Dont Look Back, Look Forwards
A few days ago I was rummaging secretly and nosily, as you do, through a friend’s extensive geek-heavy DVD collection looking for a something to pass a quiet couple of hours and I came across something that leapt right off the shelf and into that snug park of my brain labeled ‘Luke’s Most Favouritest Childhood Memories’. I recall having a VHS collection of Count Duckula way back when, and I also recall liking it very much indeed, so it was with the complete DVD collection of the titular vampire’s endeavors under my arm that I tentatively made my way home to test these rose-coloured specs of mine, hoping to all that’s good and holy that it had stood the test of time.
You see, hindsight has a habit of twisting and wrangling even the most mediocre aspects of youth into plinth-worthy and timeless artifacts of a golden age of civilization. It is with a certain carrot-juice loving fanged duck, a car that turns into a giant robot from the tourist-heavy planet of Cybertron and a potentially eyebrow-raising love of a weird dog/cat/lizard bastard stew called Snarf in mind that I believe my youth was peppered with by far the best kids TV of any generation before or since. Think you had it better? Well you’re WRONG, so stop being such a crybaby and deal with it. The Clangers and Bagpuss were abominations and whatever the young whippersnaps of today are goggleboxing between stabbings and pregnancies is simply inferior to what I was treated to after a diligent day of abacus studies at the old school house, or a wistful Summer’s Saturday morn scrumping for Old Man Sidebottom’s prize apples before getting a friendly clip round the ear from the constable for being such a little tinker. “Please don’t tell my old mum, Sir”, I’d say, “or I’ll have no supper tonight, and I saw her leave a golden cherry pie cooling on the windowsill before I came out. If you don’t tell her, I’ll save you the biggest slice.” The constable, who for the purpose of this flashback is played by Jim Broadbent, would chortle heartily and stretch his braces, ruff my hair and say “Then don’t let me catch you doing it again, Master Holland. Mr. Sidebottom is presenting his prize apples at village show next week and we can’t have you cheeky monkeys eating all his best efforts now can we?” Then he’d hop back on his bicycle, tweet his bell and trundle off down the cobbles*……..
…….aaaaand we’re back in the room.
Films on the other hand as, for want of a better word, an artform, seem to be benefiting immensely from the passage of time. Vast recent advancements in technology and budget are resulting in stories getting told that would simply have been impossible to tell a few decades ago. There was a supposed ‘Golden Era’ of Hollywood which produced some beauties that still stand up today, as does the work of Orson Welles and our boy Hitchcock, but who knows what these talents would have been able to come up with the resources available today. Adaptations of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s ‘unfilmable’ books were only made possible (possible to do well, anyway) by the emergence of CGI as a viable tool, and for all it’s faults even that story-led Benjamin Button mushfest owes a lot to the subtle effects used to portray Brad Pitt as someone women would not like to have sex with. Story always prevails over CGI wizardry however, so take note George Lucas before you hopefully fuck off and die for ruining Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Don’t get me wrong, classics from my youth still hold a special place in my heart, and anyone who doesn’t like The Goonies, Willow, Back to the Future or David Bowie’s inexplicable crotch-baguette in Labyrinth is advised to prepare for the almighty force of a roundhouse kick to the face, but I’m not as protectionist when it comes to nostalgic films as I believe that the medium is still evolving, the best is yet to come and my love of these 80’s films can be attributed to a mere case of back-in-my-day-itis.
I’m not too sure about music though. Are Oasis and Radiohead in fact two of the best bands ever to grace human ears? Did Blur change the face of the musical landscape forever? Did the Manics leave their metaphorical hand print in the wet concrete of history? Or am I just looking back at the nineties with a love of vibrant youth and wide-eyed discovery rather than objectivity? The concept that these bands aren’t as good as I think they are leaves me with a cold feeling that’s not easy to shake off, but maybe it’s preferable to an unflinching belief in them at the expense of an openness to bands that hail from different generations. An ongoing point of contention between myself and Holland Snr is his flat out refusal to acknowledge the brothers Gallagher as anything more than, and this is verbatim, ‘a pair of gobby, shit-haired, riff-nicking twats’. Besides the fact that Noel’s always had impeccable hair my old boy’s right ofcourse, but I got into music largely because of those twats and I love them. After starting to listen to older music though it occurred to me that within two decades of its inception, ‘rock’ music had been taken to its logical conclusion. Pioneers like Bowie, Hendrix, The Beatles, Led Zepelin and Pink Floyd seemed to be inventing new genres as they went along and right up to the end of the 70’s when The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Clash and Joy Division emerged, many a music fan would say they wish they were young then, just to have been there, when noone knew what was going to happen next but the wait to find out was mercifully brief.
I couldn’t, hand on heart, say the 90’s as a musical decade could even begin to compare, and this worries me. Those that grew up in the 60’s seem to always say theirs was the best decade for music. Those in the 70’s may say their decade gets the crown. Even a few brave children of the 80’s could claim they were the lucky ones and despite the advent of cheesy synth wank-pop and Dave Lee Roth, it’s a fact that The Smiths, U2 and The Cure changed people’s lives. Heavy metal came along if you were that way inclined, and rave came along if you weren’t. And at the end of the 80’s The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays hit and a little band called Nirvana released their first album, although the 90’s can lay claim to their best work. None of this makes me love 90’s or naughties music any less but it does put it in perspective somewhat, and as such I don’t find myself vehemently defending my corner from heathens who try to tell me their decade was better than mine. I hope I’m in a minority here because I don’t want to be part of the first retrospective generation, coveting the musical pride of others, glumly believing the golden era of music has been and gone and we missed it by thirty some-odd years.
Like a dormant volcano long overdue an eruption, we are due some kind of shift. Something has to happen. Something WILL happen, because as a general rule something always does. The 90’s were great and the naughties have been okay up to now but the ‘tensies’ had better be something pretty special because we’ve been patient and we deserve it. The Arctics came close and The Kings of Leon were going great guns before they became a scally’s ringtone, but they aren’t going to make our kids jealous of us. I want to be able to look back and know exactly the feeling Hunter S. Thompson was describing in his famous ‘Wave’ speech in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Living in Liverpool has many advantages but a big one for me is knowing that with all the great new bands around here if something is going to happen somewhere there’s a much higher than average chance of it happening here. So I will be able to look back on the crazy decade that was the Tensies and say to my kids that I was there, then, at that time, to paraphrase Dr Thompson: ‘where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’
And, incidentally, I’m happy to report that Count Duckula is still fucking brilliant.
* note – as I’m 24 none of these events actually occurred
Recent Comments