Surrendering

Friday is about music. Today it’s also about our world without the internet, which does me a reduction of music. There’s still a playlist. Always a playlist. Happy weekend y’all!

It has been a funny old week, a short week with the public holiday there at the front, and then to begin with an unremarkable week, as the work piled up and the days ticked themselves off.

I went to see the Sisters of Mercy but the lead singer forgot to declare that he no longer had any power in his voice when he went through customs, so as a result the band – basically some backing tapes and a couple of trace-around guitarists – played really quietly, even the dry-ice looked bored as it figured it might as well just unfurl itself because why not eh.

This wasn’t a deep, deep shame. Because the Sisters of Mercy was never my all-time favourite band. And when something is your all-time favourite you tend to make excuses for a lacklustre gig. You are pleased to say you saw them anyway. You were there. And that’s what counted. They turned up, kinda. Etc…

But it was still not quite what I would have wanted – there was a time when I really loved the Sisters, and though I never went full Goth (“you never go Full Goth!”) they were one of the bands from that movement I not only looked to, I definitely listened to. But age is a thing and why someone in their sixties should be able to sing like they did in their 20s and 30s is the impossible standard I’m glad I no longer need to enforce as any sort of stick-waving, cultural barometer-having critic.

Robbie Williams cancelled me, thereby killing music journalism in New Zealand. That’s what my new bio says.

I wrote a review of the Sisters. And you’ll get to read it one day if you like. But just as I was about to post it, the week got weirder. The internet, which we take for granted and rely on to the point of strange addictions, just decided it needed a break from us. It’s gone. And my review is hovering around in the cloud and not syncing to any other devices but it’s there on the box for me to read – so I didn’t lose it. I can’t share it. Yet. I have enough data on my phone and enough strength in my fingers and thumbs to carve out today’s newsletter. I don’t have heaps of energy or ability to go willy-nilly adding pictures or links.

But I did make the usual playlist – and I reckon it’s a goodie. And I will have my best go at linking to that in a second.

I spent hours on the phone and sending messages to diagnose the problem with the internet. All the while, I was thinking that it’s times like these I’m glad I reverted to being a stale old CD collector. And how if this was a few years ago I’d be flipping the fuck out as a deadline came and went if I missed I wouldn’t get my $30-40 or whatever it was, after tax. (It was never as much as anyone else seemed to think eh).

I broke the news to my 10yo son. It didn’t go great.

The suggestion that life was over was met with the recommendation that he try living somewhere where there isn’t even the internet ever. And as voices started getting louder, I looked to my phone and found the Brown Noise playlist.

It’s been a salve before and will be again but right now it not only feels like a band-aid, but also the literal, spiritual and metaphorical soundtrack for a house with no internet.

They sent me off to get a new modem and still no internet. They made me press the hidden reset button on the brand new modem and still no internet. They told me they’d send a contractor but they haven’t even yet sent the text telling me that one day they’ll be sending me a contractor.

And I have been very Brown Noise-assisted calm in all of this. Of course, it makes working from home a no-go, and after school childcare is now a new issue, but this is all small stuff; the problems of privilege.

We joked/weren’t joking in our house a while back in suggesting we had Internet Free weekends.

Now we’ve been given one. And it’s being met with, it’s fair to say, a range of opinions…

The other music-related thing I’d like to report, is that I am midway through an advance copy of Bono’s memoir. This book – “Surrender” – comes out next week. And if you’re a Googler or entertainment news consumer, you might have already read about how Bono does a mea culpa for sneaking that weak-as-soggy-chips U2 album onto your iPhone that other time. The extracts and teases from it are starting to trickle and then flood.

I dashed out one of these here newsletters late last year saying I was having a bit of a U2 comeback/rethink. I really couldn’t get much past Zooropa, and I mostly just cared for The Unforgettable Fire but I was taking back some of the super-harsh thoughts and words I’d flung at the band (in retaliation for them flinging their music at me). And I was remembering how lucky I was to see them at the height of their powers. When Bono could certainly still sing. And even though The Edge never actually did play the blues, he did play what seemed to matter and in the shape that connected it.

Then, earlier this year, I did a wee piece saying I was hopeful about the memoir.

Well, let me tell you, so far it is just an old-school delight. Page after page of warmth. You snuggle up with this book and it tells you its charms. It’s like hanging out with an old friend and having the thorough sort of catch-up you promise but in reality it never quite happens. Bono is a great writer, in this medium. And there’s no surprise or secret that he’s lived a life, done some amazing things and been fortunate to take his earnest pub-band-that-could antics to a supersize-me level.

There’s this beautiful passage where he writes about arriving in America on the first U2 tour. It’s December of 1980. It’s freezing and raining and they land at the John F. Kennedy airport. You might detect the ear-worm already. They ask the taxi driver to put on the radio in the hope that they’ll hear I Will Follow, their brand new single. Instead, they hear Billie Holiday.

Flash forward to U2 being megastars and you know the Angel of Harlem intro, whether you want to or not. “It was a cold and wet December Day, when we touched the ground at JFK…” or something quite like that, I typed that out from memory because each Google fact-check is harder when the internet is being measured out in your house like before-bed medicine on a spoon.

Anyway, a day or two after U2 plays its first American show, John Lennon is killed. Bono remembers that the year before, when he’s still a teenager I think, or maybe 20, he wrote half a letter to John Lennon, asking him to produce U2’s debut album. Then still very much in the planning stages. The letter is never finished. The outcome is obvious. It doesn’t happen. But these thoughts race through the young lead singer’s mind as the world grieves the loss of a hero and icon. Bono says he and the band felt, overnight, like they’d lost a guiding light. And whether you think he’s jumped-up to even wish that a Beatle might produce a debut album from some no-names, or whether you stare out the window for a bit and wonder about how that might have actually worked, Lennon, then, still seemingly lost and only just about to make his fleeting comeback…well, it hit me in a way the notes from the debt-collectors never seemed to.

I’m sorry, but this is not sappy shit at all. It’s why I gave myself over to reading about music. And then writing about music.

The book, Surrender, is an utter joy. So far, at least. And with no internet for the weekend, as it likely seems, I’ll have a good chance of actually finishing it ahead of its release. So I consider that as some clever bonus of timing.

Prior to losing most of my internet rights, I was working through the early U2 albums. And gosh they’re – mostly – great. The debut is still a bit lost, but the energy wants to be there and it signposts the best and worst intentions of the band. But swift followups, October and War, always among my favourites, are just superb. I love the live album, Under A Blood Red Sky, and Unforgettable Fire remains sublime, as both a U2 album and, also – and often more so – as a Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno collaboration.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve got to – the hard work, listening-wise, will kick in when I next sign on in whatever way, to hear the stadium anthems of the follow-up releases in their discography. Maybe I’ll hit the wall quickly, maybe because of Bono’s written insights, I’ll find new depths or at least a new crawl space within the music even.

But, again, this to me has always been what reading about music and writing about music does – it grants you ‘further’ access. It allows you to take yourself further on the journey.

I’ll likely be over U2 in a week. Again. Or I won’t. But it’s been a nice way of reminding myself of what the young cassette-buying me was obsessed with. For a time at least, U2 was my Beatles. And that’ll never be nothing, nor could it ever be embarrassing. It’s just a marker of time. Which is so much of what music is to me. A marker of time and maker of moments.

There are 40 song titles that form the chapters of Bono’s book – so nerd-me has made a playlist which might give you a teaser of the book’s themes and moods I guess. I haven’t yet played this through while reading, or after a reading session, but it felt like a thing to do – I like books with soundtracks.

But right now the soundtrack is still Brown Noise. Oscar asks me why Brown Noise is better than White Noise. I say that White Noise is abrasive. That Brown Noise is White Noise softened, the corners rounded, the static hum a texture now, not a hindrance. You have space to apply yourself into the mix with Brown Noise. In White Noise there is no you, there is just the chaos or clutter that threatens to cancel you. (That can, weirdly, be just the tonic too sometimes).

We cuddled up on the couch with our books. I was reading Bono. He was reading Stephen King. He’s doing so well on the King books, onto his third full-length novel already. And writing his own stories too, when not reading. Informed of course by his reading.

I’m very proud.

I don’t need the internet when I have my son next to me reading his book and asking wise questions. My wife in the room that adjoins, painting flowers and peeking in to ask questions, to smile at us, to offer kindness.

We’re all off together to see Don McGlashan tonight. So things are about as good as they ever could be really.

And with that, I am hoping a great weekend for all of You Too.

Or is that a weak end?

I’m sorry.

Try Vol. 88 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!