Hyde Park 2018

I am sure it says much more about me than anything else but in a crowd of sixty thousand people in Hyde Park I had managed to feel as disconnected from everyone on the planet as I think I can. I think I actually did have tears in my eyes as Rob Smith of The Cure sang Boys Don't Cry. The cause of my tears is probably open to a lifetime of therapy but I am pretty sure that the majority of the people standing near me, most of whom were holding a beer, did not have watery eyes like I did. I am sure the people around me were fans of the band because they knew the lyrics to each and every song. They even knew the obscure songs. I personally forgot that the song Jumping Someone Else's Train even existed. I probably hadn't even thought about that song in twenty five years. 

I have mostly chosen to listen to music whilst on the move and have bused, trained and walked, mostly walked, plugged into a Walkman, Discman, MP3 player and finally a mobile phone. The only thing that has changed is the instant nature that you can obtain music through technology. I still see it to be a miracle, bordering on witchcraft, that I can think of a song and instantly download it and only a small monthly charge is incurred. As an aside, I think I have found that every format has had its flaws. Tapes getting chewed up in your Walkman was always annoying. But files getting lost or Spotify telling you that you can't play that song unless you are online when you are online is actually as confounding. Walking everywhere, saturated in music, for me music has always been a hugely personal matter, with sounds pumped directly into my ears or when at home filling one small room. And although I do see that music brings people together, I think it's more the idea of it, what it represents, the deeper connections that you might feel, that truly connect people.

Liking the same music as sixty thousand people that you happen to be standing in the same park as does not guarantee a great vibe. A dozen or so years earlier I had been to a Coldplay concert at Crystal Palace national sports centre. They had recently headlined Glastonbury and were at the height of their popularity. And that evening I always refer to as the Woodstock of Dissociation. Having seen the exact same performance on the televised Glastonbury a week or so earlier it seemed like a copy of a copy of a show I'd already seen.

People stood in small cliques, small battalions closed off to meeting anyone new, on guard to repel all who encroach. They stood in groups chanting out lyrics to early Millennial anthemic sounds. I was separated from my friend who I came with and without phone reception we had little chance of finding each other. I stood alone, on the edge of a couple of cliques. I caught the bug and began Chanting, like everyone else, like you would at a football match. I couldn't ever call it singing. I could not imagine a concert bringing on any kind of dissociative disorder but if any concert could do it then it would be this one. At the end of the concert I was wandering through South London feeling despondent and disconnected. 

On the day of The Cure concert in Hyde Park there had been a big England football game on earlier. I remember how in the Nineties there was a cultural merging of sport and music. Over time I have distanced myself from both modern music and football. As a man in my twenties I had this idea that football was becoming cultured and the Indie music I grew up on was more mainstream. The world that I saw looked somewhat like one I quite liked. But it was all a very specific place and time. I can't say it seems the same anymore. Where I imagined the culture of the music scene influencing sport I think that it ended up being that sport influenced the music, paving the way for fans to turn the unique sound of Jack White's guitar into a chant that fill stadiums around the world.

It's hard to imagine these football fans in Hyde Park taking the same life long route here as me. Perhaps a major difference is that they wanted to be there and I was only mildly curious to be there. Live music is not my thing. In many ways I still feel a connection to the boy who spent the autumn months of 1987 listening to this music in his bedroom or on his walkman. I had spent the year, up until the summer months, doing what most teenage boys do - Listening to and recording the charts off the radio, which is exactly the place you would struggle to find The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain, New Order, The Smiths and the type of music I would end the year listening to. I do have a strong fond memory of one friend getting very excited at The Cure being in the charts and on standby waiting to see if they were going to play their latest release, Just Like Heaven, at the ready on the record button. It might only have been in the charts for one week and this could have been the only opportunity to record it. I still have that recording.

By the Summer of 1987 I was fourteen and the if not for some twists and turns in my life I could have grown up listening to Wet Wet Wet or Def Leppard. They had songs in the charts that I quite liked.  I started the summer as a child playing Wet Wet Wets' Sweet Little Mystery to death. It was catchy. I was fourteen. I ended the year knowing all I could about Ian Curtis and Joy Division.  This has something to do with there being a song in the charts that summer called True Faith by a band I had not previously heard of called New Order. I don't know what it is that I identified with but there was a tone to that one song that resonated with teenage me. It may be one of the few things in my life that I found for myself. Up until then I had taken so much from others. There was always someone else to get you into something else. "Here, have you tried listening to this or that or something else that someone else told me was really good?" But no one had told me to get into New Order.

I'm pretty sure I knew nothing about New Order at that age. Liking True Faith was not the same as liking early New Order. The B side, 1963, was equally good, if not better in my opinion. I still don't think there's any other New Order track that sounds quite like it. And nothing sounded like the early singles, which I would have first listened to on a double cassette album, Substance, a compilation album of their singles. I’d bought it from a friend for two quid. What would I have been without that two quid tape? This, along with Low life, that I first listened to on a cassette borrowed from our local library, would become one of the defining sounds of my teenage years. Along with Low Life, there was Darklands by The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Cure's Head on the Door. Much of these sounds would be played at full volume, creating a world of my own that I’d wrap myself in as I walked to school or cycled through my paper round. I even got run over by a car to the sound of This Time of Night from Low life. I like to think that the car clipped me and knocked me off my bike just at the climax of that song. It’s quite remarkable to make that choice. To go from Wet Wet Wet to an NME buying Joy Division devotee who once declined an invitation to a birthday party because it fell on the same day as the anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death. Recording the charts took a back seat to going through record stores looking through the New Wave sections. No one called it Indie at that stage.

I feel connected to that fourteen year old and I feel no connection at all to the football fans in Hyde Park chanting Boys Don't Cry and then talking through the slower songs. The night before, pretty much in exactly the same spot in Hyde Park, I watched Roger Waters end his set with Comfortably Numb. Could you ever imagine more of a disconnect between words, tone and actions then seeing a bunch of men chanting along to Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd like they were at a football match? You can’t help but feel a tangible sense of irony, thinking of how The Wall was inspired by Waters’ own feelings of disconnecting from people. The story goes that in the Seventies Pink Floyd found themselves playing to very large audiences, some of whom would have probably been following the band since the Syd Barrett days but many who would just be there for the beer and the atmosphere you get seeing a band play in big stadium. Waters had said that he found that it had become a rather alienating experience doing those shows. He was conscious of a wall between the band and the audience, a sensation that was heightened after an event where a fan was invited on stage and the fan spat in Waters’ face.

I wanted to stop the whole show and ask if anyone else felt funny about a crowd of people being anything but comfortably numb, beer in hand, shouting lyrics back at the stage. Feeling a certain amount of disconnection Roger? You should see all this from where I'm standing. Did you ever imagine this song being a football chant? That said, did anyone ever imagine Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes being a battle cry for football fans. I think if you actually listen to it the guitar riff of Seven Nation army has a sound that is not whatever noise that chant is. I read that in some countries the song is actually referred to as the, “Pom pom pom pom pom song.” And I can only say in all exasperation that guitars don't go pom.  A section of society had turned one of the greatest guitar sounds to a drone of a chant, draining it of all its twang. This is not the sound that took my breath away the first time I heard it in 2001. I know that as a music lover I am supposed to want to go to concerts and jump around all excited at the sound of Jack White’s guitar. But in what must seem like the strongest declaration of how live music is not my thing, my immediate reaction is to look and listen in a state of wonder. Even if I had been full of beer in Hyde Park I still think that the sound of Comfortably Numb or Boys Don’t Cry will always conjure up a different reaction to the one that seemed to prevail at those two summer concerts. Mine was a very different emotional response.

So I try to laugh about it. Cover it all up with lies. I try to laugh about it. Hiding the tears in my eyes. Because boys don't cry. Nor do they seem connected in any way. How do you relate to a crowd of 60,000 people? One person at a time probably. Maybe for some, chanting boys don't cry in a crowd somehow connects people. After the concert they go home and say, “Yeah it was great, we were all yelling and screaming, boys don't cry, at the stage.” Maybe at some point they sit alone, turn on Spotify and remember walking to school listening to Head on the Door.

In contrast, months later, at the end of the year, I went along to a lunch time Ghost gig, which turned out to be partly a talk about Factory records and an hour listening to an old New Order concert from 1985. The small room we were in was only half full. It was mostly men attending, roughly my age and I imagined that at some point they've all had a collection of NME and Melody Maker stashed under their beds. One of my work mates joined me and as we listened to songs from 1985 I pointed out - Here’s where I got hit by a car listening to this song whilst doing my paper round. And I felt like I was sharing something and somehow in a very quiet way, connecting through music.