CH³CH²OH - part 1

There's a scene transition in Children of Men where you find yourself looking out through the windscreen of a Rolls-Royce as it negotiates its way through one of the film's many grunge-laden and crowd-congealed streets. The soundtrack to this traverse is the final track from the old King Crimson LP, In the Court of the Crimson King. This is one of the albums that I have to thank my childhood friend Steve Holmes for turning me on to: he always seemed to be ahead of me in discovering new bands and new records, some of which I liked, and others, did not. I remember being physically shocked by "21st Century Schizoid Man", the first track on the album, when I first heard it in Steve's bedroom in the two-storey 'box house' in Radcliffe Way, Northolt. (We condescendingly called them the 'box houses', us folks who lived in the three-storey 'town houses' a little further along the A312 Yeading Lane. Very grand.)

I can't remember what kind of 'record player' Steve had, but I think it probably was a 'stereo' (noun), but it can't have had had much wattage, not back in c. 1973, when the kind of music equipment our working class demographic was using probably still had valves in it. So, it's a stereo system with little speakers - probably 5-8 watts? - in a small room in a council house. The track starts with some poodling noises that sound like flutes and blown organ pipes and electric motors switching on and off, barely audible above the hiss of surface noise and the repeated clicks of static and scratches on the vinyl transferred through the fluff-encrusted needle on the pick-up, into the record player's electronics, and down the cheap copper wires to the speakers' paper cones. That hiss and echo is suspended in my memory of that dusty room, and carries with it the marvellous sense of things unknown and unheard waiting to be discovered in the future: that elusive sense of wonder that you somehow leave behind and only rarely rediscover - perhaps finding it again when a piece of music touches right memory-evoking synapses, or when a certain tang of a stranger's perfume on a train or a bus resurrects the feelings of your first love; remembering that sense of wonder comes much more easily to me when I think about old music and old moments like this, and takes me back - in a weird, tingly-hairs-on-the-arms, beyond-consciousness-and-just-at-the-periphery-of-feling-and-knowing kind of way - to those teenaged years of high emotion, naivety and a confused sense of the colossal, untapped potential and possibilities of each human life.

So that poodling intro poodles along for a few seconds, and I kneel on the carpet of Steve's room with the cardboard gatefold sleeve in my hands, staring at the weird imagery and the printed lyrics, with no idea of what this record will sound like, or what it will mean to me in years to come, or how I'll remember it thirty years later, and suddenly this massive, intrusive, metallic noise blasts out of the speakers, the distorted mix distorted by the cheap speakers and by my own stunned incomprehension at this bizarre noise; then the grating, scratchy sound of the vocal comes in, as if it's sung through a broken megaphone, and my head starts to hurt with puzzlement and incredulity. Listening back to this music now, in digital form and through headphones, I realise that it wasn't really the acoustic qualities and the volume that shocked me, but the strange nature of the music: I hadn't heard anything like this before, and the instrumentation, time signatures and structures were all new and unknown. My head hurt because I couldn't 'understand' what I was hearing - it was, in a way, 'unhearable', because I had no framework of familiarity within which to set this noise and make it comprehensible; all of my mum and dad's records, and Radio 2's crooners and Ellas and Franks lived in a different sonic universe. This King Crimson album, with that screeching, driving, metallic opening, and the subsequent tracks with their flutes and towering mellotron sounds that all smack of sword and sorcery, fairy tale, sixties innocence and noodly, prog rock self indulgence, locked itself into a certain imaginative configuration in my mind, and it has stayed there ever since, lurking, waiting to be evoked and, in turn, to evoke the sense of place, mood and emotional states from those teenaged years.

So what's that got to do with CH₃CH₂OH, you might ask? Tomorrow, tomorrow...