When I grow up

I’m three years in to this blog now and have sporadically produced an end-of-year round up of my favourite records at year end. Okay, I’ve done it once. This will make it twice. Two out of three ain’t bad as Meatloaf wisely attests.

There’s no getting past the fact that it’s been a dreadful year. The world has gotten uglier, more stupid, and less tolerant. Irrespective of your personal perspective on, say, Brexit or Trump it’s been a  year characterised by a dearth of reasoned, fact based, rational discourse. We are all a little poorer and democracy is ill served by a toxic environment where lies stand as truth and dissenting voices are shouted down as traitors.

In “normal” circumstances the dumbing down and drift (lurch) right of our politics would have been enough to tip this year into the debit column. And, sure, we lost some fine people too. Bowie, Cohen, Prince. How’d I get through the 42 records thing without room for any of them ? All of that marked 2016 as rotten. But all of that, personally, ended up being nothing.

I lost my mum this year. I’m old enough at 44 to have known her a long time. In brighter moments I take some comfort in that but it’s only been three and a half months and there haven’t been many brighter moments. I’ve written about loss and grief elsewhere in these pages and it has seemed an easier thing for me to access or articulate in the abstract. I have exhausted metaphors involving the sea or the weather but it’s interesting that they were the props I reached for. There is something vast and overwhelming about the loss of a parent, even as an adult, that means you reach for things equally vast. I’ve written about depression a lot on these pages as well and there’s some equivalence in the feelings but they’re not the same. I guess the symptoms present in the same way but the root cause is different. Mum used to read my words and I suspect they were a route in to her hearing from me, understanding me. I’ve never been a great talker. I don’t regret. I can’t change the way I’m wired but I hope (I think) that she knew me a bit better as an adult by reading my ramblings about records and my sporadic, random stories. I miss her as my best reader but most of all I miss her as my mum. She was the best one anyone could have.

So my three stand out records of the year (the year being when I experienced them and not necessarily when they came out) entirely reflect all of the above. First up, Marillion’s FEAR (Fuck Everyone And Run) deals in an angry, anxious reaction to the banking crisis, to changes in global politics, to a world in which divisions between rich and poor deepen and grow. It’s breathtakingly good. Broad in scope but personal and relatable, musically rich, technical but emotional. It won’t get much credit in the end-of-year lists because Marillion have long been abandoned by the mainstream music press but it’s a remarkable statement and a career high for a band that have already scaled a few anyway.

Second is Nick Cave’s “Skeleton Tree”. It was released after the death of his son (and partially written after that event, though not entirely) and is devastating. I’m not sure in any other year whether I’d have had the appetite to listen to Skeleton Tree very much. It’s too raw and too painful but I found it a conduit for my own feelings. A lot of stuff felt very trite this year in comparison to “real life” and this record was anything but.

And finally there’s Tim Minchin’s “Matilda” soundtrack/score and, in particular, the song “When I Grow Up”. The musical is an utter delight and I think I found its overtly clever lyrics a tonic in this post-truth year of all years. I’m well aware that the musical particularly speaks to me as a father of a smart, sensitive daughter and that I have become overly sentimental in my middle-ish age. However, “When I Grow Up” kinda sums up the year for me. On the face of it it’s a singalong call to be older, to get to “eat sweets every day” and do what you like – the imagined liberation of being an adult from a child’s perspective. Inevitably it’s more complex than that and I can’t listen to the song without feeling an extraordinary sense of sadness and pathos in the lines about being old enough to carry all the things you have to carry as a grown up, about being able to fight off the monsters under the bed when you’re a grown up. There are lots of markers of being a “grown up”. Formal ones like turning 18 or 21. Or informal ones like buying your first home or getting married or having children. Or losing your mum. I wish, I really wish, that you did get to easily fight off the monsters under the bed when you grow up and I really, really wish you learned to carry all of things you have carry but it’s not as straightforward as that. This year they all got a lot heavier. This year I got to be a grown up and I’d give anything to be able to be a child again.

Go listen if you’re so minded. They’re all great records although none will make the playlists at many Christmas parties. But it hasn’t been that kind of year.