Why I was the one worth leaving

Frank Turner covering "The District Sleeps Alone" and breaking my heart over-and-over again.

I texted my best-friend Lucy to tell her I'd just listened to this song on repeat *at least 10 times* and she instructed me to stop it immediately. She is one of the people who understands how I subject myself to melancholy heartbreaking music like this and potentially wallow in it forever. I almost make myself feel worse, but it also makes me feel so much better too. So I might just sneak in one more listen today.

There's something about Frank Turner that is an affirmation for me. Even if he doesn't always explicitly spell-it-out lyrically, his songs give me this feeling that is hard to describe, but important for me to try and understand. Something about unfinished lives still in progress, people that haven't got it all sorted out yet and are still fucking-up and starting from scratch and trying again and again and again. Like you could let your painful failures and heartbreaks crush you, but you can also remember that the world is full of people starting over their lives from scratch every day.

I'm in good company (or at least, lots of it) even when I think I'm struggling alone with all this stuff.

Also, aforementioned best-friend Lucy is responsible for this sentiment, some words that I thoroughly endorse:

"I don't believe in staying in touch, it's for boring people who are dead inside. for people like us we just fall right back into things when we see each other."

And I'll add to that a few more things, like that I don't care about romanticising the old-days or school-days as the best time of my life, and I don't want to "catch up" or look back and reminisce, I really am more interested in moving on and more interested in now.

Royal Headache

Tonight it would appear to be the case that every single person in Melbourne has gone to see Melt Banana, but I'm home alone, working on my zine and updating my blog and eating Tofutti Cuties. Which has its own charm, I guess. And listening to Royal Headache, which definitely has a whole bunch of charm about it.

They are pretty awesome. My friend Dave recommended them to me and said he was sure I would love them. Which is totally the case. I can't believe they played in Melbourne not long ago and I didn't even go see them. Fail. But I will fix this sad state-of-affairs, and hopefully see them somewhere soon.

This band!

Confused (to shift the focus)

Age is a band that is totally significant and special for me and it reminds me of a lot of different things, starting in the summer of 1999 and up to 2003 when I was in Berlin.

(In the summer of 1999) While I was on the train going across town from my hostel near Warsauer Strasse to a sorta ex-squatted art venue called Tacheles I was intriguedly (is that a word?) looking at the guy opposite me reading a zine, who was wearing a Muff Potter shirt and had a Spitboy tattoo on his leg. We kept exchanging glances but I felt too shy to talk and that was without the whole language barrier inhibition thing.

That night I met up with my one internet punk contact in Berlin, Thomas, out the front of the Converge show at Tommy Weisbecker Haus. He said I couldn’t stay at his place cos it was tiny and he had someone else staying, but he’d arranged for me to stay with some friends of his and said he’d introduce me to...to the guy from the subway! Whose name was Phillipe!!!

The next couple of weeks involved staying at Phillipe’s house with a constant soundtrack of Ivich, Jasemine, Vanilla, Age, Muff Potter, all that dreamy euro emo stuff. And that slightly-famous-in-an-underground-way anarchist pop band from Luxembourg that Phillipe’s other houseguest was the "manager" for, but I cannot ever remember their name.

I always meant to get an Age record, but never actually did, apart from having some songs on a tape (with other bands like Headache and Zorn) from my pal Donat in Berlin.

Cut to early 2003 in Brisbane when my friend Sanne's boyfriend in Germany sent a mixtape with Age on it, so I finally got to hear them again. A couple of months later, I was leaving to go to Europe and I made a mixtape for my travels that included my favourite Age song of all time “Confused (to shift the focus)” as well as “Wolf” and maybe one other song of theirs, and a bunch of Billy Bragg and Hot Water Music and Le Tigre and Epoxies and Rumbleseat and whatever.

Skip to July 2003, me and Sophie hitching just before nightfall on the edge of Dresden holding a sign to get to the Czech Republic. We'd gotten dropped off there by a nice guy who had just finished working on a film-set, he was one of those great “down for the count” kinda people and I was totally enjoying talking to him and felt a little sad when we had to get out of the car.

But on the upside, he assured us he was dropping us at an amazing hitching spot. As cars whizzed by and nightfall started approaching, I started to have some doubts though, and was getting panicked visions of sleeping in the nearby bushes or an abandoned haunted church or something.

Finally a car stopped and as we ran up to it, I noticed there was a "Dance Tonight, Revolution Tomorrow” sticker on the back window. It was two guys, Tristan and Ramon, who said hi and checked where we were going and then we fell into separate conversations cos it was kinda hard to hear from the backseat, and well also sometimes it's just a little awkward when you get into a stranger's car, not to mention the language barrier.

Then Tristan asked if there we had any music we wanted to play, so I passed over what I’d just been listening to in my walkman and the track-listings. He put on the music and then read the track-listings and said incredulously “you know Age?!?!?!?!” In complete disbelief. Because the guy driving the car was the bassplayer in Age.

They were laughing because they said that me and Sophie didn’t look like punks (I think we were looking particularly clean-cut and normal to help our hitching efforts nicely along), so they didn’t expect us to be on a similar page at all.

In fact, they thought we were going to a rave because we had said we were going to a festival, which amused us no end. It turned out we were all going to the same emo/hardcore/punk/straightedge/indie fest starting in Plzen (yep, I bet you know the one).

Holy shit, I almost can’t comprehend the random individual situations across hemispheres and years that lead to this particular moment. Of all the cars that could stop by the side of the road, it was that one. With those people! Who asked me that question at that moment and we discovered that connection. Makes me smile at how sometimes life can be like that, and it reminds me that there are secret beautiful coincidental worlds still hidden within this mundane boring routine one.



http://www.myspace.com/ageuberalles

Dance Song 97

Whenever I listen to Sleater Kinney “Dance Song 97” I am instantly transported back to London in 1999. Me and Tex, inseparable and intertwined partners-in-crime forever or until we are separated by forces external to us.

It’s breakfast and we’re dancing on the table in the kitchen and we’re ecstatic because this is our song and it is the soundtrack for our life (which hasn’t really been an easy one lately), cos we can never imagine what it would be like not to know each other and it feels like we have always known each other anyway.

But actually we've only known each other for a couple of months, it just was a case of accelerated friendship time. And it’s also special because it’s just about the only music we both like and can share with each other

Now I hear "Dance Song" and I look back on that time as one of those rare moments where I was totally in the present and totally appreciated it, and could look back on it so fondly after Tex died a couple of months later. We used to share a room and fall asleep almost every night listening to Portishead (I still can't really listen to anything by them because it makes my heart ache too much)

At the start of 2009, I started getting rid of old letters and bits-and-pieces and ditching the artefacts of my past ready to move from Brisbane to Melbourne. I found all my old Tex letters and reading over them made me miss having someone in my life who I adored and looked up to and admired so much.

Admired, as in, I respected the shit out of the way he lived his everyday life, his ability to transform a room within seconds, the way he could totally change and uplift the mood, his total loving kindness in everyday moments. The kind of person I would always want to have by my side in life

The total honour it was for me to be sharing daily life with someone like him, not to mention someone with a true I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-people-think attitude, seeing him sob and weep and laugh and live his life out in full plain view of anyone who was around.

I never knew anyone like him before. It was also the first time I remember having a friend who loved me so fiercely and intensely and constantly told me so. This is a reminder for when all those letters are thrown away and gone forever