King of the castle

Okay, I know the movie was dewy eyed and romanticised and all that, but only a curmudgeon could fail to be moved by the scene where the kid flicks through his older sister’s record collection, his face lit with awe.

I got to enact my own version of hack-stalks-band a few months later, spending what seemed like the whole summer on Garbage detail, going from Dublin to Madison to London and back. Freak coincidence anecdote: in a lounge in O’Hare Airport, Chicago, I chanced to sit beside a total stranger engrossed in a rock magazine. Curiosity got the better of me, and I glanced over to see what she was reading. It was a cover story I’d written for hotpress.

Coming the other way through the same airport a few days later, I came across Tom Waits’ interview with JT LeRoy in Vanity Fair, the same JT that Garbage wrote ‘Cherry Lips’ about. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things became my book of the year. His previous novel Sarah was even better. Close runners up – Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and TC Boyle’s After The Plague.

Gigs? I’ll be brief: U2 in the Astoria, David Johansen in Whelan’s, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in the Olympia, Gavin Friday and the Friday-Seezer ensemble at the Tivoli. Neil Young had his moments too, although not many.

And, of course, U2 at Slane. For Bono, it was a case of Musician Heal Thyself. Soon after, it was September all over the world, and the Elevation tour and All That You Can’t Leave Behind album became, in one of those freak acts of God and happenstance, much bigger than music. Radiohead offered no such solace in Belfast that awful week in September; they were more an exercise in looking into the abyss without flinching. Talk about aversion therapy. I’d holidayed with my family as usual in Massachusetts the previous month. The thought of what might’ve been going down in Logan Airport as we were passing through still makes my scalp crawl.

Then came the winter of our discontent, balmed by Sparklehorse and Billy Bob Thornton and beautifulgarbage and Ash and The Frames and Nick Cave and The Strokes and countless others.

Now it’s late November. As I write this, an old friend is lying in a hospital bed in Holland in a coma. Another friend is recovering from Hepatitis A in LA. And I’m thinking about Uaneen Fitzsimons, who died a year ago today, on the feast of the patron saint of music.

Such is human experience. But loss of heart will kill you quicker than any biohazard.

C’mon 2002, you motherfucker. Do your worst.