The connection between music and memory is magnificently explored in the new book from the author of How Soon Is Now? This paperback edition is filled with King’s recollections of working in an independent record shop, Revolver Records, in Bristol in the early 1990s – a place abundant with rare records, “tremendous quantities of dub and reggae”, and a “tatterdemalion atmosphere”. The clientele knew that Revolver was a place for sharing “an obsessional love of music and a wonder at its ability to transfigure the everyday” – a passion permeating the pages.
Yet this is more than a journey through individual memory. By exploring the shop’s wide array of music – including the “rockers’ rhythm”, which was “the foundation of the roots music that formed the basis of reggae” – King examines how music captured the harsh realities of life for those suffering under “political and social turmoil” both in Jamaica and in the UK, where immigrants endured discrimination. Music’s ability to reflect and be a respite from “life’s hardships” is profoundly felt.
John Peel famously remarked: “Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise.’” That surface noise of life is beautifully captured in these pages as the author delves into his collection of several thousand records, also detailing how much pleasure they give as objects. Rediscovering records, he is gripped by reveries (even a tear along the seam of an album cover “now held a historical significance”). As well as “surface noise”, the author also depicts the poignant, eerie silence when the shop is closed.
The shop – and songs within it – became a world unto themselves, so much so that “time was told by the length it took for a needle to reach the end of the run-out groove”. But King doesn’t let nostalgia cloud his clear-eyed judgments, acknowledging the shop was “hardly faultless”, noting, for example, that it was “an environment often dominated by men”, with few female employees.
It is “the emotional effect of music” that is most powerfully chronicled: washing throughout the elegiac pages are “currents of grief” for lost places (the shop), lost things (vinyl superseded by CDs) and lost people (the tragic death of a childhood friend). The book becomes a moving testament to music’s ability to salvage, through memory, something of what has been lost.
Original Rockers is published by Faber (£9.99). Click here to buy it for £8.19
