Marcus Berkmann

Pump up the volume

issue 12 November 2011

It occurs to me sometimes that this column is, essentially, one long and painful confessional. I admit to enjoying all this unfashionable and uncool music so others don’t have to. ‘Ah, the man who likes Supertramp,’ someone once said to me at a party, just before he was stabbed by an unknown assailant. No one would say anything so sneering or discourteous to an actual member of Supertramp, current or former, which suggests that their fans must suffer on their behalf. My own suffering includes the purchase of their double live album, Paris, in or around 1980. In this they play note-perfect renditions of their hits, with added applause. If I still had the receipt, and the shop that sold it to me still existed, I would have half a mind to ask for my money back.

Being a polite sort of person, though, I try to ensure that my musical tastes do not impinge on the rest of humanity more than they have to. Certain favourite bands are only played when the woman I live with has gone out somewhere. She is barely in the car and driving away before Steely Dan are on the CD player and I am weeping tears of rage and ecstasy as the guitar solo on ‘Glamour Profession’ reaches its squealing climax. Usually, though, I try to keep the volume down and the neighbours happy. We are all a little scrunched together in this road and there are certain conversations you want to avoid having. ‘Was that Wings’ London Town you were playing this morning? Did punk never happen?’

Trouble is, my neighbour has the builders in. They are outside at this very moment, banging, crashing and occasionally pausing for a cup of Lapsang Souchong and some petits fours. Yesterday, my window was open and I inadvertently treated them to an album by the Jersey songstress Nerina Pallot. She writes a good meaty pop-rock hook, does Nerina, despite being so thin she would have to be weighed down in high winds. But when I glanced out of the window, a huge man with a shaved head gave me a look of mystification, tinged with loathing.

I took Nerina off. Tried some Wilco, the American indie band whose range and inventiveness seem to expand with every album. (Don’t have the new one yet but 2009’s Wilco (The Album) is more than enough to be going on with.) Then I put on Metallic Spheres, last year’s collaboration between The Orb and David Gilmour, about which I’m still not sure. (Is it just chillout noodling, or is there more to it? If there is I haven’t found it yet.) I even tried closing the window, which I should probably have considered a little earlier.

This morning they brought a radio.
It is tuned to Radio 1.

I have been wondering how to respond. Common sense would suggest, ‘Go and work in another room,’ but instead I have started this morning with a little light jazz-funk, a Joe Sample album from the 1980s. Was this passive-aggressive? With its infectious groove and many piano solos, this is the sort of music that, unless you actually liked it, could drive you insane. But if you are playing it softly, it is very hard to object to. I rub my hands with glee and snigger like Dick Dastardly.

They have just turned the radio up.

Can I now close the window? Probably not, for to do so would be to admit defeat, even though they are making so much noise, what with the hammering and the crashing and Jessie J’s latest single, that I cannot hear myself think. I am now playing Elliott Smith, but his drug-haze gloom may be too subtle a weapon for this conflict. Things appear to be escalating. Radio 1 is the pop music equivalent of the heavy guns, especially before10 a.m., when that awful fat man is on. I need something with more firepower. I need a nuclear option. I search the record collection. There must be something here.

There is. Breakfast in America by Supertramp. Newly remastered, in glowing Technicolor. Never have those stabs of electric piano or Roger Hodgson’s marmite voice sounded clearer, or indeed louder, as I turn the volume up beyond human forbearance. All together now: ‘When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, it was beautiful, magical…’

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