I was online very late with a workmate the other day, talking about music; about the bands and songs that floated our boats. It was weird because we don't actually know each other that well and yet, as so often happens online, you start to spiral deeply into yourself quite quickly. Conversation drifted from the songs themselves to the reasons why. I didn't paint those reasons, just sketched them briefly but when I finally logged off the brushes came out.
The fact is I've always felt rather disconnected; apart. The eternal observer. The one who sits quietly in the pub watching other people. That's not to say I don't get emotionally involved with situations or people. I do, profoundly. But I've always had this enormous difficulty expressing myself (with the exception of anger, which is all too easy an emotion to express) through any other medium than my own or other people's writing. I once asked a girl I was crazy about out by writing her a letter and then giving it to her when she came round. I just could not say the words that I'd written. Crazy isn't it? In fact it took a drunken confession of her love over the phone after many years of circling each other for me to finally reveal my feelings to the girl I'm now married to. Prior to that I'd sent her tapes and live recordings that made me feel the same intensity that she generated within me.
I always seem to be able to move people when I write. Particularly when I write letters. When I have the luxury of time for thought, to hone my blunt feelings into the shapes of the alphabet. With the spoken word though I am and always have been impotent when it comes to emotions. Spontaneity was never my thing. I am too busy analysing what the hell's going on inside me when I experience a feeling. Which appears, indeed is, like a form of detachment. It's difficult to build connections with the world when you're in the middle of internalising something. When you're "processing".
I think this marooned feeling I carry with me is reflected in some of those songs I talked about to my colleague. Reflected in the way that the Cure have always been a band I set apart from the rest of my musical tastes. Partly, although not entirely I think because they have this talent for voicing that alienated, adrift feeling perfectly. "Lost forever in a happy crowd". However, not just with words but with their sound. There is a guitar on a live recording of Faith that I have (the version from the Cure in Orange), which begins just after the main verses and continues for a few minutes before the final words that I sometimes really feel is the sound of my own voice. A banshee's wail of wordless, raw, uncontrollable loneliness. A lament that you can never truly know anyone. Even at my happiest moments, those times I have almost felt that togetherness most of us crave, when the analysis has been put to one side, that searing guitar has never stopped.
