The spring of 1994.
I was 22 years old, and in the last few months of a foundation course in art and design at Langley College, just outside of Slough. Those last few months were a whirlwind of trying to get a portfolio of artwork together, trying to get a place at some college or university when the course finished (I ended up studing illustration at Southampton) and the usual dramas, both dismal and delightful, that accompany being 22 years old.
When I play this album, this isn't what I remember - those things I thought would come back.
It's this:
At the time I was living in a rented room in Uxbridge - I had grown away from my old friends, and my social group centred around those people I went to college with, most of whom lived in Reading and Bracknell. This meant that those weekends when we didn't meet up in Reading became somewhat isolated affairs. I didn't have a job, and it was not unusual to spend the entire weekend in that cool and sunless room, reading bad horror novels and working on artwork.
I would sometimes take myself into London after I had got back from college. There were a number of second hand record shops that opened late - and it was in one of these, the Record and Tape Exchange at Notting Hill Gate, that I found this tape.
That spring was a hot one - more like an imagined summer than anything else. I remember the electric taste of the air, wandering round London, and wondering about my future, where I would end up when college had finished, if I would find a place at university or be doomed to spend the rest of my days in the Metropolitan-terminus town of Uxbridge.
Returning back top my room, I must have spent the weekend in that shadowy listless room, the end of term coming up all too quickly, trying not to be annoyed that the album was on tape, and not CD or vinyl, which I preferred, but couldn't afford, or find. Lonely weekends. It wasn't a very sociable house I lived in then and it was always a relief to get back to college on Monday if I hadn't gone out. I remember the yellow 458 bus from Uxbridge to Langley, each day a slight panic at all that time slipping away...
The album sounds like all those absences, those long spaces when I was on my own (I remember one too hot evening I walked back from Langley to Uxbridge, across all that outer-London wasteland of landscapes that seemed tinged with some undefined surreality). Spring time opening up into summer, back in those days when each summer promised some myth, some adventure, some fear...
The album encapsulates all that loneliness, all that hope, songs of lost youth.
Perhaps.
There was one song on the album called Morning, where the lyrics were taken from an Emily Dickinson poem. I remember the words haunting those in-between days: will there really be a morning?
Southampton was nowhere near as enjoyable as Langley had been. A drab and uninspiring place, a topography that inspired an introverted desperation, but I remember this too:
I was walking back from the Southampton Institute of Higher Education (grey blocks like car parks) on a spring evening, about a year from when I had first bought the album. I don't imagine I was very happy - I spent most of my time at Southampton not being happy. It was one of those spring evenings that seemed electrified and unreal, where the sky is creased violet and seems threaded through with unseen, unheard lightning. I remember one song starting (I can't remember the title now - it was on the first side of the cassette tape) just as I entered the less than salubrious environs of St Marys. As I walked into the streets where I lived, the song and the streets seemed to somehow synchronise, as if something somewhere - some hidden landscape - was just opening up. There is an image connected to this, though I can't remember if it is a memory, or the distillation of that spring evening encapsulated into a single image; a pink moon in a violet sky, pale and bloated over the houses. A St Marys Moon, I remember thinking, and in that moon, whether it was imagined or remembered, was all that was missing from my time at Southampton, all that magic and hope and fear which had been there the year before but had been too close to it to see it.
Must be the last few song of the album now, and as the downloaded music comes to an end (no cassette tape now) I am surprised by how familiar it all is, as if the last time I heard the album wasn't at least ten years ago but last week, or last month.
Anyhow.
Song's faded out now, and the album's over.
Friday night and another weekend looms, but instead of an art college to return to on Monday, there's a call centre, and instead of a painting or a drawing or a lino-cut, there will be calls to answer, complaints to write, and a clock to watch.
Keep thinking about that St Mary's moon now.
Funny the things that stay with you.
