Wednesday 27.5.09

One of my discoveries of the year is Spotify. Like a lot of things on the internet that I enjoy, it combines being useful with being time-wasting in just the right measure. I spent much of today listening to The Smiths and Morrissey's back catalogues, playing about looking up the lyrics, and generally having a mini-fest of nostalgia for the late 1980's and early 1990's.

An awful lot of stuff has been written about Moz's lyrics, so much that to some extent, I regret looking them up. They don't make me like their creator very much, for the most part. When I first listened to these songs, pre internet, with my best friend Julie, I made up my own interpretations (and even my own words). The songs were solace to me in lonely times when I was a student in Leeds, and bizarrely, I always found them uplifting. Julie would come over on condition that I would light the three bar fire, we would drink cheap red wine which took the skin off our teeth, and on a bad (maybe good) day, we would sing and dance along to This Charming Man, eventually falling into a stupor to Late Night Maudlin Street. Two tipsy girls, a single bed....and no sex of course, unless you count the whispered secrets about boys.

Nina is also a Smiths fan, so at the weekend, we are going to see Morrissey in London. Sadly, even though I am excited about going, I know that his voice can never have the resonance that it did in my cold, scruffy Leeds bedsit. Listening to the album Viva Hate reminded me of how good a friend Julie was, and of how important all of my college friends were to me. We were important to each-other, a disparate group marooned by our parents in an unfamiliar northern town, we were family for a while. A few of my younger friends (facebook contacts) are graduating this year with emotions that I recognise. What music will remind them of their friendships twenty years later?

I wish I could get back in touch with Julie, but she hasn't turned up on Friends Reunited or Facebook, and so is lost to me. Tomorrow, I'm off to see H, best friend of my 20's and beyond. Music best associated? That would be The Spice Girls. I can't believe that I let these great friends go. Glad I kept some- just some- of their music.