Something that good (or, sometimes as well, crap) music can do better than film, TV, books or poetry is that it can capture the mood of some time, place or person so elegantly and perfectly that it fills that hoary old clichéd criteria of being tailor-made for that, despite all logic pointing towards the more likely eventuality of it being tailor-made for something experienced by the person who wrote and performed it, a few thousand miles away.
Logic be buggered though.
I think I might have mentioned very early on in this blog somewhere that everything we listen to forms the soundtrack to whatever we do, whether it be mundane or massive. Or someone else might have said it. As well as this being a constant favourite of mine over the years since it was released, it’s also inextricably linked to an absolutely perfect summer and the most idyllic part of my life so far, spent in the company of someone I completely believed I was to spend the rest of my days with. I probably don’t need to finish that story….
The Reading Festival, 1993.
The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow got banned at the last minute, Porno for Pyros treated us to a stunningly bizarre headlining set punctuated by a constant stream of choice words for the audience (a few thousand of which stormed off in a huff ) before telling us that he loved us – Perry Farrell is probably one of the few people alive who could have got away with this. Also, an HR-less Bad Brains entertained the main stage, which is more than can be said for Rage Against the Machine who were disappointingly bloody awful.
And in a tent, I saw the Doughboys play for the second and final time. Absolutely brilliant stuff, although I didn’t know about half the set having not know that they had a new album out. Ah, those halcyon days of pre-internet ignorance when everyone’s minutest movement was actually none of anyone’s business and nobody minded…
Anyway, it was a brilliant time all round and if I could relive one weekend, it would be that.
I think I picked this album up at a record fair at the festival itself, or maybe that’s just my mind trying to make the time even more spot-on than it already was. Not that it matters, as Crush would be just as good as if it had been prised from the hands of a haggardly witch who had just driven over my foot.
There’s something unique about each Doughboys album, as they were never ones to repeat themselves over the course of their career. A band who blazed trails and who influenced countless other (and far more successful) bands, they seem to be loved by lots of groups and artists, but I can honestly hand-on-heart say that I have never met another actual person who has owned up to even hearing of them.
Crush finds the band with a shiny new record deal and a few quid to splash out, and each penny is spent wisely – giving them room to experiment and grow whilst both retaining their singular identity and delivering a melodic punkish album that, in any sane world, would have made them hugely famous. Sadly as we know, the world is far too fond of popping its pants on its head and so the Doughboys lasted one more album before – as mentioned in the possibly apocryphal lyrics of Samiam’s Dull – seemingly breaking up on someone’s lawn in California.
More than any other record I own, I do not have to wave the disc anywhere near a player for it to be there, fully formed, in my head. The perfect pop fuzz of Melt, the “Have I grown? I guess I’m way over twenty” line of Neighborhood Villain‘s lament to growing up, the childlike joy in the great harmonised chorus of Fix Me, right through to the expansive noise of closer Summer Song - it’s all there, whenever I want to remember that time, that place, that love. It’s heartbreaking because I still love her, but the memories are great ones and I am writing all this drivel with a smile on my face.
The reason I’m wittering about this now is that I’m almost certain I saw her fleetingly last week – and as soon as that “Hang on a minute…” moment had passed and whoever it was had driven past, this record started playing immediately in my subconscious – and I’m not completely sure if it did that to soften the blow or twist the knife….
Not usually one for posting links to songs in here as it’s much more fun to discover it yourself, but I’ll make an exception with this. It’s not the greatest quality, but sadly there’s not much evidence around nowadays that they were ever here, which is the saddest story in all of this.
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