Sonically Sculpted Moments

For a few months now, my desk has been positioned in the exact spot where A Girl Called Dusty, The Jam’s The Gift and The Walker Brothers’ Images were all created. When I still had the gift, I could hear the temporal echoes of their creation. Find myself surrounded not by walls of rendered stone, but walls of sound. There would be a snatch of Townsend playing Zootsuit when The Who were still The High Numbers. A glimpse of Engel’s genius as he strived for somewhere between Phil Spector and symphonic orchestration.

Hoarse arguments between Weller and Foxton, the perfect pop of Dusty Springfield singing Wishin’ and Hopin’ and even the regimented strings once led by Ivor Raymonde have become part of this space. The music made here has sonically sculpted moments reverberating beyond time and location. It has given songs that even now are playing on a radio somewhere in Ohio and travelling through interstellar dark to die in the static crunch of distant suns. Every time I sat down, I could feel the history that did not escape the natural gravity of the building.

Now my spell here is done. I leave without having created great art or capturing an instant which will burn within the cultural sphere. I have been the gallowglass in my blood, not the poet. As I walk from the interior’s gloom to bursting sunlight which its basement depth kept at bay, there is no Bitterest Pill, no Just Say Goodbye in the playback of my mind. There is only the unrelenting, aggressive soundtrack of London traffic and the prospects of a long walk.