My Life Has a Soundtrack

I have just watched a concert celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. That album—and music more generally—has always played a major part in my life.

My life has a soundtrack.

The music of my teens was Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Bryan Adams, Tom Petty and Joan Jett. It carried a feel-good energy that suited my school days, when life was good and the future seemed reasonably uncomplicated.

My brief foray into New Romantic and new wave was probably more about the people around me than it was about me as an individual.

Then I started working for an event production company.

I discovered space rock and the eighties disco scene—although we called the events “balls”. Believe it or not, they had evolved from roller discos. From there came acid house and the full-on rave scene.

It was an education. It caused me to grow up, both as a person and musically.

Working at Heaven nightclub in London showed me what music could mean to a community. I began to understand the different place it held within the gay subculture of the time. I saw acts including the Pet Shop Boys and Culture Club.

It was gay, joyful and wonderful in its wholehearted happiness.

When I went to university, I discovered Pink Floyd and what I am going to call music of quality and substance. I travelled through London frequently and eventually found my way to Camden, where an extraordinary music scene had already been thriving for years before I arrived.

There I encountered the early Coldplay, Blur, Muse and Kasabian.

Camden was life-altering. It taught me to appreciate different styles of music and to understand something of their history, influences and legacy.

Then life moved on, as it does: work, relationships and children.

I became very Radio 2—which is not necessarily a bad thing—and entered a more retrospective phase. Brass-band music also appeared in my life, adding another perspective and a fresh appreciation of how music works.

There were darker times ahead. During one of them, Back to Black became the soundtrack.

Music returned to the centre of my life, and it has remained there ever since. Perhaps it is maturity, but festivals, concerts and a greater awareness of what I am hearing have now become part of the way I experience the world.

I understand music—and my own soul—far better today.

I only wish I had possessed that understanding twenty or thirty years ago.

Then again, perhaps you have to live through the soundtrack before you can understand what it meant.