The dark music

Continuing on the theme of people we meet and the music that joins us together I shall travel back in time to 1989. It's been a year or so since I finished my national service and I have moved in to a little bedsit, my first house on my own. I have two neighbours, a girl and a boy. They are students and we meet occasionally in the corridor. They seem friendly but they are students and I am working. Our timetables are quite different... Summer comes too soon and they go back to their respective homes, a bath town and a flowery island. Autumn brings them back. As the swallows leave and the clouds take over, dark tunes emanate at night from the rooms across the corridor.
I am not accustomed to these sounds. I have grown up to a musical diet consisting mainly of rock, hard rock and rock and soul.



The music from next door I can only initially describe as dark. Oh, I have listened to my share of "dark" music but it is altogether of a very different "tone" of darkness. Black Sabbath, Aphrodite's Child, Iron Butterfly. Far out man! Dark yes but also naive in a way.



The song was supposedly called in the garden of eden but the singer was so stoned he pronounced it in-a-gadda-da-vida. kaloooo!

So what are these sounds from next door that are so new to me? They are Nick Cave, they are the Fall, they are the Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and many many others. on the lighter side they are the Inspiral Carpets and the Stone Roses.
Unaccustomed as my ears were it took me a while but I came to love their music too.

My two mentors were a little younger than me at the time, and living their student years to the full! And they haven't changed much either. we still keep in touch... don't we?