The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Sometimes I really hate rock’n’roll and I think it might have ruined my life. For two decades, it has distracted me from reality. I could be a banker now like all the kids I went to boarding school with. Instead I’ve got sailor tattoos and no money, because rock’n’roll helped me ignore my actual life. Here are a few examples of why rock’n’roll made me an idiot…

I can trace all my wayward, childish and delinquent behaviour back to when I was seven. My father taped The Blues Brothers off the TV, I watched it and I think something went in my head. I was a pretty good kid before, but that film turned me - it made me hate squares and want to kick against the pricks and stuff. The ‘Jailhouse Rock’ cover at the end of the film got me into Elvis and, as a reward for staying away from home for my first week, aged nine, I got a double cassette of his hits and a model of a pink Cadillac. I’m kind of a daydreamer and I had a Walkman with big headphones and a lot of time on my hands in the Hampshire countryside, so I sat in my room and got lost in the stories and characters in the songs, picturing Elvis, and sometimes myself, as the protagonist in them. I got really into the romance too; I pretty much took the lyrics as a documentary of love and adult life, and I think I’m still constantly disappointed that they’re not.

After the Elvis years came Britpop at the dawn of my teens. I really expected teenage life to be like Different Class and the Sleeper record, but life at a single-sex rural boarding school isn’t really alluded to on either of those albums. I continued to live my life in my fucking head and I think I really believed the events on those records were realer than the events in my own life. You know when people think they should have been born a woman? I was pretty sure I had been born in the wrong body too - I felt like I should have been able to walk home from school and live in a city and know girls and hang out in the park. Perhaps if James Blunt had been making records when I was 14, I would have found some music that related to the dire public school experience, but I think I just liked the sound of these other existences more.

I kind of got more and more ridiculous and less sophisticated about that shit too. When I hit 15, the only band I cared about was Rancid, who sang almost exclusively about “back in the day”, hanging around on corners, listening to Desmond Dekker with skinhead girls; their fallen comrades in the great punk wars and that. The romance of it all was irresistible to me and I overlooked the highly suspect fact that, although they looked like Discharge and The Exploited, but with more facial tattoos, they sounded like an over-produced new wave band with false English accents, and they fell in love with the pictures they painted in their songs. History will not judge Rancid or any of their ilk kindly - they’ll be considered to have been of no artistic merit, and their slick faux-Clash stomping will be mocked for having missed the point of the original forebearers of the sound.

They and the many similar American bands of the nineties are doomed to be aligned with the cock rock bands of the eighties as examples of vacuous, charmless rock’n’roll played by opportunists. I can’t defend these accusations - it’s all true - but at 15 I had already missed the point. I just wanted to be punk. Living the life I did - the lifestyle I aspired to, of squatting, sniffing glue and “getting hassled by the pigs” - was probably as remote and fantastical to me as the mythological, Dungeons and Dragons lyrics of the metal that I gave my dorm-mate a fucking hard time for listening to.

I guess this last example isn’t strictly music related, but I guess you could say the show was pretty much the grunge show. My full-on, head-over-heels first love was Claire Danes in My So-Called Life. Angela Chase was her character’s name - plaid skirts and big boots and red hair over her eyes… fuck, man, she was incredible. As well as being in love, I got most of my angry teen steez from her; I was in a constant state of self-reassessment and emotional upheaval. You’d imagine that show would be exploitative, preachy shit, but it was really well written. Angela had a lot of problems - a fraught relationship with her parents, low self-esteem, drug-addicted friends and problems at school - and I wanted to experience it all with her, then rescue her from it, marry her and obviously bone her.

The thing that held the show together was Angela’s voiceover - her inner monologue - deeply personal thoughts and feelings. These were the first deeply personal thoughts and feelings I had ever heard aside from my own idiotic, hormonal rantings (everything in my head is still like that now, by the way). The show was on every weekday morning for about a month the summer that I was 13 or 14, and I recall the theme tune would send my stomach into knots. I wouldn’t be able to finish my Pop Tarts and I felt the same horrible/thrilling yearn in my gut every time she appeared on the screen, or her sad-sounding drawl voiced-over a montage. That feeling is love. If I feel that feeling now about someone, I think first about Angela, because she’s the benchmark and will be forever.

When each episode was over, I looked around at my own comfortable-but-dull and very un-sexy existence and felt ashamed. Real life is very immobile compared to a well-written teen drama. I think this was kind of a turning point because, about a week in, I realised the best way to combat this sudden, ugly return to reality was to consciously ignore it and just think about the show and Angela for the rest of the day. I was in love with a fictional character for about two years and I really think rock’n’roll has ruined my life. There are a million more examples of this stuff in my adult life too. It’s embarrassing. Maybe next issue.

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