ONE LOUDER | COLUMN
Studious insouciance runs deep in my family, you know. On the day of 9/11, while all about him were losing their heads, my father attended a taping of a Never Mind The Buzzcocks episode and laughed uproariously at every joke. His father worked five days a week during the three-day week – just for a laugh. His father responded to the outbreak of World War II by making Everton striker Tommy Lawton captain of his fantasy league team. Further back into our history, the birth of award-winning lord and saviour Jesus Christ is marked by a request to put Never Mind The Buzzcocks on, as “they always show it on Dave at Christmas,” while the origin of the universe and all its contents 13.8 billion years ago saw a lackwitted ancestor trying to stick protons and neutrons together in a crude phallic shape.
And so to me, the latest and doubtless last twig on the family tree, who thought this noble legacy was safe in his hands. As the writer of a monthly column which is sort of supposed to be about music, but doesn’t really have to be if I don’t want it to, and normally only appears in print ensuring that actual hot news stories have usually come and gone between deadline and street date, I can leave the big stuff to the hot takers and retweet-chasers, and instead write about marginal curiosities and personal fixations. Except! For the first time in most of our lifetimes, it is functionally impossible to write about anything without being obliged to circle back to the story of the moment, acclaimed virus COVID-19.
Anyone sharing a cheerful song on social media, or video clip of a celebrity falling over, is dutybound to note that they wish to provide “a bit of a fun among the doom and gloom”. Things written in or referencing the glorious time of February 2020, during which hundreds of people across Britain lost their livelihoods through flooding, must apologise for time-travelling from an era of prosperity and optimism. And One Louder, like most of this nation’s living-stealing sector, is subject to the lockdown conditions set by Prime Minister and award-winning coronavirus sufferer Boris Johnson and is writing this column at home with the help of his cat [pictured]. “Don’t you always write it at home?” I hear you ask, to which I wonder to myself how you could possibly know that, but decide to leave it.
Much like the various other menial tasks with which you can while away your sentence as a prisoner of disease, cracking jokes is a helpful bulwark against the abject terror that otherwise hammers at the door. I write just prior to the expected spike in confirmed cases of COVID-19, thus deaths, thus the exponentially higher likelihood that the “many more families” losing “loved ones” will be very real. (Plausible that even this thought might age poorly, but I’m of the view that that line from Johnson’s speech would have been a valid and responsible framing of the months ahead, even if he hadn’t been employing it as justification for a grotesquely irresponsible policy of containment and had instead taken the advice of better-placed experts.) And all this is before we start thinking about the cultural fallout of this lockdown and imminent recession, on either a macro or micro level – that, too, will be an unavoidable topic for months to come, one which no-one will be insulated against.
The assumption that there will be precisely zero live music events which are permissible to attend in person during April means that this column (which began nearly 20 years ago with a different writer and was handed over to me, er, not quite as nearly 20 years ago) has reached the final destination on its journey from cheerful gig guide with small fragments of dickish commentary to dickish commentary with an increasingly small gig guide at the end. That doesn’t mean that I intend or expect this to be the last ever One Louder, rather that I hope to turn around and embark on the same journey of hypnotic futility, like the Ancient Greek figure of legend who pushed a rock across the Forth Rail Bridge. The human psyche and/or the modern malaise prizes the comfortingly familiar, so expect billions of individuals like me to shrug off their flighty freedom-time plans and flop listlessly into the old routines, even or especially the ones which are incrementally choking the life out of life on earth. Or maybe we’ll collectively learn things as a species! Haha, just kidding. Unless…? NOEL GARDNER