About three weeks ago I moved down to Chichester for University, leaving Blackburn and my gap year behind. Although I’m yet to be really swamped by Uni work it seems like an unfortunate inevitability, and for this reason things might begin to slow down where this blog is concerned. Since arriving I’ve posted a few reviews, and these reviews have been far from my best work, and at this point I feel like I have to put quality over quantity, and prioritise my Uni life over my online blog presence. Chances are you won’t care about this a great deal, but I figured an update would be good, at least so it makes me feel like I’ve justified a lapse in future activity. Thinking ahead there are only a few more releases this year which I’d really like to review (Ben Howard, Have Mercy etc.) and it’s likely that these might be the only things going up on this site until Christmas. When I was at home I had nothing else going on, for eighteen months almost, so it was easy to dedicate several hours to a single record, or a few days to a lengthy submissions post. I feel like this won’t be as doable over the coming months, although things might change.

Anyway, that’s that, consider the site updated. I recently had to write a poem about the year I was born (1994), and seeing as I put a music-based spin on it I figured I’d post it on here. Please bear in mind that this isn’t exactly a finished version, as well as the fact that this is the first piece of poetry I’ve written in around five years. Feel free to be disappointed.

Right Day, Wrong Month

I wish I’d been born a month earlier,
to coincide with the release of Definitely, Maybe.
Partly because it would make a better party story than:
“ginger hair / big feet / tall”
but also because I might not have given up playing the guitar at twelve years old.
I’d be pushed by some sort of cosmic coincidence,
as well as one of the best albums ever made.

I was born into a house full of wax
but I never had a birth record I could relate to,
something timeless to define a youth not yet lived.
As I cried as a baby in a hospital Pavarotti topped charts;
now, I’m hardly a classical man – although I appreciate the arts.

1994, born into a world of sounds I couldn’t understand
I discovered them all slowly and gleefully,
like a child on an easter egg hunt,
or a tired homeless man picking up coins from the rolling stones,
each one a key to something infinite through headphones.
Revolver, Dookie, Springsteen and Cobain;
a man I grew to admire, and who exited as my parents chose a name.

As the IRA dropped bombs on Heathrow
I was crawling to Faith No More.
And as the Chinese had their first browse of the internet
our radio was afire to Love Is All Around by Wet Wet Wet.
(Zero weddings, zero funerals and one birth)
My father’s favourite songs became my own,
warm vibrations to eager infant ears just discovering home.

To be sure, the year of my birth was one of many musical highs and lows,
at its lowest perhaps when Bieber was born.
Although I’m disappointed to have missed out on Oasis’s Definitely, Maybe
at least I don’t share a birthday with the tool who sang Baby.
Right day, right month