JC
Music Memory Meaning #1
Diving through the surface of the music I’m listening to right now – then down into the depths of the songs that helped me make some sense of this life…
the MUSIC…
Gaerea & Conjurer
Islington Assembly Hall 18.09.26
I feel like I’m stepping back into a world that I belong in. It’s a place where the music is loud enough to smother all the other noise in my head. The people there dress the way they always did: they’re pierced, tattooed and they wear band t-shirts.
I am on my own but I am home.
Conjurer’s heaviness makes the air thicker. I can feel my body expanding as I breathe the band’s music in. I become fuller, more solid, and yet lighter too. All the things that don’t matter evaporate and it is just this moment. The primal growled vocals feel unutterably pure. The crowd’s devoted howls make it clear that everyone in Islington’s Assembly Hall thinks the same.
If Conjurer’s songs are like hymns from another realm, Gaerea’s mesmerising metal emanates from an even more deeply buried dimension. Their songs are like portals within a portal, and listening to them live gives me the same spiralling feeling I get from staring at the cover of Loss, the band’s fifth album. Kaiwan Shaban’s artwork depicts a shadowy figure being beamed up into the night sky. The sensation I have now – of being sucked out of time, of being inhaled by something much bigger than myself – is liberating.
the MEMORY…
Slipknot
Astoria 13.12.99
By the time Slipknot arrived in London for the first time, I had been writing for The Fly Magazine for 9 months. My writing wasn’t very good at all and I wasn’t getting paid, but suddenly I could go to any gig I wanted to for free. And, yes, I went to lots of those shows on my own, but then I started to hang out with people I’d see over and over again at those same gigs. I’d lived in London since starting Queen Mary University in 1995 but only now did I feel like I was part of the city’s fabric.
The Astoria on Charing Cross Road was the best venue for those accidental meet-ups – there would be so many recognisable faces hanging out at the Keith Moon bar. Not that I saw anyone I knew on the night of Slipknot’s show. Maybe because, from the moment the band appeared in those red boiler suits, amidst a squall of siren-like shrieks and wails, my eyes were locked on what was happening on stage. I had never heard anything so heavy or seen anything so unhinged. I didn’t understand it. But it changed my life.
the MEANING…
Pinpointing A Place Of Perfect Peace
I was 23 when Slipknot taught me what it was like to really feel at peace in a shared space. Before that moment, I don’t think I could have ever guessed that the act of cramming myself into a room filled with the racket of face-melting metal music would be what facilitated a gorgeous sense of equilibrium deep in my core. Suddenly, I had found a steadiness that I’d never experienced before. I’m not saying that walking into a Slipknot or Gaerea show will necessarily feel like coming home for everyone, but your own version of that place – it could be a football stadium or a reading group or a cooking class; it could be anywhere – is a place worth searching for.