In some vain hope of broadening the minds of today's youth I'm writing a piece on why I love music, why it's such an important part of my life and why I feel deeply sorry for people raised in a generation of X-Factor and the like.
My story starts at a time when I too gave in to peer pressure and just went with the flow with regards to music. Dance was very popular during my days at school, and with friends all listening to the same thing my choice of music back then was more about fitting in than pleasing the ears. If anyone threw a party the stereo was pre-loaded with the latest Ibiza record and left to its own devices for the remainder of the evening. Worse still it was all over the television with channels like MTV dominating my household for many years. I couldn't help but like the repetitive beats that were thrown at me in drones on a daily basis because there was literally no other choice and I was much too scared to explore new sounds on my own. At one point I remember almost buying a set of turn tables for my very small vinyl collection, because that's what everyone else was doing. Looking back now I hate myself for being so predictable and shallow, but then I was just a kid who still had a whole other world to discover so I can cut him a little slack.
My first foray into something different was down to my school friend Jonathan and his older brother Rob. I used to go over most nights to either bum free cigarettes or play on his computer. It was here I first discovered Resident Evil, which we decided to play in compete and utter darkness...big mistake for obvious reasons. Other times we would go and play Worms on the Amiga in Rob's room – a place covered from ceiling to floor in band posters, none of which I'd ever heard of. I remember a Green Day 'Dookie' and Foo Fighters self titled album poster with the neat looking laser gun were two fairly large ones, but dominating the majority of his room were pictures of the band Korn. Through hearing both Jon and Rob play them I managed to get a copy of of their first album for myself and instantly fell in love with this strange, moody and incredibly dark and twisted music; everything your average depressed teenager needs right?
I spent the next 5 or so years listening to a mixture of Korn and Sepultura, probably worrying the hell out of my parents in the process. Jonathan Davies, the vocalist for Korn, was sexually abused by family members as a youngster and this ended up being the source of his inspiration lyrically and a common theme still to this day in the bands work. Hearing things like this all day didn't exactly put me in a good place for someone going through the trials of puberty and for a person always being told to stop being so noisy I suddenly became very quiet indeed. On the flip side I was hearing sounds unlike anything else; Fieldy clicking as he played the bass because the strings were tuned so low, Monkey doing magical things with a guitar and Jonathan singing with such emotion that he sometimes broke down into tears mid song. I had finally found something that reached deep inside me and tugged at the strings of my guitar shaped heart.
No longer could I stand the manufactured stuff that plagued the airwaves, and I started spending my allowance buying cassettes and CDs of bands I'd never heard of and mostly coming home with utter tat but the important thing is that I was getting out there and finding sounds that pleased me and not worrying about what my friends might think. This carried on right up to the age of nu-metal and while some of the first bands around were actually enjoyable (Linkin Park, Papa Roach) it wasn't long until the big record companies got in on the act, keen to make a quick buck from the hard work of others. Then the flood gates opened and once again I was forced to listen to music void of any emotion and it did nothing for me. I had to find something better.
I'd seen various Foo Fighters videos on TV so I was vaguely aware of the faces in the band, so when a song came with the best sound I'd ever heard I said to my brother “is that Dave Grohl?”. This band played in front of a black background and frequently cut to clips of them driving around in a pick up, eventually running over a stag. The video then got really weird as the creature became almost human and punched the band members in their faces, driving the car back to its house and mounting their heads on its wall. Oh yeah, it also bunked up with a plastic doe. Those images have stuck in my mind just as much as the music has over ten years later. This was my first taste of Queens of the Stone Age and the modern day Elvis, that is Joshua Homme.
