Mirroring Mood

Music and Melancholy

In all the time since my accident there has only been one person that I have truly hated. It was in the early days, after being flown down from Glasgow to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. I spent the first week there in the high dependency unit, one step down from intensive care. Alongside the total lack of natural light, and the incessant beeping of machines monitoring the vital signs of two largely comatose patients, I shared a ward with a man in his late 50s. A bloke from the East End of London, he was a window cleaner by trade, who had found himself in hospital after falling at work and puncturing a lung. I know this because he told the story to absolutely anybody who came within earshot. His favourite mode of communication, however, was to shout on the phone via his Bluetooth headset. And what heralded these calls was his purposely chosen ringtone: the George Formby “classic” When I'm Cleaning Windows. Because he was a window cleaner. Get it?

This guy had no compunction leaving his volume on maximum and picking up the phone whenever anybody called. Whether it be 5am to talk to his wife, or 11pm to chat with his mates, he was always happy to bellow inanities into his headset once George Formby had gotten things going. Unless of course he was snoozing during normal waking hours, in which case the entire room would be treated to a full rendition of the Formby hit. Back in those days sleep was incredibly difficult for me, and this guy was really not helping. A kindly nurse took pity on me and asked him to lower the volume and not shout on the phone outside 8:00am to 8:00pm. She was treated to a barrage of abuse around the theme of his right to speak on the phone whenever he wanted. Similarly, his visitors would completely disregard the two persons maximum rule that applied to everybody else in hospital, and crowd into the small ward room, surrounding his bed so as to shout their drivel to each other in person.

I quietly seethed in bed, lacking the courage to stick up for myself; whilst paralysed with both arms in plaster casts, I honestly feared to confront him. But hate him I really did, and to this day I think if I ever hear the opening notes of that George Formby monstrosity again I will develop a 1000 yard stare before experiencing whatever the tetraplegic equivalent of shell shock is.

I am perhaps at risk of something similar with the music of Michael Jackson here in the nursing home. It has the beneficial effect of helping calm one of the residents down, and stops him otherwise making loud noises. On the other hand, I'm getting rather sick of Michael Jackson. In the past I've neither found his music particularly good, nor bad, more just “meh”. But hearing it every day it is really starting to grate. Then again, I should probably try and sort this out myself. I could always request some ABBA instead. Surely he can be soothed by the tones of ABBA, right? After all, everyone likes ABBA. Even a retired straight edge vegan hardcore punk like me can appreciate pop music of that quality.

And indeed, it is pleasing to reflect that music seems to be coming back into my life. Unable to listen to anything for months after I woke up in hospital (too painful were the memories triggered by songs I knew), things began to change towards the end of rehab. For a couple of weeks I had an overwhelming urge to listen to one thing, and one thing only: an obscure EP by the metalcore band November Coming Fire, who came out of the Canterbury hardcore punk scene in the early 2000s (yes, there really was such a thing). I have no idea why this was what my brain wanted to hear, not least as I doubt I had listened to it in the previous decade. And luckily for the other patients I had headphones, as I doubt they would have appreciated music quite that heavy. But for me it really hit. 20 years on and the record still stands up, in a way not a lot of stuff from the DIY punk scene really does anymore.

But for a while that was it. Nothing else seemed worth listening to. Yet that too has recently begun to change. Here in the nursing home I'm doing well if I get out of bed before 11:00am, such is the tedious rigmarole of being helped through my various morning routines. But in the afternoons I now try to do some academic work, i.e. read various bits of obscure philosophy that no normal person cares about. It gives me a sense of purpose and helps me to feel a bit less useless, restoring a long-lost approximation of normality. And one of the strange side effects of this is that I get a fairly powerful sense of déjà vu: it feels an awful lot like my second year as an undergraduate. I get up later than is ideal, and am not really productive until the afternoons – but then I get some solid hours of work done in my bedroom, before relocating to eat a canteen cooked meal. A few more hours of work are attempted, before relaxing for the evening. Rinse and repeat; every day is more or less the same. But one thing that tends to accompany me throughout the day, whilst working, is music in the background.

This was standard fare for me as a student, and it feels natural to do it again now. (Playing my own music has the added bonus of drowning out Michael Jackson.) I still have to be careful about what gets played: as a general rule anything electric guitar based is largely off limits, it seems. And the results have been eclectic. Mozart's Requiem, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and Tom Waits’s Alice, have all featured recently. Although when I spell it out, a shared theme is not too hard to identify there, I suppose.

The artist I keep coming back to though is one that I started listening to as an undergraduate. I think I first came across Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, in a discarded music magazine in a bar (showing my age here, I guess). Inspired by what I read, I picked up a CD copy of her breakthrough album Moon Pix in the nearby HMV (god, I really am old). It quickly became a personal favourite, though one of those records that I always weirdly thought of as “mine” because I didn't know anybody else who listened to her, and rather enjoyed that fact. I suppose there's something fitting about that, given the haunting melancholy that underwrites most of her music.

Which I suppose also explains why it has felt like a natural fit in recent weeks. We tend to pick music that mirrors mood, and whilst I am now much better off, psychologically speaking, having left rehab, and once again having the luxury of privacy and something like quiet, it would be dishonest to deny that a certain melancholy continues to underlie my daily life. But such is the paradox of music: melancholy sounds can help lift a melancholy mood. It can also offer work-arounds. Moon Pix reminds me of riding the Greyhound bus from Boston to New York, the first time I visited the USA over 15 years ago, just happy to watch a new world go by. Marshall’s fantastic live cover album recreating Bob Dylan's (in)famous so-called Royal Albert Hall Concert enables me to listen to classic Dylan songs that the originals are still a little too raw to access. More riskily, her album You Are Free reminds me of driving to Valencia at the end of a week-long climbing trip with my ex-partner, who for many years was also my closest climbing partner. A happy memory, but one now unavoidably underwritten by melancholy.

The wider paradox is that whilst in recent weeks I have felt, for the first time in months, like I am reconnecting with the person I used to be, I am inevitably also growing into somebody new. And that, just as inevitably, means coming to think of myself in different ways; as a different kind of person. One of the peer support volunteers that I met in rehab warned me that this was inevitable, but also urged me to see it as an opportunity. I haven't yet managed to work out how to do the latter, but I cannot deny that the process has begun. It seems appropriate, however, to give the final words to Marshall:

Once I wanted to be the greatest/

No wind or waterfall could stall me/

And then came the rush of the flood/

Stars at night turned deep to dust.