with a smile and said, “Well, someone has been messing about inside your brain, what do you expect?” The effects of a human being’s hand moving and manipulating inside your head can be felt daily — even now, a year and a half after surgery. Spend five minutes thinking about it and you get caught in the black magic that lurks inside that idea — all manner of manipulation caused by sly laser beams and a sleight of hand.

All of this leads back to the question that started this off: what does your brain do?

Before the diagnosis — tumour already silently in place, steadily buggering up everyday life — I often found myself tied up in repetition. I’d follow patterns, stay in sync with my own personal version of what reality might be (if over-enthusiastic drinkers who love loud music were in control of it all). Post-surgery, post-recovery, those repetitions are now locked in. A low-level panic rises up inside when I can’t go over the options in my mind and tick them off one by one.

Over the last few months, I’ve found myself bound by the kind of simple repetitions I’ve mentioned on here before (The Brain Tumour Charity talk about it here). Is the front door shut? Is the cat locked in? Is 9pm too early to go up to bed and watch whatever programme might as well have consumed all other TV? On and on, again and again. They have become ghostly presences — spectral figures in the corner of the room, glitches in how days are supposed to unfold. The thought of randomness, or looseness — a six-sided die, each number linked to a completely different option — is now so alien that it’s hard to recognise life once followed that path on any given day. Stupid decisions made in split seconds, regretted later but loved in the moment — that was how booze and drugs and — yes — even the brain ran things.

So how did that function change so much? Did the surgeon’s hand add barriers and blocks — some unwanted cheat code — that have left me prone to all of these dysfunctions? Knowing what my brain does now, with all these patterns and tics that have become part of who I am and how I exist, is it wrong to feel more than a little doubt about the decisions made up there in the skull?

That temperamental lobe is still in control (and thank God for that — the alternatives aren’t especially pleasant), but its path is now a little off-kilter. Maybe that’s just an inevitable side effect after somebody has been rooting around inside your head.

If you see me out and about, maybe stop and tell me I did actually shut the door, and that the cat is fine exactly where he is. Help me out with the things my brain keeps testing me with. Help me work out what it does and why it does it.

And if all of that works, let’s go and have another beer. I’d owe you.

The first sound could be a laser beam slowed right down, each drop in pitch adding another subtle layer of threat. Underneath it, a drum pattern kicks in at 87 bpm. You could call it a walking rhythm, if the walker were a fully stoned version of Travolta at the start of Saturday Night Fever. When the voice arrives, it’s high-toned but completely commanding, singing about a modern-day American rebel who happens to share a name with Mark Twain’s mischievous Mississippi orphan, first introduced in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876.

As the song unfolds, Tom Sawyer’s rhythm track pounds away like a jackhammer against unrelenting metal, creating the illusion that the track’s speed has doubled before dropping back into that stoned 87 bpm tumble. Add a sixteen note hi-hat pattern and the resultant track features what Drumeo — the online teaching resource for anyone who lives with sticks in their hands — once called “the world’s greatest air-drumming song of all time”.

Tom Sawyer is Rush soundtracking the dawn of the 1980s. Or not quite the dawn, given that their previous album — the one led by the mighty The Spirit of Radio — arrived on 14 January 1980. Here, progressive music and contemporary studio production fuse into one enormous, hefty radio-friendly sound. Hard, synth-driven and sparse in all the right places, Tom Sawyer combines phased electronics with a brutal drum break that could supercharge almost any hip-hop record — and has, having been sampled or lifted by everyone from Danny Brown to Ultramagnetic MCs. Hell, it’s even been lifted by US metal band Godsmack.

I first heard the record as a pre-teen kid: ten years old and knowing precisely nothing. Bad hair, the first red pocks of acne, and a habit of getting smacked across the head by teachers if I had the temerity to wear a badge or patch advertising my musical tastes at school. Rush were technically one of my brother’s bands — he was three years older, and therefore three years deeper in — and in our house their songs were pretty much impossible to escape. The melodies soared, the guitar solos sounded like how you imagined you might play if you ever learned, and every song seemed engineered for Drumeo’s air drumming championship. For a ten-year-old who didn’t understand — or even want to understand — Madness or The Specials, Rush’s music was an irresistible mix.

Rush’s drummer — one third of their perfect machine — was Neil Peart, who also wrote most of the band’s lyrics. In 2020, Peart died from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain tumour that he had lived with for three years. GBMs account for around 15 per cent of all tumours found inside the skull, and once diagnosed, the survival odds are not good. My friend Andy was diagnosed with a GBM and passed away seven months later.

It’s hard to think of a musician so deft, so powerful, so precise being taken down by such a… nothing. Tumours are small and insidious, creeping in and filling available space until they take over. Little curses, unseen and very much unwanted.

As Rush records go, Peart was very much the brain of the whole thing: a fully functioning higher organ driving the machine, trying to move the human beings lucky enough to witness him play. The repetition I talked about above — maybe that was there in the mathematical precision of his playing. Endless fills, loops, time changes: things that made sense to him, and to all the people who bought his records.

The two serving members of Rush - Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson - are back out on tour this week, with German drummer Anika Nilles filling Peart’s seat. The gigs look like a love letter to their lost friend — a celebration of all the work they did together in fifty years, played with all the heaviness you’d hope for.

From hastily recorded Instagram clips, Nilles seems to have brilliantly captured his sound and power — enough to make me want to see them when they eventually get to the UK next year. The teenage kid who wore their badge into primary school is now in his late fifties, contemplating heading up to London between doctors appointments and MRI scans in an attempt to relive the past for an hour or two. Forgive me if a few tears appear when Tom Sawyer reaches it’s climax.

Listening to Global Communications’ 76:14 a lot at the moment. Maybe it’s a reaction to the constant horrible news cycle, who knows. Definite blissful escapism though.