And so Day 5’s story brings me nicely onto Day 6’s song. It was that same summer in London, and those few weeks are still evoked by this track. It popped into my head one day in a Tube station, when I saw a signpost telling me which platform was for northbound trains, and which was for southbound.
No matter where I am, if see the word “southbound” this song still jumps in front of my mind, and I’m instantly transported back to that sultry summer and the ceramic furnace of the London Underground in a heatwave. It’s one of those oddly Proustian sense-memories: even the opening riff can bring back the stench of summer sweat, the robotic applause of trains clattering in tunnels below, the crush of bodies searching for something to hold on to as they’re jostled about their daily lives, and the feeling that I was outside of all this: nowhere to commute to, no badly airconditioned office to melt in, no real reason to be on those trains except to feel outside of it all from within the centre.
Those days were carefree: the paragon of teenagehood. I’d finished school, got accepted to the college course of my dreams, and had nothing to do except wait out the long, humid months until I was thrust forward into the second act of my life. I spent that summer doing as little as I could: ecstatic finally to be free of the constricting confines of secondary education and percolating with anticipation of the good times ahead. I was arrogant, cocksure and confident: all the things an eighteen-year-old should be, and I was convinced I had the best taste in music of anyone who had ever hummed a tune.
This is largely Thin Lizzy’s fault. They were a huge part of my teenage years, symbolic to me now of my musical awakening: that moment when you realise that there’s a world full of music out there waiting for you to listen to it. Thin Lizzy were a gateway band for me. From them, I found my way into the rest of the 1970s, and all the hard-rocking stadium-fillers therein. Lizzy led me like Virgil led Dante, through the circles of rock. They showed me Led Zeppelin raising their arms to touch the gods; Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar in sacrifice to the solo; The Rolling Stones seducing everyone in sight; Lynyrd Skynyrd soaring through the skies; Rory Gallagher playing the back room of a dingy pub full of thousands of people.
Nothing could have prepared me for what lay ahead: it was no less than a musical odyssey, a devouring of every song that I could lay my hands on, the excitement at finding a new band even if everyone else on the planet had heard them before. I spent countless hours attached by the ears to my stereo, countless nights in dark basements watching people sweat over their guitars, countless CDs and records and downloads cataloguing my experiments, countless lyrics and melodies and rhythms running around my brain. Thin Lizzy had no idea what they’d started.
Maybe this song doesn’t exactly fit the criteria of today’s 30 Day Song Challenge. It does remind me of a place, but more than that it reminds me of an entire era encapsulated in those humid, crowded subway stations. It wasn’t this song in particular that started all this, but Southbound is the icon, the synecdoche, the part that represents the whole of my musical education. From the moment it first forced its way through my mind on the London Underground all those years ago, it’s been southbound for me ever since.
No comments:
Post a Comment