Music and melancholy

A while ago, I started to draft a post on the importance of melancholy music in my life. I have always been a fan of music that others would describe as unacceptably sad or morose, and make no apologies for the fact. Music has helped me through some hard times of real (or often imagined) existential melodramatic self-pity and angst.

Since then, I have had cause to return to music for comfort due to personal loss, and have gone through something which I am not going to write about here, but which made me think even more about how important music with a certain mood was in the darker moments of my life. While the music I turned to first in recent days revolved around a core of 'The songs of Leonard Cohen', 'The Boatman's Call', and (predictably) 'Boxer', for now I am going to stick to my original idea, which was to talk about the music which I listened to in times of adolescent micro-dispair over long-forgotten girls or crises, so trivial in grown-up retrospect, and come back later to talk about more recent emotional comfort blankets like the above, as well as American Music Club, Tindersticks and others.



So, back in time for now. Coming of age socially and musically in the early 1980s and being of a certain taste and midset predictably turned my head towards Joy Division, of course, and songs like the magnificent 'Shadowplay', probably my favourite of their songs:


It is simply impossible to know whether we would still hear the same agony and dispair in Ian Curtis' voice and see it etched on his face if he had lived to grow old like his bandmates. As it is, to me it sounds like a moan from a pit of hell, like a man clinging on to everything with his fingernails, like it seems he really was. There is no doubt in my mind that every second of every Joy Division song is the real thing, not just put-on angst by intense young men of more recent years who can make the sound but never match the mood, who will never convince you that their demons are crawling behind their skin, looking through their eyeballs, and playing their larynx like their own guitar. However, despite the dispair, Joy Division for me would not necessarily conjure the word 'sad', more 'angry' or 'dispairing', and would not quite hit the tone I needed in the dark blue moments of which I speak.

For that, I really think you need The Cure. Not the happy, bouncy, poppy Cure of late 80s/early 90s, and definitely not the loud grungy Cure of the last decade, or even the scarily psychotic Cure of 'Pornography', but the young early 1980s Cure, when they had just discovered drugs and alcohol and synthesisers. This is when they made the sepulchral mausoleum of sound that is 'Faith', which contains songs like 'The Funeral party', to me one of the saddest pieces of music I have ever heard, with the drums and huge synths building a rhythm that can only honestly be described as 'funereal'; this is exactly what Emily Dickinson would have sounded like if she had grown big hair, worn over-sized black clothes and white runners, and picked up a guitar:


Of course, growing up musically with a melancholy bent in the 198os made the Smiths an inevitable accessory. While probably too simple and obvious, I am sure I was not the only person/loser who though that the following lines in 'How soon is now?' had been robbed from the diary they never wrote.

'There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loved you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die'


I could go on about this kind of music forever, and am sure I will come back again to this topic, but will end this post with just one more song of the era. By comparison with those which are listed above, Japan's 'Ghosts' is light and ehereal, like a whisper or David Sylvain's fringe, or perhaps a ghost, but the short lyrics always struck a simple chord with me, so I will end this post with a live performance (not as good as the one on the live album 'Oil on Canvas', but good nonetheless).