Tom Dunne: Station To Station with a lifelong love of music
Albums by David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan have all had a huge presence in Tom Dunne's life.
Mary Coughlan is talking to me. “I was listening to you last night. Jesus, you know so much about music!” I know this comes from a good place, but I’m having one of those days. I am wondering am I wrong to think so much about music? Did I just not grow up properly?
Theoretically, music is a rites of passage thing. You get into it, it’s important to you, like a first love, but eventually you move on. At some point, on hold for customer service, a child crying beside you, the on-hold music reminds you briefly of something that once, meant, well, everything.
Or you don’t. Somehow you keep it in your life. And people say things to you like “still at the aul music?” Or you read Trevor Horn’s book and he says his dad used to warn him that professional musicians end up playing “music they don’t like”. These things lodge inside you.
And then a lady on Twitter tweets a photo of David Bowie’s Station To Station and says that when she first heard it, she had four channels, the radio and the mobile library. She says she played it and the first Velvet Underground album for a month solid. She says it was one of the most important months of her life. Twitter doesn’t do high fives, but if it did.
Station To Station was one of mine too. I listened to it during one of those glorious summers in the 1970s, the long hot ones. I was growing up. My head was full of questions. Who was I? What about girls? What was important? What could I be? What could I do?
As my brain raced and turmoil reigned supreme, a soundtrack played. Bowie’s languorous lyrics permeated every space. It added gravitas, mystique, drama. Various lines opened doors in my mind. What world is this? Who are these people? What do they want? What stations would this little train arrive at?
Now, forty years on, the opening bars of Station To Station still bring me back to what passed for a tennis court on the street where I grew up. I don’t remember any other details, just the music drifting on the air.
I didn’t ignore the real world. I did exams and went to college. But not alone. I had the good luck to be accompanied first by Bowie’s Low and then Heroes. They are inseparable in my mind. I took to listening to A New Career in a New Town before every exam I ever did!
It’s hard to explain how a piece of music can come to resonant so intensely with you. How it can take you out of yourself and away to somewhere else. But remembering, for example, how Leonard Cohen performing Famous Blue Raincoat at 3Arena, took 10,000 people simultaneously to the same place, you can’t deny it either.
Albums, thankfully, have resonated with and accompanied me in life ever since. More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits took me out of school, Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom brought me through college, and U2’s October ensured music was a world I could never, really, fully let go of.
Music, and particularly some albums, came to represent all that we could be. Lloyd Cole and Kate Bush seemed to put into words thoughts we were having ourselves, or shadows of those thoughts in subtle shades. The same room, but more imaginatively furnished.
Music applies a balm to our life’s experiences. Few times in your life will match the intensity of your youth, and the music you turn to at that time is unlikely to be matched in your affections. However, if you stay open to it, make space, it can swoop in to help, time and time again.
Bowie’s final album hit me hard. The last song, I Can’t Give Everything Away, has a near identical mouth organ motif to A New Career in a New Town. It is plaintive, desolate, lonely. It somehow made me think “There’s a man who’s leaving the station”.
I became convinced Bowie was very unwell. I recall looking at my wife and thinking that Bowie had been a part of my life decades before she or my children. And had inhabited a part of that life with incredible intensity. He died two days later.
It’s hard to explain to some. But for others, like my Twitter friend, it isn’t hard at all. It is what you would expect from the greatest cultural artform of the last 100 years.
