The ceaseless flow of Screamadelica: a symphony in three parts
This is a long piece on memory and music and the tricks we play on ourselves. It's about being young, ageing, and having faith that the art you need will find you when you really need it.
Part One: Slip Inside This House
Perhaps the synchronicity is unlikely. The moment, the sound and the feeling all fused together, each a corroborative witness for the others. Is the memory accurate? I don’t know. I’m less likely to trust my own mind these days.
The moment first. It is 1991. It’s late September. I am 15. I’m walking through school even though it’s a Saturday. The school fete is on and there’s the sense of rules loosened; things turned upside down for a moment. Teachers are here but relaxed. Non-uniformed kids roam in packs, rushing in and out of doorways fixed open to the Saturday sun. The teenage bravado a notch louder, the chimes of freedom flashing just that little bit more brightly.
The sound I know for sure. I know as much as I came to know anything in that school, the identity of the tape turning in my Walkman that day. The song lopes to a rolling beat. A man blurts an incredulous, infectious laugh on a loop. A sitar unspools continuously in one ear, languid like my fifth-year peers leaning against that brick wall. Trip inside this house, sneers a nasal voice by way of a chorus. Is this what being on drugs feels like, I wonder. It sounds like the descriptions of acid I’ve read in my Dad’s Beatles books, slow yet fast, cartoon and scary at the same time. It feels illicit, like I’ve smuggled a pusherman into school. I peer at the cassette case in my pocket again. The image sparkles, is as suggestive as the music. The shiny red border, surrounding, what, a face? A sun, or a fried egg with legs. Eyes staring blankly from the middle. It’s unknowable. Slightly dangerous.
And so, the feeling:
Sensation is heightened today. The smiles and shouts, the sun and heat, the role reversal. The sickly-sweet candy floss air folding around the brown sizzle of onions. It’s warm, the way only Autumn is sometimes. I remember the prickle on my arm, skin reddening with surprise as much as heat, the scratch of classroom brick as someone pushes by. Or maybe this is a trick of the mind. Maybe it’s the older me at work, choosing to remember this feeling, inserting it into my own youthful timeline so that the future I will remember it all just the way I need to, carry with me this swirling memory of a moment as it settles on me like magic dust, a permanent September sunburn.
Moment, sound, feeling. Past, future, present. All come together, as one.
Does everyone experience their past in this way? As if it’s still happening, on repeat but partial, a recorded loop that leaves life as it really was just beyond view? Or is it my age, the age I was then, I mean, 15, a time when life sticks. Or maybe I mean the age I am now, when life recalibrates, comes undone a little. Or is it the age, this era of total digital recall, where we can’t move for anniversaries and on-this-days, when history feels ever-present, as if an effortless, instantaneous grasp on the past has condemned us to this: a life where we endlessly re-live our stories.
I started writing this piece two years ago, in 2021. The idea was to mark a thirty-year anniversary of my favourite teenage record, the way that we all do that now. I was 15 in 1991, and buying the NME every Wednesday. 1991 was the moment I stepped into the river, had my baptism of black ink and secret knowledge, an introduction to that ceaseless flow of music I’ve loved ever since. Downstream of that flow, it seemed, was the future, the places music was heading. The past was upstream, and it travelled down in currents and eddies to rush past me where I stood: here, now, 1991.
That year splits musical history in two for me. There is before 1991 and there is after, and in between is the year itself, the inflection point, the part of the river where upstream and downstream meet. It’s from this vantage point that I instinctively compute any musical information, consider where things came from, where they went, what it all means. Call it my annus panopticus. 1991 is a two-way looking glass and it seems to me simple numerology that 1991 is a palindrome, that you could place a mirror at its centre and it would read the same on both sides, that its approach is the same regardless of your direction, that you might flow toward or away from it and as you pass through you might stand at its middle, looking right and looking left, looking forward and behind, see the past arrive and watch the future start. 1991 is both reflection and inflection. There is symmetry to its symmetry.
It’s clear there was something in the water, some divine arithmetic at work in the rush of music that year, the ceaseless flow full of arrivals and culminations, of launchpads and blueprints. Think about REM and Metallica, each ascending to their own respective summits, each making their biggest albums, each defining moments that might allow either of them to be labelled unofficial biggest band in the world. Think about Guns N Roses, who arrive in 1991 as the official version, but who end it somewhere else entirely, their career peak soon crumbling into a cack-handed descent, the kind of long goodbye that only LA noir can produce. Think too about the catalyst for that fall - Nirvana, 1991’s most visible arrival, a moment the culture changed overnight. Nevermind is both crash-landing and launchpad, celebrated as an effortless raid on mainstream territory and at the same time dangerous portent for a band and a man who discover they really don’t want to be there. Their arrival is the start of their ending; their tragedy inevitable the moment success arrives.
There’s more, of course. A Tribe Called Quest and Massive Attack each perfect a new aesthetic, an organic bricolage of sounds crafted and curated and blurred to signpost an entire world of new beginnings. The Orb and The KLF make their first albums too, music from the future that asks questions about memory and timeless space and the eternal, questions like what time is love? and what were the skies like when you were young?, making music that sounds like the future but actually invites you to look back, or look inward, or discover a yearning nostalgia for the present. Talk Talk don’t so much arrive in 1991 as finally resolve, ultimately leaving as quietly as any group arrived or left anywhere. With Loveless, My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields arrives somewhere entirely new, somewhere at the limits of his imagination and ours, a place no one else ever really caught up with, not even him. U2 and Blur make cameos, too, one busily reversing from the cul-de-sac they had driven into, using irony and Achtung Baby to escape the humdrum death rattle of rocknroll cliche, the other stalling their own entrance, clearing their throat without quite finding their voice.
And then there is Primal Scream.
Screamadelica arrived in my 1991, in everyone’s 1991, both slowly and all at once, feeling surprising as it was familiar. Loaded, the first single, was 18 months old. There’d been three more singles since, and all were on the album in some form, one of them twice, in its original state and as a remix. Track 2, the laughing slow-fast trippy one on my Walkman, was a cover. Of eleven songs, six were in the public domain as the album came out.
And so, to me, Screamadelica represents 1991 not just sonically, but symbolically. It is both culmination and launchpad. It is a seminal moment full of new directions that’s also a compendium of a well-documented two-year journey. A band obsessed with the past giving itself a shot at future posterity. To this 15 year old, it was a record that had all of music rushing through it, a sound that didn’t only bathe in the ceaseless flow but was made of it, as if it had swirled its way into being, coursed its way downstream only to catch the sunlight on the water’s surface and twinkle brightly as it danced its way past me. I dived in, of course. It came to feel like a guide, a map for so many years of listening that would follow. With 1991 my vantage point, Screamadelica fixed itself as the centre of my musical universe, the narrow grid reference of my spot on the river bank, where everything converged and diverged off again into a billion streams.
It sprinkled magic dust on this boy one sunny Saturday and stayed there, sank deep into his psyche. It became a two-way keyhole through which he sees the world.
If the word magical must be explained, let it stand for no more than the fact that the moment itself is a moment of absorption and is remembered with a delight all the more exquisite for being quite incommunicable. But Kenn has an urge to be explicit, even to labour what is infinitely elusive, because the farther he goes towards the source of his river the more he feels there is in this very elusiveness the significance he would like to hold.
from Highland River by Neil M. Gunn
It is summer 2021. I am on holiday. I am reading but not writing. The thing I am not writing is a piece I've not been writing for six months now: something to catalogue and process Screamadelica as it turns 30. The book I am reading is called Highland River by Neil M Gunn, a book I found the week before in a bookshop in the foothills of the Cairngorms.
It strikes me the book is about a man looking back to a time when he was a boy - a time that is thirty years ago for him, but more than a century back for contemporary readers - and to a land even further north than I am now. Kenn is the name of the boy who is now the man, or perhaps is still the boy living as a man, looking back after having fought in and survived the Great War, and having enjoyed an education, a proper one, the first in his family to manage it, and he is thinking about what all this education and experience can tell him about a time before he had either of those things, and about who he was as that time unfolded, and what or who it was that made him who he was then, and therefore perhaps who he might be now. He writes from a time of disillusionment, the war having given way to a grinding ordinariness, as if to catalogue and understand something, to “labour what is infinitely elusive”. He does this by charting the landscape of his pre-war childhood, a terrain that was rough and unromantic. A place where the ground was hard and so was the grain of family life. Dad went out fishing on the North Sea, a perilous, daunting prospect for all of them. It was Mum’s job to make a little go a long way a lot of the time. This was village life hewn by the mountain, by proficiency in hunting and poaching, by knowledge of plants and trees and weather and the cycle of the seasons. And most of all by the river.
When we first meet the boy, Kenn, he makes a pre-dawn excursion to the river and tussles in the freezing cold with a live salmon that is making its way upstream. By the end of the book, after the war, he is a scientist, someone who wants to understand the source of things, wondering about what has been lost and what has endured, and we follow his own search upstream, physically and emotionally, back to the river, back to a childhood that unfolded, like that of the salmon, by instinct and tradition. There is a kind of magic to the river and to his childhood he can barely explain, sometimes barely see, and he shows it to us sometimes obliquely, as he shows us other things, more tangible and real things that are not quite the source of the magic. He sees and we see that while he knew everything about the ways of the river, its contours, its ceaseless flow, its rise and fall, the way it fed different parts of the landscape, he never followed the river back to its source. He can’t remember where it came from, and he can’t let go of the idea of tracing the river upstream, like the salmon, to the spring where everything begins.
There’s something meaningful there, he feels. Something he must find. Something to tell him who he is.
Part Two: Inner Flight
A chirping, fluttering sound fades in. It skitters left to right then back again, circling around the headphones, a continuous echo of itself. There’s a wordless, celestial voice calling, siren-like, beckoning you into this beautiful space as a calming, reflective melody gradually unfurls and you’re floating. Dreaming. Drifting further and further, higher and higher, until that chirping, fluttering sound brings you back round. Ready to be in the world once more.
That chirping, fluttering sound is the start of a song called Inner Flight. It comes right after one called Higher Than The Sun. As with the titles, so with the music: we’re looking to the outer reaches of space one minute, facing inward the next. The song signals the start of Screamadelica’s middle third, twenty minutes where the only voices are that celestial siren and a pair of rousing, pleading gospel refrains. Bobby Gillespie, the notional singer of the group, is present for a few seconds only. At 15 I have no real reference point for this music. I can’t seem to identify what you would use to make it, yet it seems so organic, the opposite of synthetic. It seems to float. Later I will realise that the floatiness of Inner Flight, like so much of Screamadelica, is very much tethered to the past and to music that came before. Its template is from Brian Wilson, who made gorgeous, lovelorn instrumentals like this for Pet Sounds – what sounds like it’s come from space is actually an echo of sixties LA, rebounded into the nineties; surf sounds via satellite.
That chirping, fluttering sound wasn’t new either. It’s a sample taken from song Brian Eno recorded in 1974, on his album, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.
The song is called The Great Pretender.
It is summer 2021, and I am learning that two-way keyholes contain opposing views of the same thing. A portal is also a trap. The gift of discovery can also be a burden. The price of secret knowledge might be an unearned superiority.
It is summer 2021, and after more than a pandemic year of looking inward and very little time looking outward, more back than forward, things that were once fixed and concrete feel decidedly less so. My mind has turned on me. Not entirely, and not all the time, nor in a way that’s completely debilitating or corrosive the way some experience it, but with enough regularity and precision to chip away at some ideas I have of myself. As the world shuts down, my mind builds its reserves of negative self-talk. Rising in me now, having lain dormant all this time perhaps, is a toxic blend of risk aversion and regret. And shame. If my mind isn’t outright accusing me of failure, it’s certainly content to make me feel like one. I am not good enough, it says. I never tried hard enough. Anything I am good at is just luck. I will be exposed. My knowledge is pointless. All I’ve ever done is show off. No one’s interested. I’m not authentic. I don’t know what I’m for. The things I hold dear, like music, are not there because I love them but because I think they make me look good. It’s all been so much social currency.
This isn’t the fault of Screamadelica, or of Bobby Gillespie. Neither caused my mindstate, but the ideas each represented are emblematic of it. The distilled essence of the poison my brain was feeding from.
At 15, my imagination had been fired by Bobby’s interviews. As much as his music formed a new landscape, the names of artists and records that tumbled from his mouth felt like treasure map clues to search out. I was a smart, intellectually curious kid who didn’t really think he had much about him. Against a backdrop of dull, semi-rural 90s life, Bobby’s was an intoxicating gospel. This knowledge made me special. Mine was a higher order of fandom.
But there’s an inverse take on the record, shared by people who aren’t so beguiled or besotted. They say they see through the pose, claim it’s smoke and mirrors, that it’s Weatherall’s record, that the band’s output is little more than a regurgitated record collection. That Bobby’s namechecking shows the void where originality should be. This was my Screamadelica paradox. A record that convinced me of my good taste, now denuded of its connoisseur status by doubting voices. Obviously, I didn’t want to acknowledge the criticism that Bobby was overly earnest, dismissive, and rarely on a level with the artists he loved. Not just because they were the flaws of someone I’d put on a pedestal. Deep down, those qualities were what I least liked about myself. Looking back, that dislike got closer to the surface every year. In 2021, at least in moments, it was all I thought I was.
I’m not saying I was sad because I’d outgrown the album that was my favourite as a teenager. I’m not saying I was disappointed in a teen hero’s feet of clay. I’m saying there are times when the edifices we build feel momentarily hollow, that the impenetrable hardness of our exterior no longer protects the softness we keep from the world. A lifetime of treasure maps had made me mercenary: it felt like everything I did or consumed had to have value. I had become, in Jonathan Raban’s memorable phrase, “a prisoner of my insecure good taste.” It’s not that my mind wouldn’t afford me the refuge of music, rather that it attempted to demean a lifetime of listening as an extended adolescent performance. There, at the inflection point of the inflection point, right at the big bang of my identity, was a record and a person and a notion of fandom that reflected my worst ideas of myself back at me. It was as if the person I decided to be at 15 had been an act, and here I was still stuck in the role. I convinced myself for moments that I’d never meant any of it. I disassociated. I became The Great Pretender.
Good taste is not a personality. But it felt like all I had. This thought cuts deeper the harder you try to show it isn’t true, the harder you keep going, keep discovering, keep trying to make yourself more interesting than you believe yourself to be, keep scoring points off the world, until you reach a midpoint in life when the things you’ve been carrying with you, unnoticed maybe, start to weigh you down because you’ve never really dealt with them. Maybe then you unspool a little. Maybe then you’re David Byrne: this is not my beautiful house - my God, how did I get here? Maybe then you start to feel the sting of a song like Nick Drake’s Hazey Jane II, with its portrait of the complacent collector, of youthful conviction, hollowed out:
And what will happen in the evening in the forest with the weasel with the teeth that bite so sharp when you're not looking in the evening?
And all the friends that you once knew are left behind, they kept you safe and so secure amongst the books and all the records of your lifetime?
What will happen,
in the morning
When the world it gets so crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning?
What will happen, exactly?
In recent years, the simple fact that he had never actually gone to the source of his childhood’s river had quietly taken possession of his mind, and by a slowly growing impulsive need had started it on this long, intricate quest, a quest of lost times and places, but not for the mere sake of evoking them, or of indulging pleasant or sentimental memories, but of capturing, of isolating, a quality of awareness and delight in order to provide the core of life with warmth and light.
from Highland River by Neil M. Gunn
It is 2021 and I am in the Highlands, not writing but reading, reading Highland River, a novel in which Neil M Gunn writes about a boy he calls Kenn, a boy who is also a man looking back at when he was a boy. Gunn becomes Kenn and Kenn becomes a boy with unspoken dreams and fears, which through the act of reading mingle with my own, become a tangle of memories and events and feelings that are the very essence of childhood. That tangle itself becomes mixed up with ideas of what it is to be that boy now grown up, a man who is supposed to have left those memories and events and feelings behind, only to realise they’re never really left behind. We carry them with us as we grow up. Until for one reason or another we no longer can. And then where do they go?
I am reading on holiday and not writing about Screamadelica again, even though I brought all my notes with me, even though it is August 2021, getting towards September, getting towards the corresponding Saturday of that Saturday I walked into school, a thirtieth anniversary that was the trigger to start writing about Screamadelica, a memory that in the end became the moment the story began. Now in some way I can’t explain, the confluence of timelines is a barrier to writing rather than a prompt. Instead I lose myself in Gunn, who is also Kenn the boy, who says of Kenn the man that “the adventures of boyhood were adventures towards the source, towards the ultimate loneliness of moor and mountainside, and his own adventure will finally have to take the same road,” and on some level I start to perceive that there may be something in the past that I don’t want to write about, or that I do want to write about but can’t. I wonder whether the problem is the 2021 version of me, who is not able to write, or the me of 1991, who doesn’t want to be written about. Or maybe the problem is what happens when those two people come together. Why is it, I wonder, that all roads seem to lead back there, yet I never seem to arrive. And I don’t wonder at all that it is so exhausting, all this not writing, because I am never not thinking about it.
I read Highland River in the Highlands and think about Kenn returning first figuratively and then literally to the time and place of his youth. In both instances, Gunn places us at Kenn’s shoulder, so we walk the earth with him and trace the river and relive his time in that landscape, first in memory or in imagination, then in reality. Kenn’s memory shows us someone watching his childhood unfold with no real idea of where it’s going, the way a real childhood does. In Kenn’s grown-up reality we experience a landscape that fails to live up to the expectations set by memory, the way real life does. There is a truth in memory’s fiction, but reality hits harder. Kenn is Gunn’s avatar in time, a way of investigating, mediating and understanding the person he became. A way of looking backwards and forwards at once. Kenn when older returns to the river and follows it upstream, back to where he never previously went, back in time, to the source of all this ceaseless flow. He wants to know where it came from, where indeed he came from, to find the knowledge that’s always been just out of reach - the indefinable essence of himself and his landscape that might make everything make sense. In this way, Kenn stands for all memories of childhood, the uncanny heart of nostalgia, how we can travel all that way in memory or imagination or geography only to be spooked by what we see when we get there. Namely, ourselves. There we are, a two-way keyhole in the past, an avatar in time who created the person we have become.
As another song from 1991 would have it, I was looking back at you to see you looking back at me to see me looking back at you.
Part Three: Shine Like Stars
Long shadows fall across the grass. It’s September again.
Pools of Saturday light - the golden kind, the light that feels like magic dust - swim in the late afternoon air. I am high up at the top of the city, listening 30 years later to a record that places me back in the moment of that school fete, and at so many points since. Gigs, parties, bedrooms, holidays, shared moments.
I’m asking very little of Screamadelica today. Making no demands on it. Pressing play because it feels instinctively right, rather than relying on it to affirm or represent anything about me, or my world or choices. And yet it gives of itself generously, finding its own level the way all water does, reaching calmly but deliberately into the crevices of my mind, sound-tracking my view, my time alone up here walking the dog. I’m at the point in the city where the city stops being a city and indeed stops altogether, the land falling away into a gorge. The gorge is huge, a gap so wide you can’t over it, except by the bridge that stands as the landmark of this city, away to my left. Below, of course, is the river. Large but low, estuary brown, downstream of who knows where, the end point rather than the start point, or maybe, as with all these things, it’s also the opposite - the beginning of a potential journey back to the source, wherever that is.
The music burbles and plinks, breathes and throbs, swoons and sways. I realise for the first time how no format in which I’ve owned and played Screamadelica has ever quite fitted or served the flow of the music. The tape I listened to that day in 1991 - borrowed, copied, returned - placed the music across two sides of unequal length. The CD I bought soon after connected the album into one smooth whole. The vinyl version I’ve listened to most of all carves it up into quarters. Yet all this time it’s been an album of three clear movements. A symphony in three parts, each about twenty minutes long. There’s the breathless, coming-up-and-oh-it’s-beautiful run from Movin’ On Up to Higher Than The Sun. Then there’s the almost wordless section in the middle: Inner Flight, Come Together, Loaded - Weatherall in full flow, plugging the band into something multi-coloured and militant, cutting them - and me - free from any notion of how their music had to sound. Finally there’s the run of space ballads, from Damaged through to Shine Like Stars, that finds a kind of peace with it all. Chiming and floating and sliding back into wherever it all came from, washing over me and dissipating and returning to the ceaseless flow of music that inspired it, and which it in turn inspired. It ends as it always does, or rather I feel once more at the end of it as I always did: joyful, a happy swirl of memory and possibility, somehow able to look upstream and downstream at the same time. Like I have arrived somewhere and yet could travel anywhere I wanted.
Today, in this mood, I take that middle section of Screamadelica to stand for something optimistic and radical. Twenty minutes of drift and swagger that carries me from introspection to elation. Fuck cynicism, I think today. Fuck the sneering story my mind was trying to tell me last year, and still does now and again. Here is music that manifests something that for all its abstraction is very real. An alternate dimension. Bobby, the singer of this group, is nowhere to be heard. But he’s also everywhere. It’s a potent idea: that somehow a presence can become elemental, dissolved into air, or water, like a river. This music is impossible without him, yet his vision for his band is realised the moment he steps beyond it. The ego, dissipated. In its place a music that is willed into being, wrought from passion and belief and a pursuit of the transcendent.
Screamadelica was the first of many records I loved that seemed similarly willed into being. Transcendent music that exists because its makers perceived such a thing to be possible. Records like Laser Guided Melodies, A Love Supreme, Astral Weeks, What’s Going On, Spirit Of Eden, If I Could Only Remember My Name. Records full of mellifluous sounds and dissolved boundaries that sound like they’re beaming back from somewhere. Music touched with spirituality, or music that in some circular way attests to the power of itself. They seem to conjure the ineffable. They embody ideas that can only be communicated or made manifest by music. They stand for love, God, altered states, memory, nature, the grandeur of an estuary gorge or a Scottish Highland sunset. The sublime, in other words. They are records made not just of songs but of a belief in magic. So while Screamadelica never really was dance music in any technical sense, it is about the rapture and the promise of the dancefloor. That moment of collective joy. A more positive way of life. The glimpse of something greater.
So today, thinking this, I don’t feel hollow. Today I feel grateful to have been young and impressionable when this record came out. Today I try to imagine what it must feel like to be a musician who stepped into the river themselves once as well, as a fan at first, then as a maker of music. How that person might go on to offer a promise of something greater to someone they will never meet, simply by making their own contribution to the ceaseless flow. I think about how essential and affirming that is. I think about the notion that, after everything else falls away and is forgotten, this is enough. That the connection is made is what matters.
Reading Bobby’s memoir, Tenement Kid, it’s clear that connection was deliberate. He describes Screamadelica’s opening track, Movin’ On Up, as a song of struggle and redemption, a song for anyone “lost in a wilderness of their own making.” He notes that “everyone feels alone and helpless at some point in their lives”, suffers from low self-esteem or insecurity. He calls the song “a universal song in the face of adversity. A song that admits wrongdoing, failure and spiritual confusion yet takes responsibility and confronts demons head on.”
“I believe that inside us all are vast reserves of power,” Bobby writes, “it’s only when we’re tested do we realise our true strength. We are spiritual beings with unlimited capacity for love and creativity. Maybe Movin’ On Up is a hymn for all the desolate, lost, angry, confused, self-hating people of the world. It’s a hymn to the transcendent, healing, life-affirming power of community I found in rock and roll and acid house.”
Show me the teenager that doesn’t feel “desolate, lost, angry, confused, self-hating.” Show me the teenager that wouldn’t be fired by the power Bobby was trying to transmit. Show me anyone that doesn’t need that affirmation once in a while.
After all, he says, “we all have a deep need to believe in something.”
In some unaccountable way he seemed to be aware of the living essence of this history without having been explicitly taught it. He knows he has been the subject of ‘influences’.... Knowing this, he would like to stop the thickening of his mind, to hunt back into that lost land. It was intensely real. Kenn has a feeling if he could recapture this, he would recapture not merely the old primordial goodness of life but its moments of absolute ecstasy. Is it possible in mature years to thin the lenses of the eye, to get the impulses and responses acting as they acted in boyhood? Has ‘knowledge’ explained the youthful wonder, and lethargy killed it?
from Highland River by Neil M. Gunn
When Kenn returns to the land where he grew up, the source of his river is not the loch he imagined, but a small stream that continues underground. He is confused at first. He listens so intently he mistakes his own blood flow for the sound of water. Then finally he sees an abandoned shore. “The gathering clot of moody denial dissolved like tiredness from his flesh, and his body lay to the sands lightly in a desire for sleep. As his eyes looked out across the water, they smiled. Out of great works of art, out of great writing, there comes upon the soul sometimes a feeling of strange intimacy. It is the moment in which all conflict is reconciled, in which a timeless harmony is achieved. It was coming upon him now.”
It’s one of the most beautiful endings to a novel I’ve ever read. I inhaled it sat on a shore overlooking the North Sea as the water danced and glistened, draped in the same golden light that would bathe me near the Avon Gorge a month or so later. Whenever that light appears and opens a window to the sublime I think of Kenn in that moment, one in which all conflict is reconciled, and he finally re-connects with wonder just he seems least likely to ever feel it again. I can’t think of an ending I’ve needed more. A lesson I’ve needed more. To know that underneath the doubt and the confusion there is something more powerful, some ineffable joy waiting to be re-discovered, and that the inexorable urge to return, as Kenn did to his river, to that moment, without knowing why, is act of faith, a belief that the strength to move forward and perhaps even value of the life in which we find ourselves might lie somewhere in the past.
We are always looking back and moving forward, it seems. Arriving and departing.
Kenn helps me remember that sometimes return is renewal. And his return to his river takes me back to the moment I first stepped in my own – that ceaseless flow of music and words. He makes me think about Bobby too, and how we all exist downstream of some and upstream of others, and how one person’s desire to take the art that fired their imagination and remake it for themselves is an act of love, regardless of what anyone thinks, an act of love for those who inspire it and for those who inherit it, because somewhere downstream, someone is waiting, and listening, and will maybe be inspired to do the same. Getting older, we all experience the “gathering clot of moody denial” that Kenn does, but it can dissolve on contact with wonder, and with the art that inspires us, or connects to the person we once were.
Getting older isn’t always about putting away childish things. It is the capacity to relive the things we went through as children so we might better understand them the second time around. This is what Neil M. Gunn means, I think, when he writes in Highland River that “youth’s memories have always this happy trick of living in the future.” Sometimes, when we get there, it can be hard to remember. But sometimes we are returned to what was always in front of us. For a while, there, I needed returning. I needed to remember what it was like to wonder, to learn again that what I had experienced was in fact wonder, learn again to embrace without shame an idea I’d once had of myself: that Screamadelica made a believer out of me.