SPOTIFY AND THE LONG LOST EXPERIENCES OF MUSIC DISCOVERY

In 2000 I started earning my own money for the first time. Through some obscure connection of a family friend I landed a plum job as a porter at Bournemouth’s Durley Hall, a shit-to-middling seaside hotel where wedding receptions were hosted every Saturday and I nearly lost a finger.

My team – each of us in a blue waistcoat and black bow tie – consisted of me, a gnarled but funny and affable Scot, a Frenchman with a heart of gold and a succession of nameless young Portuguese men, none of whom I recall seeing twice.

We all had our reasons to be there. I don’t know theirs. Mine was music.

I’d been cultivating a collection of compact discs for years. I took music seriously at an early age, pocket money spent on singles gradually evolving into a strict policy that any and all pounds and pennies in birthday cards were to be spent on albums.

And that’s what happened. My collection grew a little every November and December, and music became the defining aspect of my identity. I was and am a metalhead. I took that seriously at a young age, too, thanks to the early influence of my uncle and a good deal of chiselling and refinement with my friends Cal and Dom.

My first job supercharged my musical discovery like hitting the hyperspeed button in an old video game. In those days it was possible to unearth new favourites through various online sources including the infamous Napster, but the art of being a music fan hadn’t materially changed all that much since the tape trading era that buoyed the bands I later adored in the early 1980s.

Before the Durley Hall the going was slow. Now, in possession of a sweaty little plastic envelope holding £21 for seven hours of stacking chairs, fancy-folding tablecloths and pouring hundreds of glasses of Buck’s Fizz, my world changed in an afternoon.

Cash pocketed, I marched back through the town centre to catch the bus home. By the time I sat down at the front of the top deck of the number three back to Moordown I’d spent the lot. Rewind and repeat, week after week after week.

My CD collection bloomed. I listened like there was no tomorrow. I read liner notes. I watched videos and bought magazines and I binged and gorged and devoured it all.

I had a few jobs as a teenager. From the hotel I moved to Bournemouth Super Bowl, then to TK Maxx, then out to Bowlplex in Branksome and back into town to Sharkey’s, which was exactly what it sounds like. I took exams, made friends, lost friends, started drinking, passed my driving test, stopped playing football – all the while it was music that mattered most.

More specifically, it was absorbing music that mattered most. Building my collection was an act of self-education. It was an obsession in the most positive sense. It broadened my horizons and that’s enriched my life in more ways than I can count. Music meant and means the world to me, and even as recently as 2000 feeding that obsession required effort.

It’s not just the work that had to go into becoming a music fan that I miss. It’s not the loss of the physical artefact, which for most of my adult life has been what I’ve assumed to be the reason the modern music industry left me cold. The level of access we have now has reinvigorated my own love of new music and I wouldn’t deny the next generation that just because I didn’t have it.

But the age of frictionless consumption has surely robbed young music fans of the rewards that came with the immersive necessities of simply getting into music. It’s hard not to mourn that when it brought such love into my experience.

I think about this every time I hear a song from Faith No More’s 1992 album, Angel Dust. The very sound of that album takes me back to the time when I bought it with my own money at Essential Records. I was already a fan of the band but there was no question of hearing their whole discography at the click of a button.

Faith No More being Faith No More, I had no idea what to expect from Angel Dust. Hearing it for the first time wasn’t just exciting – it was energising. That’s why I can go right back there today within a few notes of ‘Caffeine’, and that’s the feeling I fear we’re denying new music fans today.

Spotify is the dirty word thus far unspoken. First Neil Young and then Joni Mitchell recently made a stand against the platform’s relative silence about one of their most despicable, dangerous podcast assets. There will be others after them and there were many before them.

Artists I respect have long criticised Spotify for the disgracefully paltry compensation on offer for musicians whose music keeps it afloat. It is with no little guilt that I use and indeed pay for Spotify as the keystone of my music listening and have done for some time. I support those bands by buying merchandise and music – millions of others do not.

I’m not innocent or in a position to flame other music fans for their passive enjoyment of art. I am complicit. I am flawed. But I try to do my bit to make up for that. I aim to make a Spotify-neutral contribution to the bands I love. Ethical net-zero.

Yet I feel justified in lamenting what I believe younger music fans have lost. Even today, Angel Dust fills me with the mysterious wonder it had when I first listened to it in full. It’s far from alone.

Superunknown, Soundgarden’s masterpiece, wouldn’t have had the same impact if I’d just tapped a mouse to hear it. The genesis of my thrash metal collection – Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, even my beloved Metallica – was the fruit of a methodical and romantic process of purchase and play.

Those albums take me back not to the time they were released but to my own first encounters with them, often decades later.

To Essential Records, tucked away off Bournemouth Square, where so many of the albums that shaped my taste were dropped onto the counter in stacks of five or six after meticulously clack-clacking through the racks in search of greatness, weirdness or obscurity.

To HMV, where collection-fillers and box-tickers were loaded up through cut-price bundle deals and an embarrassingly intimate knowledge of a metal section that shrank and shrank until my visits became motivated more by hope than expectation.

To MVC, which disappeared from Westover Road as quickly as it appeared but never went undisturbed when I passed by en route to the cinema or Sega World or Burger King or all three. I still have no idea whether that little card was worthwhile.

I lugged these bags of CDs home on the bus and span them to death. What else could I do? I’d spent all my wages on them. If it turned out I didn’t like one I wore the damned thing out until I did. There were exceptions, of course, but the point is this: my discovery and experience of music, even in this century, was defined by effort and reward.

Therein lies the real cultural death of music. Where I brought myself up to get out of music what I put in, the commodification of albums (insofar as people even care about albums, now) has left us with a low-effort and low-reward music culture.

Worse still, the vast majority of artists still work themselves to the bone, still pour their heart and soul into their music, just to be a part of this cycle of easy clicks and peanuts payments. I don’t know why they do it but I thank the gods every day of my life that they do.

The cultural cauldron into which they introduce their ideas is different to the one I knew when I was in my formative years as a music fan. It has plenty in its favour; advantages I enjoy all the time. It offers access, ease and convenience. For the dedicated discoverer these are undeniable positives, but they come at a cost.

So many of the albums we bought twenty years ago, old or new, have something intangible in between the notes. Sometimes it’s hewn from mystery and memory and a real, tactile, meaningful exchange. Sometimes it stems from the discovery of something by accident that lives with us forever. Sometimes it’s as simple as people and time and place recalled in an instant.

I worry that these intangibles have been lost forever. Or, to put it another way, that they’ve been taken away from potentially active and engaged music fans by pandering to a dominant class of passive listeners. Such richness will they miss.

A BRANDANE HEART

Despite a life of relative contentment I am not a restful man. In my mind doubt and pessimism reign, a perpetual fury of this and that, seldom at ease. The Isle of Bute – whether I’m there in body or spirit – has always been my sanctuary.

Bute is moored peacefully in the Firth of Clyde, perfectly west as the crow flies of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city by population. The bustle of Buchanan Street is a world away from the sleepy splendour of Scalpsie Bay beach or Ettrick Bay and its postcard view of Arran.

The Caledonian MacBrayne car ferries Argyle and Bute aren’t the vessels beloved of my childhood but they look a lot like them. They sail between the mainland terminal in the village of Wemyss Bay and Rothesay, my ancestral island home and as close as Bute gets to crowded.

Rothesay is in many ways a typical British seaside resort, its most colourful days experienced by now-distant generations and its celebrated buildings beginning to crumble around the newsreel reminiscences of holidays gone by. Though not without its charm, Rothesay isn’t blessed with the phenomenal beauty so prominent in the parts of the island where nature remains dominant.

Just around the coast from Rothesay is Ascog, home to a handful of islanders but to me a beach of shingle and slate-grey sand, punctuated by seabound pipes and the cherry red of an old-fashioned telephone box that looms in the corner of one’s vision when sitting on the promenade bench. This is my mother’s favourite spot on the island and the only place in the world where we share childhood memories.

From that bench we watched Argyle and Bute pass one another on the waves the day before we said goodbye to my grandmother. My first visit in many years to this place I love so much was a sudden and unwanted holiday that uncovered long forgotten summer joys in the shadow of loss and heartbreak.

Rothesay and Bute have a richer history than is suggested by their modest existence today. The island has a past studded with headlines that betray its status as just a little bit more special than the average British island.

Its number one tourist attraction according to TripAdvisor and modern lore is not the seals who sun themselves on the rocks, or the herons who squawk their way over the grand houses of Craigmore to settle on the pebbles after dark, but the Victorian public convenience perched on the seafront in Rothesay, beautifully preserved with most of its original fitments and open to visitors with a penny to spend.

The building was commissioned in 1899 by the Rothesay Harbour Trust, a decorative and lavish statement of lavatorial grandeur quite in keeping with the town’s Victorian golden age. Rothesay was a much loved holiday destination for the ladies and gentlemen of the day. When the Waverley – the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer – sails by, it’s easy to imagine their ghosts on deck, waving to the rather less numerous tourists of today as they tackle the putting greens overlooking the water.

Peer further inland and they would discover a side to Rothesay they would never have imagined.

In late 2015 Bute welcomed 24 families of Syrian refugees and there were more to follow. The inevitable xenophobic backlash was quashed by the forthright advocacy of the local newspaper editor. The shop fronts and restaurants that popped up in the years that followed are testament to their successful integration. Helmi’s Bakery, a popular Syrian patisserie opened by Tasnim and Mohamed across East Princes Street from the harbour, now has a presence on the mainland.

Indeed, Bute has a proud heritage when it comes to offering a safe refuge. In between the Victorian visitors in the 19th Century and the burgeoning Syrian community in the 21st there came an influx of new islanders from the mainland. They were the Butemen of the future. Children of the War.

The waters around the island made Bute an ideal naval site during World War II and both on- and off-shore it provided a base for various military operations. No sooner had war been declared than Rothesay Pavilion was transformed into the island’s reception centre for evacuees.

It’s here that my relationship with this rugged, wonderful, curious place begins. My great-grandparents, Jimmy and Jeanne, made their life in Rothesay and added significantly to its population. One of their children, my grandmother, Prue, was born just as the War began. She left Scotland for Birmingham at the age of 18 and returned after Joe, my grandfather, passed away in 1991.

We buried her with her parents in the grounds of Saint Mary’s Chapel in September 2020 after a service with restricted attendance, mandatory face masks and no pallbearers. I’ve never known a sadness like it.

Not many people of my age meet their great-grandparents but I was lucky enough to know one of mine. Jimmy lived to the age of 100 and, as a lover of pipe bands, he couldn’t have been in a better place. In his younger days he worked as a slater, a role that afforded him an apprentice, Hector, upon whom was bestowed the responsibility of legging it to the betting shop to indulge another of his great passions.

He loved nothing in life more than his family, all three younger generations of us. He was the patriarchal presence of those childhood holidays, the family’s triangulation point. Through him, relatives who would be distant in other families became close in ours. He was proud that his longevity in life facilitated that.

I have many happy memories of Jimmy but my grandfather died in his early fifties. I was old enough to know and remember him but young enough that most of those memories fade together until they’re not really memories at all. They were made not in Birmingham but on Bute.

One such memory emerged in the form of a photograph inherited from the albums left in my late gran’s flat overlooking the island’s visitor centre and the harbour beyond.

Somewhere in the Bute countryside on one of our many fishing trips, my skinny and nobbly-kneed former self takes a brief sidestep out of his youthful shyness and shouts at the top of his little lungs. Standing to my left, sporting a beaming smile and a distinctive pair of sunglasses, is my granddad.

This snapshot could have been taken on any one of those outings. I have no idea. I don’t recognise the landscape or my clothing. But I can smell his tobacco after more than thirty years, and I remember now that he used to stir his tea with his finger as if it were a normal thing to do.

Rothesay’s popularity over the years means that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland, England and all over the world with hazy memories of the Isle of Bute. It’s different when it’s family. Whether we were fishing at Ascog or Kilchattan Bay or Loch Fad, or skimming stones into Kames Bay on the east of the island and anywhere else we could find them, we did so with a sense of home. We didn’t all live there but none among us were tourists.

On my most recent visit, my mum said something later corroborated by two of my colleagues whose coincidental Bute roots are equal to hers and more tangible by far than mine. The island doesn’t sound much, now the last echoes of more prosperous summers are long forgotten, but when you’re there as family it gets under your skin, somehow. It’s easy to fall in love with it and impossible to let it go.

That photograph, taken elsewhere, would still represent happy, sunny days with my grandparents no matter what. Taken where it was, it’s as much about the place as the people.

Within that single frame is a world lived by generations since lost. Not a holiday, but everyday. Food shopping and picking up the paper from the newsagent. Popping in to see great aunts and second cousins for a cuppa. The mundanity of routine, tucked away in the water. And me, a little boy from the south coast of England, loving every moment of it because I felt like I belonged.

Bute is part of my identity. I adore the island for the memories it’s given me, for the home it’s been for my family and for a beautiful landscape I’d choose over anywhere else in the British Isles.

I’ll never feel about anywhere else the way I feel driving off the green ramp of the ferry, Rothesay stretching out in front of me as a lifetime of memories reignite. I’ll never taste vanilla ice cream better than Zavaroni’s. I’ll never capture or articulate the essence of my childhood that lurks just out of reach on every visit. But I like to know it’s there.