Ziggy’s lament
Crate digging, music and missing out
I have an old friend called Ziggy. Not Bowie’s Ziggy – this one is Stephen to his mum, Steve to others. Ziggy is even more obsessed with music than I am. This post – and this Substack – is inspired by and dedicated to him…
(…and Bowie’s Ziggy, just a little bit!)
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1 - Ziggy’s lament
At the back-end of each year, Steve known as Ziggy spends hours compiling – curating – his 100 favourite tracks of the year, a task he undertakes with another obsessive friend (also called Steve, who goes by the nickname, Stitch). There’s no social media blag, no pretentious ‘look how cool I am’, just the joy of two Steves (Ziggy and Stitch) hearing and finding new sounds and celebrating old ones. They spend hours and hours compiling their tracks; sharing them with each other around Christmas-time each year, and then do it again the following year.
I played football with both Steves for years, and though I now live away, Ziggy and I meet occasionally for a pint, talk about old times and swap new musical finds via Facebook Messenger. I haven’t, however, ever found the time or patience to curate 100 tracks a year! Back in the day, we went to a few gigs too. Our biggest shared musical experience was Oasis at Knebworth in 1996 (the Sunday for those who need to know). I might write more about that another time.
Recently, though, Ziggy gave me something to mull over in one of our Messenger exchanges. He wrote: “Every now and then I hear an old tune and instead of just enjoying the fact that I've discovered it, I tend to curse the fact that it's been around for so long and I've missed out for all those years.”
He got me thinking; I know what he means, and I get his pain. Music fans can be a bit obsessive and completist, and we can also suffer big doses of FOMO – I’ve travelled down enough rabbit holes to know the truth of this. But I realised that I no longer share this feeling. For me, the discovery of old and new tracks and albums that I’ve never heard is a joy (though I do sometimes wonder, more quizzically than in lamentation: “how did I miss that one?”).
Isn’t it all about context anyway? And time, and how we were being in our lives, and what we were doing with them? When we were younger, music choice was often about fitting in and not seeming like a dick. Fitting in where, though? At sixth form, there were the Prog Rock guys, the Bowie boys and girls and the disco crowd. I liked rock and disco (still do, though disco more than rock), so fitting in was confusing. And punk was just around the corner – so there was years of habitual sneering to come from that crowd – and then the soul boys who liked a good fight (and this is a heavily edited version - it was way more complicated than that at the time!)
Perhaps, it’s easier now, but music basically lands and seeds itself in our personal and cultural worlds – in this particular time, place and circumstances – and often grows into something unexpected, marvellous and often transformative from there!
2 - Powderfinger
Just for context, the discovery track I sent Ziggy was 'Odda Delf’ by the mercurial, Banksy-like, Yorkshire-based electronic artist, Craven Faults (check it out, it’s mesmerising):
The track he sent me in response, and the subject of his lament, was Powderfinger. It’s a classic Neil Young song, which was apparently played a lot live. Most recently, it appeared on a studio album (Hitchhiker) that was written and recorded in 1976, but not released until 41 years later in 2017 – Music is full of these seemingly random anomalies! It’s a gorgeous track, and I can see why Steve loves it. I also get how he wonders how he missed it, yet I also wonder whether the song meets both of us more fully now, as 60-somethings whose combined (and broad!) musical gaze incorporates a myriad of past connections, memories and associations?
When Powderfinger first came out on a Crazy Horse live album in 1979, maybe neither of us were listening to Neil Young that much – there were probably way punkier, funkier grooves on our radar by then. I know I became aware of Neil Young as an influence on Nirvana and the grunge scene a few years later, and then, later still, loved his gorgeous solo albums: Harvest, After the Goldrush, Silver and Gold, Harvest Moon, Living with War. This leaves massive gaps of course – songs and albums I’ve never heard, that at the time I probably didn’t want to hear. Looking back, much of my knowledge of Neil Young’s early work came from a vinyl copy of Decade in my collection– the triple album retrospective that came out in 1976 – and where I first heard his awesome, furious, elegiac song, Ohio.
That’s a whole life away. I finished secondary school that year, and I can’t remember for the life of me when and where I got the album! In any case, there’s an ocean of music – Neil Young’s and everyone else’s – between then and now. A whole load of life, love, loss and learning for me, Ziggy, Stitch, Neil Young – and everyone else…
Thinking about the implication of Ziggy’s lament, I don’t think I was ever capable (if that’s the right word!) of being a Neil Young completist – or a completist of any artists, bands or genres. I don’t mind the missing out. I’ve always loved the criss-crossing, random-discovering, crate-digging, genre-hopping, influence-following, pin-in-the-mapping of my musical life!
3 - Crate digging as life…
It’s how I function – I realise now – in other parts of life too. I am not a systematic person – my enthusiasms take me where they take me. Interests and conversations tend to fly all over the shop and, where music is concerned, this means that there’s always going to be a new (or old) song or album or artist or whole bloody movement or genre to be unearthed or stumbled upon! And in other parts of my life? Well you should see my bookshelves (both real and digital) … and my sporting hobbies… and my work life too…
I’m not unusual in this, I’m sure, there are crate diggers everywhere. We do tend to be a tad obsessive, but really we are just ordinary people who get inspired; we love to listen and love to dance – the dopamine waltz, perhaps… I could say that crate-digging is a way of living, or that my approach to music reveals more about ‘me' than any ‘personality test’ or therapy session could, but I don’t want to get in too deep and, as a psychotherapist myself, I know that’s not entirely true. Not always…
This is not going to be a muso’s blog (there’s an amazing career that some people have called a ‘musicologist’ - imagine!), though it may be a blog that has muses and inspiration running through! There will be some stories to tell. I’ll travel around a bit. Maybe pick up an album or song, or a timeframe or memory, a person or an event, and see what flows around it.
For example, there’s a whole period in which I listened mostly to classical stuff and, within that vast canon, mainly to music that popped up for me from Classic CD cover discs! There was nothing systematic to this musical ‘education’ – just finding what I liked: bleak Shostakovich string quartets; medieval choral chants; Mahler symphonies; a random CD of old French ‘chansons’, to pick out a few. Likewise, Uncut magazine introduced me to Alt-country and Americana – and also to Delays, a band that I’ll undoubtedly write something more about at some stage. And there’s my Defected house music stage (which I haven’t ever really grown out of), an obsession with mid-90s Drum and Bass and, back in the day, all those record shops… one on every street corner it seemed in the olden days before mp3s and streaming…
And as for the other Ziggy (David, not Steve) no doubt he’ll make an appearance here somewhere along the line….
Next time: the first in an occasional series, Oddfinds, about the records, songs, or even shops, labels and other pieces of the musical ecology that are literally ‘odd finds’. Pieces of vinyl, CDs or online bits of great music hanging around in digital corners. From my point of view, an oddfind is good - very good…