nixsight

Kieron Gillen posted “Swim” by Madder Rose, as a song that reminded him of somewhere. It was the first time I’d heard or even thought about that song in years, but while listening to it, I read Gillen’s post, about a Sixth Form full of music and memories, and the arbitrariness of choosing one song to define a particular thing, if you’re a certain sort of person with a certain sort of relationship with music.

But something he said, about a girl playing the song to him, triggered off a couple of different thought processes, and I ended up pretty much spamming his comments with them.

The song that came to mind, after some meandering, was “Creep” by Radiohead.

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It’s not a particularly sophisticated choice. The song is almost designed to resonate with a certain sort of boy in a certain sort of period of his life. But, you know, it is what it is. So few things work the way they are supposed to by design, and this particular one totally does. At least for me, in the perfect storm I found myself in in 1993.

I’ll let “Comments Nick” explain, in an only-mildly-edited-from-the-comment-I-just-left form. Just assume everything after the jump is in quotation marks:

I’m about four or five years out of synch with [Kieron's] story – my sixth-form girl-songs were all jangly regional accents and Hammond Organ and just typing it reminds me of a couple of formative nights at the Sixth Form night in the Sleaford Rugby Club Sixth Form, dancing sweaty with the awkward girl whose more-easily-cute older sister was at Uni in Salford. (If you feel you can stand to hear about that girl/music interface, go here.)

Madder Rose came along after the next world-changing indie-girl had come and gone. She threw my world into uproar in my first year at university, to a soundtrack of Cud and a whole other wave of English accents set to guitar.

The coda to this, of course, is one of sensitive-boy torment. We started dating early in 93, and being a canny lass, she’d become obsessed with this mostly overlooked album called Pablo Honey. In particular, she got a kick out of a song called “Creep”. She was a dorky girl, and seemed to get a lot of cheerful mileage out of putting herself in the singer’s shoes, as she bounced along her single bed, shouting the chorus into my face.

The timing of the end of the relationship was one of those perfect times when everything aligns and the universe seems to be telling you something. “Creep” got its second wind and widespread success, and I suddenly got to hear it every time I went to a nightclub and tried to drink the melodrama of the departed girl out of my head.

And of course, that chorus didn’t seem so cute and fuzzy when it wasn’t her singing it in her underwear. You know the lyrics. Everybody knows the lyrics. The song quickly went from being a knowing, winking, smiling bit of self-loathing from a girl in a room where she was comfortable and safe and in control, to being the sullen, self-important and passive-aggressive piece of bitter loneliness and unrequited infatuation that it really always had been. And you always got to listen to it while in a room full of girls-gone-hostile, or so it seemed in my jilted state.

This sounds a little more heartfelt than I mean it to, though. The interesting thing about recounting this story is that in the years inbetween, I’d forgotten that there had been a time when, with a little context, this song had actually and easily been an oddly cute in-joke between two awkward, fond kids. It’s a strange sort of smile that that brings, but it’s mine.