the wutars

… High Wycombe, to be precise. I believe not in the conjecture that one is one’s surroundings, but that you either become a living, breathing doppelganger of your environment or you become better than that, a phoenix from the proverbial dying embers that is your town.

High Wycombe will never be my town though, I was born too far north of Watford Gap to ever be able to call it home. Truth is, even home’s too far away in the distant past now to call ‘home’ properly. I still find incredible peace and tranquility in the safe environs of my formative years though, like nowhere else. One thing that’s never far away though are my records; Definitely Maybe, The Queen Is Dead, too many Best Ofs to mention, this marvellous gem by a band called Corduroy, any Great Blind Degree, lots of Stax and Motown comps. A part of my head’s always in those records, they define a point in time – many points in time, places, people, sensations, the lot. The guitar part from ‘Animal Nitrate’ has excited me in ways that the guitar part from ‘Animal Nitrate’ perhaps shouldn’t have, there’s nothing I could possibly feel that my collection of scratched round discs hasn’t given me.

It’s a uniquely male thing, I think, the need to collect, hoard, and protect. I certainly haven’t seen many members of the female persuasion do the same. I think of it as MY need though, and the further away I am from home, the further away I am from my nearest and dearest I am, the more prescience my magpie-like instincts take on. The boxes, the sleeves, the discs, and most importantly the sounds become a surrogate support network; my own, non-sentient family.

And this is where we come full circle. I am never in a strange town with these silly little mass-produced artifacts by my side. I am in my own personal utopia, and I shall always rise, like that little phoenix, from the dull tones of whichever High Wycombe I shall find myself in. As one revolutionary probably never ever said, Viva Stuff.

AG

Tags: Animal Nitrate, Corduroy, Definitely Maybe, High Wycombe, Motown, Stax, The Queen Is Dead

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.