The future past

Listening to Paul McCartney’s “Give my regards to Broad Street” today made me think about age and the passage of time.  This is a song that was somehow dated even when it was first released. Yet, as I happened to work next door to the old Broad Street Station at the time the record and film were released,  I always feel a certain attachment to it and somewhere around the middle of the song the unremitting schmaltz seems to pass – at least temporarily!  Anyway, I always thought of McCartney as being quite old relatively to me, so I was surprised to find that he was still only 42 when the record came out and that I’m older now than he was then. Yet looking back at him back them, he still seems somehow older than I am now – perhaps I look older to other people than I seem to look to myself even if people often guess that I’m younger than I am?  None of which is of any major significance, but which did remind me of another track which I thought at the time showed the future of pop music. It didn’t, but it still seems far more contemporary today than McCartney’s song did then.

This is the amazing Careering by Public Image

Street Spirit (Fade Out)

This song was the start and the end for me. I found in it a summation of the waste and emptiness that afflicted much of my life up to the point that I first heard it. A long-hard struggle to try to establish independence and purpose only to find that the struggle had become all-encompassing and blinded me to the direction my life was taking. The ‘purpose’ I reached was someone elses ideal not mine.

Realization of my position took time, and eventually the abandonment of almost everything that had seemed important to that point.

Since then, I’ve tried not to compromise on my view of society – I no longer tolerate bigotry and prejudice. I work with teenagers and find that I constantly have to try explain to them the motivation of others. They are judged as wild, uncontrolled and ill-disciplined. I generally find the opposite, thought they often seek to fulfil the expectations of them expressed in the media. But it is now a form of conformity that tells teenagers to drink too much or to act recklessly, not the other way round. It was supposed to be non-conformist in the 1960s, but somewhere along the way it changed.

My experience is that people are different in many ways but also have much in common with each other. Treat them as individuals and they usually respond positively. I hate the divisions bought by labels, nationalism and wealth.