Del Amitri
Some other suckers parade

My first impression of England, through the train window, was that it’s flat. It’s really, really flat. I’d only ever been in Scotland, so with that as my benchmark I was amazed to see the hills and rock faces slowly start to slip away on either side of me. Within the space of 20 minutes or so the stone waves flooding past the window reduced to a trickle before nearly entirely disappearing.

I could see for miles. Gazing across fields punctuated by farm houses or the odd power station, monstrous cooling towers spewing wasted energy into the atmosphere. The journey paused at the majority of stations through which we passed to allow commuters and travellers to board or disembark, part of their daily trudge to work or a meeting or off for some respite to pretend the cycle won’t just start right up again mere days later. All very reminiscent of that breakthrough song from waking hours.

I love the rumble of a train, and I adore long train journeys, but I could barely feel the friction of the wheels on the rails. My attention was lost in the new Del Amitri album. I had a portable CD player. How modern. If I moved it, the track would skip, but who cares about such minutia?! A small price to pay for better sound quality.

I watched. And I listened. Some other suckers parade felt a little different to previous albums. More of a live rock band feel than of contemporary pop, more energy, more pace, then tapering off a little toward the end with a few slower numbers. The themes were familiar but felt written from a perspective with slightly more experience than before. Looking back a little more. Themes of trying to be better, trying to become who you want to be. Or, rather, trying to stop being what you don’t want to be. But knowing you’ll probably never change, and that the pursuit of change may itself be causing further pain.

We all go through that time in our lives where we are not quite a kid and not quite an adult. For me that was my early 20s. That time where your emotions are running rampant, you’re truly experiencing what it is to have independence and are trying to find your feet in your chosen career. We have more responsibility that we should probably be trusted with and nowhere near enough experience to know how easily we can screw it all up. A melting pot of emotions, hormones, finished with a huge splash of inexperience to completely spoil the recipe.

To say I was wet behind the ears is an understatement. I found it difficult. It was pure emotional turmoil. I’m not sure if the magnitude with which I failed to understand other people or to which others failed to understand me was greater. I’m still not there. I never will be. I deal with that on a daily basis and have long learned that “dealing with it” means “accepting it”, as opposed to actually becoming any better at it. The only constant; the only thing I could and can rely on was, and still is music. But of course, when you’re that age you just assume you’re normal. You think everyone feels as you do. You fail to understand why you can’t fit in with other people. You fail to understand why you are absolutely and wholly not where it’s at. You have yet to learn that however hard you try to change, it won’t make it better.

I was 22 in 1997 when some other sucker’s parade was released. 22, on a train, wondering why I never knew England was so damn flat. Wondering why everything in life was so difficult. Wondering how to find happiness. Wondering what happiness was. It would be many years before I would learn that the emotions I felt, and how difficult I found everything, were a result of something beyond my control. Something clinical. Something where the medicine relieved the pain. A little. I liked the course trainer. I plucked up the courage, having watched her all day, to ask her back to my room. To my surprise she agreed, and we lay and talked for a few hours. We talked of previous breakups and of the pain we felt most recently from bad breakups. I asked her to listen to this side of the morning. She must have seen me as an odd character. I probably was, and as a result of that nothing happened other than talking. I thought of her thereafter for several months. Thought of asking her to come up and see Scotland with me, but I never did anything about it so I never saw her again.

It’s amazing how some other suckers parade now represents that few months of my life. The train journey, the passengers, my first impressions of England (it’s very flat, did I say?) and the trainer from the course. And the fact that nothing happened with her; that it absolutely was not meant to be.

Life is just a collection of these tiny little events. A novel is nothing without the full stop, and life is nothing without each little tiny event. The full stop is tiny, the smallest individual character in most sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books, but it means so much. Stop, I’ve finished a statement. Take in what I’ve just written. Digest it. Allow it to become part of your overall understanding of the writing it follows. Understand it, then move on once you have. It’s direct. It’s uncompromising. It ends most chapters and novels too. It is the king of the end. And the events in our lives are the same. These are sentences. They have a beginning, a body and a full stop. Or sometimes a question mark or even an exclamation mark. The full stop terminates the previous event as you move on to the next, until one day your final full stop closes your final chapter. When you put your collection of events together into a chapter you have an entire part of your life. And for me the soundtrack to these parts of my life are albums. Del Amitri, as well as some other bands, are the soundtrack to these chapters.

Some other sucker’s parade represents me moving from teen to an adult. Or at least an excuse for an adult. And it was also the first time I saw them live, at the Barrowlands in ’97. I still wear the teeshirt. And I still wear the scowl.