Inbetween years

We all know about soulmates, people who are perfectly on one's wavelength in a way that no-one else can be, who just have that special place and connection, whether friend or spouse. I often wonder if a song can be a soulmate because, if it can, mine is 'Inbetween days' by The Cure. No other song in the 4,000 or so on my iPod comes even close to that kind of intimate relationship. Physicists talk of resonances between things or forces, when one can trigger under certain conditions effects and changes in another; there is undoubtedly a spooky resonance between this song, my heart, and my brain.



Call me a philistine (you wouldn't be the first) but I would actually claim that the first second of this song means more to me than the other thousands of hours of music I have at my fingertips: that rumbling tumbling, chaotic yet perfectly controlled avalanche of drums that kicks off and stands majestically alone until, just as a second appears on the song timer, the bass guitar kicks in. That kind of dramatic entrance, unequalled ever, sets a dizzying standard that is luckily almost matched by the stepwise ushering into place, in perfectly timed sequence, of acoustic guitar, cheesy synth, and finally Robert Smith's gloriously morose voice, all sounding more perfect in that three-minute symphony than they ever have for me in any other context (sort of like the way most of the actors in the Lord of the Rings films, on those three magical occasions, simply acted above and beyond anything they had done before, or might ever do again).

I have listened to that song at least once a week for fifteen years and it never fails to stir my spirits, to sound fresh and new and exciting. I have listened to other music, of course, falling as so many of my contemporaries did under the benign influence of Uncut magazine and spending the 1990s and beyond exploring a world of American music I would otherwise never have found. The Cure of the 1980s (very specifically), however, remain top of the heap as my favourite band ever, and have ingrained in me a soft spot for large bands of serious men, in dark suits worn casually, making superficially gloomy music shot through with wit and eccentricity (prime examples are Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks and, erm, Reservoir Dogs).

‘Inbetween days’ was released in 1985, which makes it 23 years old, which occasionally beings me close to a vertigo-like state of amazement at a generation gap which has opened up, like an earthquake tearing a gash in a road. Let’s, just for a moment, use 1985 as a fulcrum around which to pivot time, a tipping point in pop music’s admittedly short but occasionally glorious history. Pivot one way by 23 years and we land in 1962, not just the past but 7 years before I was born, in other words, when real time began. Years like 1962 just don’t even register on my musical radar – what the hell was anyone listening to? Doing a little archeological excavation on the Internet suggests that this was the year Bob Dylan released his first album, Elvis was balancing movies and music, and the year’s top songs were by Bobby Vinton, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Acker Bilk and the Four Seasons. That is old music, old old old, just incomprehensibly far back, to a 39-year-old as much as a 16-year-old. This terrifying sensation of a gaping generation chasm is even more dizzying when I wonder if the 16 year-olds of today view 1985 as being that far back, and might think that The Cure could have been sampling pounding dinosaur feet to catch that magical drum sound.

Even now, with my theoretically greater maturity, my iPod hasn't stretched back that far, and my sole dalliances with the 1960s remain early Leonard Cohen and frequent unsuccessful attempts to see what the point is about Bob Dylan. It really troubles me to contemplate that, to today's teenagers, my song could seem that old, that much of a whole different world, era, separated across an unbridgeable chasm of time from today. To me it is timeless, ageless, deathless, and will never get so old that I felt like it could die.

Jumping back to the present on our 23-year pivot, during the inbetween years, as I have implied, my relationship with the Cure was never monogamous, and as time goes on, I have flirted with other songs and artists thinking they might be a serious prospect for my soul, but it has never been serious. However, quite recently, one band has finally come close and may yet have it in them to produce a piece of music that could threaten the supremacy of ‘Inbetween days’. That band is The National, and last year's Boxer contained some moments of pure beauty, again led by astonishing drum performances; the passage around a minute into Fake Empire when Bryan Davendorf announces his presence by slowly cranking up as the piano takes a breather is simply astonishing and, lacking the proper terminology to explain technically what they are called, the drum patterns in Apartment Story just don’t sound like anything else I have ever heard. Drums have bridged the gap for me, and The National are battling for control of my musical soul; hopefully, peaceful cohabitation will be the solution.

Interestingly, one other common feature bridges the gap from Cure to National, and that is fantastic videos, from giant fluorescent socks chasing the band while a drunken camera swinging from a rope captures the action for Inbetween Days, to the National gradually winning over an indifferent wedding crowd in a beautifully shot piece for Apartment Story.

The circle is closed, the bridge is strong, but can the bridge bear another giant arching span backwards too to 1962 and finally swallow up the other generation gap? We will just have to see.