The midday sun at midnight
Anti depressant action and hope where you can find it
“Do you think you could maybe post something a little more cheerful?”
A casual Saturday afternoon call and my Dad is now laughing as he points out that I have been a bit bloody miserable talking about chemotherapy recently (in case you missed it misery fans, the offending piece is online as I’m A Leaf On A Windy Day).
The thing is he’s right. Sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in the grey. It feels weird writing that while the sun blazes down outside but there you go, you can’t choose what the weather does no matter how hard you try. Recovery gives you grey days and greyer evenings. One of life’s jet black t-shirts has snuck into an all-white wash. The clothes line can’t lie.
My God, this all sounds terrible doesn’t it? What can we do about it? What positives can we cling onto when willingly taking NHS poison pills?
I wrote that last piece in the eye of a ten-day Procarbazin storm just as the kids finished school for the summer and succumbed to whatever crappy illnesses were knocking round at end of term parties. What I’m starting to learn from taking Procarbazin is that there is a peak period in the middle of the dose where you feel utterly devoid. It’s very hard to deal with as it’s so absolutely anti-normal. Maybe best close the laptop that day and wait for that dismal brain soup to drain away to nothing.
All that said, there are still colours burnt directly onto my brain - glorious rainbow bands branded on there ready to bring a little pinch of hope when everything else fades to flat. Scenes from films, pictures from books, faded magazine pages. Snippets of music videos, the flicker of rolling celluloid in a movie theatre. These are less formative snapshots. They’re impactful first impressions made in better times. They’re hope, basically.
Right now, hope is Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez chugging lines of speed off the dashboard of a repo car. And its Tom Courtenay marching home through the streets of Bradford at night at the end of Billy Liar, Ambrosia’s army band following in his wake.
Hope might as well be Ian Brown in 1989, maracas in hand and five pound notes printed round the collar of his shirt, arms stretched out in an arc wider than his own ego. And its there when The Stone Roses turned up collectively covered in paint after they’ve done their old record company over, a display of art conquering the grim, grubby commerce of a low rent reissue campaign (sadly we’ll all become very, very used to that in the years that follow).
Hope is there in Shaun William Ryder and Kermit at the first ever Black Grape gig, on stage at the Hanover Grand huffing oxygen from a canister like its the only thing keeping them alive. Maybe it was. And it’s right there in Morrissey, interviewed on The Tube, his mind driven wild by yellowing paperbacks, still beautiful and unsullied by godawful right wing strop.
Hope is Massive Attack taking the tone of a city, recording it and turning it into something close to religious music written as a soundtrack to streets and streets of concrete and graffiti. Sometimes you can hear it in Mark E Smith’s voice, rattling along like a northern machine gun spitting his way through everything from foul British weather to the high magick of the occult. And it’s clear as day in James Dean Bradfield performing at gale force 10, clad in a balaclava and racking up the complaints back in the days when Top of the Pops still meant something.
Hope is a printed black and white page where Madonna stands staunch and naked on a New York street, smoking cigarettes like her life depended on it. And a few years later its Madonna utterly possessed by an untouchable ABBA sample in the Hung Up video, the sound a faultless piece of brain control. Hope is the Beastie Boys moving like elastic through a forest clearing on So Whatcha Want and its the white noise that obliterates everything when the Queens of the Stone Age hit armageddon speed on telly.
Hope is acid house as an explosion blitzing through the normal. It’s the feeling you got when you heard the near-obliterating warp through your entire being when Underworld’s Rez was played at the right volume, at the right time of day (by that read loud, and at any time of day). And it’s definitely the Dust Brothers dipping into the record box to find one last majestic record to play at the end of the night at the Albany.
Hope is a pristine, almost psychedelically coloured Marvel comic sat on the shelf and its the first copies of NME and Melody Maker being lifted off the newsstand on a Tuesday lunchtime (RIP). It’s a half empty cinema, popcorn in hand, taking a trip down Mulholland Drive. It’s a bountiful harvest of apples from Summerisle and its the echoing fizz of a beer bottle opening in a quiet room, pouring out a yard of whatever lager cures you on the sunniest of days. Hope is there in a Labour election victory, hard won after years and horrible years of staring right into the immovable obsidian souls of the enemy (as I write this, I’m very aware that hopeful moments like this come back to properly haunt you in multiple ways soon enough).
And it’s there in the green grass that grows through the paving stones at the front of your house. A gentle reminder of what’s pushing through all the time.
New life. More hope.
For those of you who are disgusted by this week’s emotional sell-out, I can only apologise for having taken my Dad’s gentle criticism seriously. If he’d have got to me on another day, I might have dug in deeper and gone for something really bloody grim (hmmmm… maybe I should be thanking him here). In the coming weeks I’m going through a load of notes written during the past year. I’m hoping to process the operation into words and also to talk to other people about how sound works for you when you’re one ear and half a brain down. So, a bit less hope in the coming weeks.