Bit of a cheat this one, as in terms of influence my choice probably encompasses several bits of music together, and it could easily have been one of the others listed, but I’ll come to that in a moment. Everyone has songs that mean something to them from their youth, their halcyon days, and the lyrics that were ‘all about me’ and all that jazz, but this isn’t entirely where I’m going with this one.
Along with tracks like Blues for Ceausescu (Fatima Mansions), Head Like a Hole (NIN), or Liberator (Spear of Destiny), Debaser (Pixies), Freak Scene was a classic ‘moshing’ song for people like me, always able to launch me from my position on the walls of Planet X or Atmosphere into the thronged dancefloor. While shoegazers, goths and stoners (I may have dipped my toes into all those waters) have their ways of immersing themselves in the music, a good moshpit is cathartic. I have happy memories of being knocked unconscious ‘dancing’ to Liberator at a club in Cardiff and coming round have been dragged to the side, only to dive in again, and the best of these moshing clubs were a celebration, not places of true violence. If you went down, people backed away enough for you to regain your feet and throw yourselves back into the fray (literally), it was frenetic and wonderful and you were subsumed into the music.
Now I may be alone here, but I feel the same way about the best writing and poetry, which engages and takes you over, and makes you want to be a part of the action. In the case of ‘angry slacker’ like Freak Scene you could become a part of the art, in your head at least, and in my writing at the time, I drew on those experiences and that music to let go of everything but a feeling, and set it free. So you can blame Dinosaur for some of my more badly behaved poetry 😊 There is a wonderful spoken word middle 8 as well, that the first time I heard it, shocked, surprised, delighted me and summed up my life at the time. In so few words, it encapsulated feelings of loss and hope at the same time, it was the perfect form of modern poetry.
Quite frequently for a scene in a novel, or series of them, I’ll use a particular piece of music, either quoting lyrics or listening to it as I write to evoke the right emotions or memories. Freak Scene itself hasn’t served this purpose quite yet, but it’s an inspiration waiting to happen in a future work.
Dinosaur Jr. are a hugely underrated band in my opinion, and a shout out to their cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, which even Robert Smith admires. I saw them a few years back and would love to see them again soon.
Stay safe,
Kit