The television had been reluctantly

placed back in my bedroom,

although hardly watched, only for three or four

programmes that I truly wanted

to see,

Doctor Who, Match of the Day, Top of the Pops

or the late night horror film which

took me through teenage years and the sound of the

Vampire scream as he burned to ash, smoke rising,

enough to stoke the fires of the imagination,

so no great loss in the scheme of things,

but I was desperate to watch the event

unfold at Wembley so much so

that my punishment for the bad report card from school,

and looking back between the red and black school crested words

of supposed damnation I read them now wondering

exactly why I was being punished…

for only in the subjects I detested, Maths, Geography,

physics and Chemistry was I truly lacking

and I was never going to take them again anyway,

I exchanged one day in which to sit

with a pile of sandwiches and watch

Live Aid

come alive, for a further month of television ban

and the extra humiliation of writing out

word

for

bloody

word

the history of the English Civil War

and in which time I realised that Oliver Cromwell

was a true and inglorious bastard.

It was a price I was willing to pay.

 

Music was always the passion

and I could not miss out on this day,

not able to wangle a ticket as I knew

my father was off, pottering around the house,

wondering exactly how he had raised a son not interested

one bit in what lay under the hood

of his car or ever likely to give a damn

about the internal combustion engine or the lathe in which

wood shaped chairs,

and the excuse of a Scout camp too

often used and the thought of a repeat of Milton Keynes Bowl

a couple of weeks earlier not wanting

to be relived on the back off a motorbike ridden

by a twenty year old

who I was sure forgot I was on the back

holding on for grim life and the trees

blushed in their appreciation of the speed he took corners.

 

I remember the feeling of excitement

and being fourteen, not truly getting the point

of the exercise, I just wanted to hear the Boomtown Rats,

David Bowie, Adam Ant and Queen,

all points in between,

play live, just in case I never got the chance in later life.

 

Stupid, brainless and dim-witted, slow

to really get to understand the point…

 

I finally understood when I listened to the words

of The Cars played out late in the evening

from the single speaker television set

across the images

of a people so far from me and to whom

I knew nothing of and I wept in embarrassed shame…

 

At thirteen I understood after reading 1984

and sewed the trousers of the ragged men

but at fourteen I knew fuck all

and thirty years on,

I find I love music even more,

but I still don’t understand

humanity.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015