11. Ghost in the Machine

The Best Years of Your Life

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the eleventh track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘The Best Years of Your Life’.

Childhood

I feel like this album has been circling the drain of childhood for a while now. But I’m ashamed to admit that the title of this track is deliberately ironic. I took a decision with these emails that I’d try to be as honest as I possibly could about this music, how I relate to it, and the story it tells. I did have a number of ideas for music and projects that involve me telling a long string of very deliberate lies, and maybe you’ll enjoy them one day. But this project is not one of those.

Bearing this in mind, I feel a little sheepish that I have entitled a piece with a phrase so deliberately designed to invoke childhood, when the piece isn’t really about childhood at all. The irony in the title is that, for the most part, I hated my childhood and had a fairly miserable time of it. To be clear, it was nowhere near as bad as a lot of very unfortunate people. I wasn’t beaten, or abused (at least not at home, or by my family), or subject to the myriad horrendous things inflicted on children that make for such terrible reading in a lot of newspapers. I was just pretty miserable, or scared, or bored, or sometimes all three at once. I got through it, but it was unpleasant enough that my eyes used to roll really quite hard when people used the phrase ‘the best years of your life’. I thought they stank, for the most part.

So what is this piece about? Good question, and I’m not sure a big explainer is terribly helpful here. In the context of the album - we’ve arrived! We’re happy! But there is such a novelty to this state. It’s unusual, and hard to get used to. It feels almost like things should have felt all along. Almost as though they always were like this, if you could only have seen it at the time. Now these really are the best years of your life.

But if the best years are now, what’s with all the nostalgia?

Space Age Man’s Final Frontier

You might have noticed that many of the cover images for these tracks have a sort of degraded 70s look to them, which is entirely deliberate. They match the aesthetic of the music, although I’m not certain how much of this is audible to people not completely steeped in my world. But you might have listened to some of the other tracks and found yourself wondering why all the synths are slightly out of tune, or why some tracks have a bunch of hiss on them like they were recorded on cassette tape, or what the deal is with the scratchy vinyl noises. Well, that’s entirely on purpose. In some cases I actually had to try quite hard to make it sound like that.

One of the major touchstones in my musical life was the first Arrested Development album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of..., which begins with the sound of a needle being dropped onto a vinyl record. I remember this being a breathtaking surprise for me, partly because I bought it on CD and I was still getting used to how much better CDs sounded than the cassettes I’d been used to until that point. I mean, what? Why? My parents had gone to all this trouble of buying this really expensive CD player, and I spent 30% more on the CD than the vinyl would have cost me (yes, you read that right, that genuinely happened in the olden days). What does that noise mean? I’ll do my best to explain.

Look Around You

This track from my album, The Best Years of Your Life, has a different version of one of those needle-drop audio tricks, something else I stole from John Cage (via Aphex Twin). You might notice if you listen carefully that the piano sounds like a machine. Not only are there piano notes, but there are clunks and clicks as keys hit wood, and hammers hit strings, and pedals go up and down. It kind of sounds like the piano in my house when I was young. Or at least how I remember it. The imperfection makes it sound more real, maybe. Except that’s not really what a piano sounds like in real life. The more real it gets, the less real it is. It’s not a million miles away from the sensation of putting on a CD and hearing the sound of vinyl. F for Fake again.

All of this stuff belongs to a world that I like spending time in, which is the world of hauntology. This is a concept that was first put forward by Derrida. (I need to pause at this point and acknowledge the massive miserable sigh of my subscriber base crying, as if with one voice, ‘I knew this **** would start banging on about Derrida eventually’. Don’t panic. This is the first and last time). It’s the phenomenon where cultural artefacts from the past keep getting dragged into the present, sometimes to the extent that they form part of the present. I think I first woke up to it years ago when I was at a lecture by Trevor Wishart (I think), when the person I remember being Trevor Wishart said ‘we are not all paddling in the shallows of a postmodern sea at the end of music history’, in response to which I remember thinking ‘uh… nah… dude, we really are’.

I could write a whole book on this (there’s a threat), but maybe I’ll just talk a little about the musical and cultural references and why they’re important for this album. The very obvious place one starts here is Boards of Canada, who do an incredible job of conjouring up the forgotten past. Their way of using very old sounding synthesisers, and equipment like reel-to-reel tape recorders, makes their music extremely evocative of things like the ten minute films they used to show before the main feature in cinemas, or the peculiar quality of sound on VHS video tapes, or a young Richard hiding under his covers and being terrified witless reading Alan Garner’s ‘Elidor’. It’s sort of the early 80s, but much more than a pastiche; almost an invocation of the emotion of that time. A feeling of time travel, rather than the knowledge of it.

For me, there’s also a lot of provincial UK references in this bag of stuff, because that’s part of me, the provincial UK being where I grew up. This is a world of Dr Who, Children’s Film Foundation, John Wyndham, Quatermass, orange squash, and Ghostwatch, the latter being the absolute sina qua non of this corner of hauntology and a highly recommended watch.

I’ve included a ‘dig deeper’ paragraph at the bottom of this email if you’re curious. It’s down there so my partner doesn’t have to remind me (again) not to clog these emails with long lists of people she’s never heard of.

Nostalgia for the present

Aside from the world of hauntology being music that I like and a sound world that I enjoy being part of, what has any of this got to do with the story? Mark Fisher, the remarkable originator of the idea of capitalist realism, wrote a lot about hauntology. He had a really good description of it as a ‘nostalgia for lost futures’. This is a really profound distinction; the ache not for the past, but for the present to which that past should have led. The road not travelled. The choice not taken. We’ve been here before.

I think in some of this album, and this track in particular, the nostalgia I’m trying to evoke is not nostalgia for a childhood I didn’t really like that much. It’s nostalgia for the future that child hoped he’d eventually enjoy. But the difference with this track, and with this entire third sequence, is that things really are good. The child has grown, finally, into a life that is far better than his young self could possibly have imagined. The emotion is a weird one to pin down, but I’ll try to explain - it’s like our main character is feeling an unrequited longing for a life that he actually has. I was recently introduced to the lovely turn of phrase “…Happiness is continuing to desire what you already have…”, and that works really well here. We’ve arrived. Our unfulfilled longing tells us that we’re actually happy.

Items yet to be explained

I’m conscious that this post has kind of explained what the track is about, but not entirely. I’ve described the piano in this track, but what about the duduk solo? I’d love to say it is a throwback to Peter Gabriel’s Passion, which was one of my favourite albums growing up. That’s true - Passion really was, and is, one of my favourite albums. But that’s not why the duduk is on this track. It’s actually there because it just sort of works. I can’t say anything more than, well, it just sort of works. You know. Works. The opposite of doesn’t work.

That’s true for actually quite a lot of this album. It’s not totally in service of anything. It’s there because it says something that I feel in a way I can’t express any other way. And I suppose that’s what music’s all about when it comes down to it. We’ll talk more about that next time.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.

Dig Deeper!

There are quite a lot of musical places in the post above that I didn’t go for length. The most important for me musically is probably the albums of Portishead, particularly the second one (called Portishead). The last track of that album pulls off the breathtaking coup of sampling a song almost wholesale, but it’s a song by a band that never existed. It’s insanely good.

Somebody I crossed paths with years ago who has since (justifiably) become a lot better known is The Caretaker, who is well worth checking out. I’d love to be the guy who presciently bought Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia knowing how brilliant it was at the time, long before anybody else. But I’m actually the guy who bought Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, listened to some of it once, wasn’t sure what to make of it, since lost the tapes, and was recently told by a friend of mine that that random guy we used to hang out with in Colchester Arts Centre went on to become super famous and his tapes are now worth quite a lot of money. Oh well. His stuff sounds great to me now, making me even more disappointed that I don’t know where those tapes are.

Those interested in really old out of tune synthesisers should check out the artists on the Castles in Space label, in particular my personal favourite 110% proof double shot hauntologist Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan. Or if you want a quadruple shot, you can always invest in a CD-R (!) of Shropshire Number Stations.

And if you’re a reader, or indeed a human being, you will almost certainly enjoy Stuart Millard’s hilarious Frantic Planet blog. And you’ll also definitely enjoy at least the first season of Look Around You if you can get hold of it. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is similarly worth a squiz, if only to check out Matt Berry before he apparently became the most famous person in the universe, or something.

Finally, you probably just need to watch vintage Dr Who. And maybe read some Alan Garner while you’re about it.