Song 7: Holes

Holes - Mercury Rev

It can sometimes be quite a while after the event before you realise what songs are particularly significant to you and your life and tastes. The opening track to the 1998 Mercury Rev album 'Deserter's Songs' is such a song for me.

It was a happy combination of circumstances which elevated 'Holes' to this exalted position, and the key, above all, lies in two words - 'Sony Discman'.

If you're a little young to remember,  let me say that late 1998 was pretty spectacularly late for a supposed music fanatic to still be buying (or copying) everything on cassette. The choice of cassettes in the music stores up to that point was still just about acceptable but nowhere near the panoply of untold riches in the CD section. It was the fact that Bob Dylan's 'Albert Hall' official bootleg was only available on CD which finally persuaded me to shell out the £36 and shed the cultivated eccentricity and get myself a Discman.

[This stands pretty high but not alone in my litany of Luddism. Whether it was not having a video player till around 1992, handwriting out all my university essays, not getting an e-mail address till 1999, not getting a mobile till early 2003, I certainly was slow on the uptake. Now I spend my whole working life on a computer, but there is still a part of me that is a little scared of turning the laptop on in case it bites me.]

Anyway, all of a sudden, I had my discman and my world of possibilities, as well as a little more disposable cash than I'd had in the past. And two things happened 1. Radio 1 played the Mercury Rev single 'Goddess on a Hiway', which I liked, and then 'Deserter's Songs' was named NME's Album of the Year.

This was a pretty big thing coming from NME, which had understandably been all about Britpop and its attachments for the last 4 years or so (all the time I'd been buying it). 1997's winner had been Spiritualized's ineffable 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space' so it's not like I'd never been exposed to bold, experimental music before, but here was the UK's Britpop Bible giving up and saying "No, sorry, our time has passed, the best music this year has come from the USA and it sounds nothing like Menswear".

So, pretty much the first CD I bought in what was soon to become quite a frenzied spree which would last about 8 years (till, my late, but not spectacularly late, adoption of iTunes) and end up with over 1000 albums, was 'Deserter's Songs'. It's interesting to think what other albums were part of that first release, that first "Oh, my, I can have anything I want now!" Slightly odd ones really - Ian Dury's 'New Boots and Panties', Otis Redding's 'Greatest Hits', Rufus Wainwright's self-titled debut (a good call) and of course the aforementioned Dylan live album.

But it was 'Deserter's Songs' first and foremost, and I can still remember it. The effect was magical. It was the opening up of a new world which I'd thought listening to 'Pet Sounds' would be, that I'd pretended 'Pet Sounds' was, but that 'Pet Sounds' slightly disappointingly wasn't quite (though I do love it and it's beauty is actually surprisingly conventional and soothing rather than mindbending, as i'd kind of expected).

It was 'Holes', a song of such sweet sadness, maturity and enchantment I didn't know where I'd been these last 20 years. When the singer closed out this five minute odyssey with "Bands - those funny little plans, that never work quite right", I felt like, even though they were just some American band whose history I didn't know from Adam, I'd lived the last 10 years of torment of hardship with them, that their plans that hadn't quite worked right were the most amazing plans there'd ever been, which were the key to all our lives and this band was an epic on a par with 'Gone with the Wind'.

It was this, this song above all, that has made me, to this day, an Americana freak, a sucker for beardy Yanks with high voices, a fan of Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes, Neil Young even, everything. It was this song that did it.

I've made it sound like I realised this at the time, and maybe I did, but until this year I'd forgotten it. I'd be more inclined to talk about Wilco, my first copy of Uncut, Ryan Adams etc but no, it was 'Holes' that pre-dated all of that. 'Holes' on CD.

'Holes' is the best song on that album, for sure, but there are other lovely ones - 'Endlessly', 'Opus 40' and without question that single 'Goddess on a Hiway', with its glorious sugar rush chorus. No wonder it was a surprise minor hit single. And that's another thing I just remembered about it which somehow makes it so pivotal for me. I remember Andy Taylor singing along to that chorus at the Christian Union Christmas Conference. Wow, David, that's amazing, I can hear you saying. Thanks for sharing.

Well, here's the point, perhaps a little laboured. I hadn't figured these two parts of my life were joined. I associate the Christian Union with a very different me with the me who was listening to Americana. That Christmas Conference was my very last, I realise. I was invited along as a farewell. I was full on infidel by then, but my memories are warm and fuzzy. But that was it with Christ for me (not entirely, in a sense. I had a spell of churchgoing a little later, but, strange as it may sound, that was never a religious thing, it was just grounding and giving my week a sense of balance). And, this may sound cheesy, but music became my new religion. I remember speaking to some old school guys that next summer and being asked "What are you up to?" and I said "Music" and they said "Making it?" and I replied "No, just listening to it", which I know is a profoundly disappointing answer to what a 20 year old with the world at his feet is "up to" but it was true, really. That's what mattered to me, and it still matters to me enormously.

And what of Mercury Rev? Well, I fairly quickly tired of the magical pixie vocals of Jonathan Donahue - I remember being disappointed by their next album 'All is Dream', but in fact, again, there are two or three moments of magic in it - 'Nite and Fog', 'A Drop in Time' and above all the first song 'The Dark is Rising' (they were clearly a band for album openers, which is almost as transcendently beautiful as 'Holes'. It actually shares some qualities with 'The Way We Were', it's a real heartbreaking meditation on loss, memory, human failure. How does that old song go?