Concrete Pencil: Bigmouth Strikes Again

By John Hill on November 18, 2009 1:04 PM |

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Dan Bourke

Dan Bourke's musical heroes are coming back from the dead

The passing of time, and all of its sickening crimes, is making me sad again. That, plagiarism fans, is a line by Morrissey, who I saw last week.

These days, Morrissey fans, the man himself is playing a Smiths song about every three numbers in his set. Up from the none, ever, which had been the avowed policy for most of his solo career.

He, musical nostalgia fans, is not the only act finding new life treading old ground.

In the past five years I have probably seen as many reformed bands as real, actual live ones.

All the greats. The Pogues. The Specials. The Wonder Stuff. Pop Will Eat Itself.
So many of them are at it. The Pixies. The Pistols. Pavement. My Bloody Valentine. Blur. The Mondays. Sundays. The Verve. OMD. Take That, obviously. Terrorvision. The Jam (minus Paul Weller).

And on Saturday, for the second time, I saw the reformed Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine.

It's easy to sneer at Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. They had bad drum machines, silly haircuts and sillier puns.

And it's even easier to sneer at them reformed, and all the others.

But I'll not hear nowt against them. This may sound ridiculous, but bear with me. Indie music saved my life. Well, not really, but it made me think about stuff in a different way that would otherwise have been hard to find in a small town in the early '90s.

It made me read books and want to have an interesting job and to wear ripped jeans and hooded tops and gave me stuff to talk about.

And in the broad sweep of human history, the fact that I saw the Pogues six years after they first split won't really matter very much.

I saw music I love played loud by the great men and women who made it. These are the happy times of life.

The crowd on Saturday was joined in a tubby, balding, merry reminiscence.

Carter petered out in the late '90s to public indifference after new directions and fanbase dissipation and a feeling of their time passing.

But 10 years on no-one remembers the slow flattenning of the Carter lager.

The passing of time compresses the lifetime of the band into one entity: Carter. Which from viewpoint of 2009 all (from A Sheltered Life to Born On The 5th Of November, discography fans ) seems somehow equally distant, and equally near.

So reform gigs let us, and them, give proper appreciation to our past and the things in it we love. And that there is no shame in that.