Prozac and Whimsy

I remember the first time I saw her. It was early September in 1995, I was a spotty, stick thin, awkward, gawky kid who liked music and basketball and very little else. She was beautiful. Maybe not conventionally beautiful but to me she was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen in my life. She was wearing a ballgown and a pearl necklace, her bleached blonde hair a delicate yet deliberate mess and a smear red lipstick only made her skin seem paler than I ever thought possible. She drawled her way through a dedication for the performance that was to follow, put a barefoot up on the monitor and then let rip.

I was in love immediately.

Grunge missed me at the time, I was a little too young for it to mean anything to me and barely knew who Kurt was and certainly didn’t care when he died. We didn’t have sky so the world of MTV was alien to me unless I was round a mates house. I was into rock and metal, well I was into Guns N Roses and Metallica. A little bit of Faith No More as well. Basically if my mates older brother gave us a tape with it on that was what I liked the most at the time. Apart from The Holy Bible, as already discussed that was something that was very special to me even if no one else understood it in the ways that I thought I did.

Hole performing Violet on the 1995 MTV VMA’ changed everything. I never had a girlfriend all through school. I was bullied relentlessly for being gay but I didn’t have a boyfriend either so how does that work? Courtney Love in all of her dishevelled beauty hit me and my hormones like a freight train and my world was never the same again. Me and a mate caught the bus into the city (Hereford) the next weekend and I bought a poster of her and Live Through This on tape. Before the year was out I was living in torn jeans and chequered shirts over t-shirts. I grew my hair out until it was a shaggy mess in my eyes and then started dying it different shades of red.

The music came thick and fast after this Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Green Day, Rage Against The Machine, Alice In Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Bush if you were on the cover of Kerrang! I would try and be a fan. The quiet kid who left school and the sullen one who arrived at college were two very different people.

Looking back what I did then and for the next few years was use music as a personality. It was all I cared about and all I talked about. Music is still massively important to me now, possibly a little too important at times, but there is at least a part of me that is a really real person even if I’m not sure who he is right now.

Live Through This is an album I have bought many times over. Copies have been lent out and never returned, chewed up and replaced through necessity, and part of the big switch from tape to CD (a story for another day). It’s an album that sounds as fresh and raw as it did back then. I can go months if not years at this point without listening to it but I still know (almost) all the words and it still makes me smile. It makes me want to lay in my room looking at the posters on my walls and dream of a life where I had no idea what was going to happen next and that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the next payday and the trip to the record store and whatever treasure that turned up.

I miss the innocence and excitement of those days. I miss my heart skipping a beat when I hear something new. I don’t want to be jaded and depressed I want to feel alive again.