I have to tiptoe round the 80's. There was so much good music, a lot of which can be dated to within a couple of months. Who now remembers any of those British Jazz-Funk acts, every band given the Trevor Horn touch of magic, everyone who ever fronted for Stock, Aiken and Waterman, or Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis? And how quickly it was trampled on by the behemoth that was dance music? Hand Held In Black and White is the last record that reminds me of how I could feel a sense of possibility in a gust of wind, in the sun reflecting from a window, in the sight of a pretty girl.
After that, my world started to close in, slowly so that I didn't really notice it. The gap between the upbeat, club-oriented music I was listening to and the increasingly withdrawn life I was leading became greater and greater. I had terrible insomnia for two years in the mid-Eighties, changed jobs and choose my first property not wisely and, unknown to me, was heading for a fall. But the music was so bright and shiny.
The Fall was alcoholism. While everyone else was having the Second Sumer of Love, my liking of a tipple turned into an actual problem. I spent six years as a practising alcoholic, with a ghastly dry drunk in the summer of 1991, when I was crazier than when I was under the influence. I called AA one grey, damp October morning 1993, after I had been unemployed for fifteen months. A couple of years later, I heard Not An Addict on MTV and it knocked me out.
"It's over now, I'm cold, alone / I'm just a person on my own / Nothing means a thing to me / Oh, nothing means a thing to me". Underneath all my appearance of normal living, that is still how I feel. As for Fast Love, George Michael's hymn to casual sex and the sexiest video you will ever see, and that includes anything with Shakira in it.
Most of the recent music I like - from chillwave and progressive house to The Script - has a little touch of jazz, or blues or 80's soul. You might not think Bach has anything to do with blues or jazz, but you would be wrong. His compositions have the same sense of being snapshots of a endless flow of music that Coltrane's records do: a record of a constantly evolving flow of thoughts about melody, harmony and rhythm.
The record companies had a notorious cull of their catalogues and artists in the late 1980's - there's a line in a Missy Elliott track "since Elektra dropped Miss Anita Baker". But CD's, PC's and the internet allowed the musicians came back with a vengeance. There's so much music around today, and a lot of it is excellent. Fire up your iTunes and look at the radio.
Somewhere, a young man is walking down the road at three in the morning after a late-night session with friends. She was there, they exchanged a kiss in the kitchen. It's warm and the air smells of early summer. He doesn't have to be in college until eleven that morning. And this is playing on his phone's media player...
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