Thirty years ago yesterday, I attended my first gig: Back to the Planet, Pop Will Eat Itself and Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Heineken Festival in Roundhay Park, Leeds, and I was back again on the Saturday for the “Britpop” day headlined by Pulp. It was a giant, four-day free festival that had a number of notable events (not least the penultimate show of all, and final UK show by Siouxsie and the Banshees, their last was in Belgium; Pulp played their first show since the triumphant Glastonbury headliner a few weeks before), and my hazy memory these days recalls it as a fun couple of days to kick off what has been a lot of gigs since.

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My gig-going spreadsheet is not complete – a good number of shows have been lost to history prior to 2003 – but it still records a lot of shows, and my estimate is that I’ve seen around 1,000 gigs and around 3,000 live sets. My records show 823 gigs and having seen 2,367 live sets (the last being last Friday). I’ve seen 1,508 different artists live (six of which are unidentified and lost to history), 383 of them more than once. I’ve even – somehow – seen VNV Nation ten times, despite never really liking them.

But this post isn’t about my favourite, or even the worst, gigs over that thirty year span. It’s about nostalgia in song, and how looking back can be both a good and a bad thing. It can affect a worldview, it can affect future decisions both for better and worse. Indeed, some parts of our wider scenes seem to see everything through a lens of nostalgia, constantly posting that it was forty-three years since the release of some single or album or another, and rarely posting about new music (to their detriment).

I don’t mind occasionally looking back: I use music and the memories it invokes to fill in the gaps of life that I might have forgotten. But as a music writer of nearly twenty-nine years, I see it as a responsibility to continue looking forward too, to keep looking for and celebrating new music. If we get mired in nostalgia and never look forward, nothing changes or gets better.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Covenant
/Like Tears In Rain
/United States of Mind

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The mighty opener to what might be seen as the point where Covenant became a really big deal, at the heart of that explosion of what became known as Futurepop around the turn of the Millenium. Like Tears In Rain is yet another Bladerunner reference from a group that quite a number of them in their earlier years, and Roy Batty’s monologue at the conclusion of Bladerunner is one of nostalgic references, too. But the song? It feels rather more personal, and one full of desperation. Amid the thumping, near-martial beats and the bubbling synths, Eskil Simonsson delivers a vocal that appears to be memories triggered by a visit to New York, as he realises that his past is being swept away: homes and streets, nature, swept away by the pace of progress, the contact of friends lost, and others dying before their time. Such is the bleakness, it is remarkable that it has become one of their most beloved songs, an extraordinary live song every single time.

It was also reworked using the lyrics of Der Leiermann – part of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise cycle, which fit suspiciously well…

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/Paul Simon
/Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard
/Paul Simon

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The thing about nostalgia in song is that it is often not true – or inspired by a number of sources. Paul Simon has never confirmed what events Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard is actually about, apparently happy to retain the mystery and seemingly amused by the many interpretations of it. What is agreed, though, is that two kids get into some form of trouble, and are rescued from worse consequences by the intervention of a radical priest. But what actions get them into trouble in the first place, we don’t know. All of us likely got up to hijinks when we were young of one sort or another, and for the most part never faced much in the way of consequences for whatever they were. It’s probably for the best that those kind of events remain buried in the past.

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/Bowling For Soup
/1985
/A Hangover You Don’t Deserve

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This week I learned: 1985 is a cover, originally recorded by pop-punk band SR-71, and apparently handed to Bowling for Soup, who had the US hit with it just months later. As it happens, Bowling for Soup did very little with it, aside from amending a few lyrics. The song is about a middle-aged woman wondering what she’s done with her mundane life, looking back to the hopes and dreams of their youth and how those – mostly unrealistic – aspirations never worked out. But it also nods back to the way that the music of our youth is the music that we keep going back to time and again.

The video is something of a hoot, too, as Bowling For Soup having fun dressing up as a bunch of eighties artists…

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/Pet Shop Boys
/Being Boring
/Behaviour

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The song title of this wistful, elegant Pet Shop Boys single was inspired by two things: a quote seen on a party invite: “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” (which came from Zelda Fitzgerald, the American novelist and socialite), but also accusations from a Japanese journalist that the Pet Shop Boys were boring, thanks to the deadpan nature of Tennant’s delivery.

But the parties and life that inspired this song were in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before Neil Tennant moved to London (where he met Chris Lowe and formed the duo we know now), and his then-best friend Christopher Dowell, who died from AIDS in 1989. Appropriately, the song is more subdued than some of their hits of the era, but it is also a deeply moving song: looking at how all that chaos of youthful life doesn’t really have a point – it is about finding yourself, finding your style, your likes and dislikes, and what boundaries you are willing to push. As you grow older, and have more responsibility, risk-taking becomes an outlier, as you have more to lose.

With hindsight, though, the Pet Shop Boys were never boring. I just needed to live more to understand where Neil Tennant was coming from.

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/Whipping Boy
/When We Were Young
/Heartworm

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One of the many much-praised bands of the mid-90s who rather slipped away without much trace – but were far better than their lack-of-success ever suggested.

On the glorious, powerful When We Were Young, the band take a look at their youth, much like Neil Tennant did, but it is obvious that their upbringing and outlook was very different. No outlandish dressing up at parties, instead here “drinking pernod and dry cider”, smashing the odd window, having fumbling sexual encounters, getting stoned, sharing your love of classic TV with friends. Yeah, that sounds familiar in many ways. I spent much of my teens finding my people, flitting across friends groups, exploring music outside of my comfort zone, smoking and drinking way too young, and as Whipping Boy note, without any real thought to consequences. When you’re a teen, consequences happen to adults, right?

For many of us, we’re probably lucky that we escaped the consequences of our teenage actions. There were some that didn’t: I vividly remember a schoolmate being killed by her drunk-driver boyfriend aged just fifteen, another friend died of undiagnosed heart problems in their mid-twenties. Others were overcome by issues in their lives and took their own lives at various points. Another old school-friend ran a local pub back in Huddersfield for a while, and was found dead in his squalid flat in his early forties.

I made it through, and to this day I thank my lucky stars I have.

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/Kirsty MacColl
/Days
/Kite

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I know this is a Kinks song originally, but the song is these days (ha!) so indelibly associated with Kirsty MacColl that I couldn’t possibly have featured another version. A gentle, summery song that was originally written by Ray Davies on The Village Green Preservation Society, it is a song that reflects on the joy and love that someone brought to the narrator, but accepting that this time has ended, and the time has come to move on without them. While it is a song drenched in sadness and perhaps wistful regret, it is notable that the song remains positive about the future (something that isn’t always the case in other songs this week).

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/Philip Jeays
/Arles
/Cupid Is A Drunkard

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I’ve featured Jeays a good many times over the years on these pages, and with good reason: he’s a lovely fellow that writes extraordinary songs (and, indeed, we used his signature song Cupid Is A Drunkard at our wedding, for Daisy’s walk down the aisle). His songs are generally split into two – the more upbeat songs that are either angry, funny, or both, and then his ballads. Many of his ballads deal with his interesting past and youth, and one of Jeays’ greatest laments is Arles.

Arles is a city in southern France, which was once an important Roman city and more recently inspired the work of Van Gogh, as well as being the home to Picasso and Gauguin too for a time. Jeays spent time there as a youth when he’d left school, and this song is a broken, delicate thing, as Jeays reminisces about the people he saw and knew on the seedier side of a city usually choked with tourists. This isn’t a rose-tinted view of the city – although, as Jeays notes in the commentary about the song on the Bandcamp page, his youthful naïveté perhaps meant that he only realised the reality of some events he describes a bit later in life. This is a time now past, the small hotel and bar he mentions are now long gone, and Jeays has moved on.

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/The Brokerdealer
/Sophomore Slump
/Untitled EP #2

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Whenever something new is released, it is rare to hear the view that it’s better than what the artist had done before. There’s that “difficult second album”, or the “comeback album”, or that general feeling that the magic that was there the first time you discovered your current favourite artist is… totally missing on the new single.

Craig Finn of beloved American rock band The Hold Steady is one of a number of artists that have taken this cliché head-on. He worked with Mr. Projectile on a project that nearly vanished from view (it’s only available on Youtube, that I can find) for a series of electronic tracks that couldn’t be further from the searing rock’n’roll of his main band, and on Sophomore Slump, he has fun sketching out situations with fans and record labels, as they offer their views on his new material.

The song closes with: “Man, we didn’t really like it man, it’s too bad man the man used to be a genius“.

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/David Sylvian
/Nostalgia
/Brilliant Trees

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David Sylvian was, to these ears and eyes, anyway, the most thoughtful and stylish of the early 80s new wave and new romantic bands, his band Japan having an elegance unmatched by any of their peers, while his solo work took in some remarkable collaborators (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Robert Fripp, Holger Czukay…!) and went in very different directions, as if Sylvian felt entirely constrained by the fashions of the time previously.

Nostalgia is a subdued, after-dark trip into the memories of the mind, a minimalist ballad that makes space for the imagination. Both of Sylvian, who is fighting to cut away the branches of his life that leave him tethered to the past, instead aiming to look forward and make a future anew.

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/Lauren Mayberry
/A Work of Fiction
/Vicious Creature

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Lauren Mayberry has stepped away from CHVRCHES for a while recently, deciding to do her own thing for a while and release music that is entirely her vision, and as it turned out, Vicious Creature was a fascinating album that showed a number of different approaches and influences, that took in balladry, thumping pop tunes, drum’n’bass and even some rock elements.

The sweet-sounding, pop ballad that is A Work of Fiction appears late in the album, and seems to address some of the issues Mayberry had/has with their career, musing over whether ambition had taken over from realism. But the kicker comes in the chorus, as Mayberry sings: “Nostalgia is such a vicious creature / Another way to say that you fear the future“.

And that is what I feel about nostalgia. While the odd trip back in time can be nice, nostalgia can be fucking suffocating. I’m heartily sick of right-wing politicians – and voters – constantly harking back to some imagined time where “things were better”, as if everything has to be stuck in aspic and must never change. There is a balance, and not all change is bad. But then, not all change is good, either.

There is a balance to be struck, and it is a difficult one. But it can be done, and thus, we can continue to move forward and make the world better than it is right now. Goodness knows we need it.