This Track First Got Me Thinking

I don't know how everybody feels about music.
I do know, not everybody sees it the way I do.

Music is one of the most important things in my life. To me, it is not only one of the true pleasures of being alive, it is the underlying rhythm that we all emote to.

When people say to me 'Oh, I like anything, me' or 'I'm not that bothered about music', I know they are not a person I will ever share a wavelength with.

I pretty much always have music playing at home. If I could have a chip installed into my brain, to keep music playing inside me every waking minute, I would.

This track is important to me, because it was the first track I listened to and UNDERSTOOD.
Hearing this, was the first time I looked at the world I lived in and started to develop values of my own.
Not my parent's values.
Not my teacher's values.
Not my schoolfriends' values.
My values.

It was late eighties boomtime. I was about ten, I think.
Weekend after weekend, my brother and myself were dragged round house after house, from Victorian townhouse, to newly built showhome.

The housing market was soaring. My father wanted to sell our house for twice what he paid for it, while he could, and make the best deal.
And move into a valuable property.
It dominated his life.
And ours too.

This was the triumph era of 'Greed is good'.
This was the era where the cogs in my brain first asserted their independence.

At this age, I first read about Hitler and Stalin, about the Civil war, about other faiths.
At this age, I started the first tentative steps towards a worldview.
In an era where it really was all about having loads of money.

I can still remember another kid at school shouting 'We're richer than you' at me.
He meant it.

When I first heard this track, I was on the school bus. I can remember sitting forward and listening.
I just felt mesmerised by this song. So much so, I think I memorised the lot on first hearing.
I GOT it.



It is about a stepfather asking his stepson what he sees on the TV. It is about the hollowness of the future being served up to the young of that time- and don't think it has changed for the better, it certainly hasn't.
I was old enough to get the point, but young enough to know that I was part of the generation growing up in that world.
For the first time, I saw the world I was growing up in as it was, hollow, valueless and empty, a world of families isolating themselves in six bedroomed showhomes, staring in silence at the TV, whilst the great things that humanity had in them, the things I had started to learn about, died.

And I felt strange.
The questions started then.
And I knew from then on, that I couldn't rely on anyone else to answer them for me.

For the first time ever, I had seen the wider ramifications of the existence that surrounded me, and I really didn't like what I saw.

I don't think I was alone there.