Connor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes probably never even met Art Garfunkel

If I consider my drunken carnage years to be from 1999 to 2006 then all I could have told you before now is that the Bright Eyes gig I went to during that time was somewhere nearer 2006 than 1999. I just looked up the date and it turns out it was March 14 2005. Wow. Within a year life would be different. The boozy London life of a hotel concierge and porter has its limits. Nine years was mine.

I'd just finished a ten day shift at the Marriott Hotel in Swiss Cottage. It was my own fault. I did the rota. I'd done it to maximize holiday days. If I worked ten straight I could go on leave for longer. I was flying the next day to Melbourne. So from the Bright eyes gig and for another ten days at least, things were all over the place. That may explain why the evening is remembered in a similar way to how you'd remember a dream.

The memory of that night in the Astoria on Charing Cross road on that night in March 2005  has always felt like a significant point in time. For me, even if I didn't know it at the time, it was nearing the end of one period of my life and it was also a point where culturally and politically the world seemed to be shifting. Broadly speaking 2000 to 2005 was all about anti-war feelings and 2006 to 2010 was all about money, credit crunch and the divide between rich and poor. Within a year of that concert things would feel different.

The whole thing was a tired and boozy occasion, with me holding on to the bar whilst drinking sugary Smirnoff ice to keep myself awake. I do remember Connor Oberst stood on a piano, leaping in the air and then smashing his guitar to pieces at the end of the last song.  The two Bright Eyes Albums from that time, I'm Wide Awake It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, would underpin so much of what was going on at the time in both the real world and in my own head. It's a shame Conner Oberst and his band would go forever under the radar for so many people. I have endured many conversations along the lines of, "Bright eyes? Did they sing that song from Watership down?" Poor Art Garfunkel. You'd think someone would know that he sang that song 

For me those two albums had a sense of political and cultural protest that should have made the band and those albums more well known. They were the songs that reflected those weird times of stumbling, often literally, through a cultural wasteland of the early 2000s.  Lua is of course the ideal song for the lost and weary. I probably listened to it, on long 3am walks home, on curb sides or that one time where I was drunk and lying on top of some stranger's parked car.

But beyond that one song you can find songs littered with music that you can smash a guitar to. You can find lyrics strewn all over the place referencing the illegal wars of the time. Casually littered throughout are references like,  "The noise in the background from televised war," or the imagery of a "desert where the dead lay down."  Here's some songs for our disillusioned and confusing times. Most of us who were kicking around at that time still cling to our mentality of, "Well at least we'll be remembered on the right side of history." If you ever had that on a badge you should find that you can still wear it and be relevant.

And there was me, circa 2005, writing novels that could never get published and getting mashed a lot. Having been clean and sober for much of the 90s I adopted a rebellious nature and dragged it into the new century, at just about the time that it seemed to me that it was going out of fashion.  As per the last track on Digital Ash, I often did, "Worry that I've lost the plot."

Although, all these years later I hear Lua and often think of the time that my mate Kevin the musician, after an evening of drinking, drove from central London in the general direction of my home and dropped me, "somewhere north of the river," because, "You live north of the river, right?" Or I hear I Believe in Symmetry and I'm a different kind of lost and dreaming of hope and how the Universe would one day soon tilt my way. It's just come to mind as I write those words that I used to respond to my coworkers asking me how I was doing  by saying, "The Universe still isn't the shape I want it to be." And now it still isn't and in many ways probably never will be. That's fine. I worked out that that's how it's supposed to be.

I don't think that in 2005 I could claim that I knew we were stumbling into a cultural wasteland of a new century. It's purely a retrospective narration in which I can envision a crowd in the Astoria where at least some of the people felt the same as me. At least we all liked this cool band that was saying things we related to.  From the back of the room I was there to the end, propping up the bar. Or was the bar propping up me?  It turns out that sugary alcohol just leaves me feeling tired but wired.  At the very end Connor Oberst was standing on top of that piano, singing with a wavering voice, singing, "Well, I could have been a famous singer if I had someone else's voice. But failure's always sounded better. Let's fuck it up, boys, make some noise," Through tired eyes I saw him  jump from the piano. His quavering voice shouted and stretched out the words, "I'm wide awake, it's morning." And as he smashed his guitar into the ground, I enjoyed the mad destructive frenzy even if I didn't have the energy to show my appreciation.

I started writing this as a way of introducing a friend to a couple of Bright eyes tracks. I don't know if  people still discover old music and ponder about what was going on at the time? Is anyone listening to Lua and imagining a world without Uber where you can leave a bar at 3am and "keep waving at the taxis but they keep turning their lights off?"  There's a certain madness that I fondly think of in my memories of those times, as there is a certain madness echoed throughout those songs.