Why Music Has Never Let Me Down

Once you've seen behind the curtain, it's difficult, if not impossible, to forget what's there.

There's a part of me that's sad I'm not as innocent as I once was. I suppose that's simply part of growing older.

As children, we experience the world before we learn to question it. We trust more easily. We accept things at face value. We throw ourselves into experiences without wondering whether someone has an agenda.

Life changes that.

You become aware of politics, marketing, self-interest and the countless invisible forces competing for your attention. You learn that not every opinion is honestly held and not every argument is really about the subject being discussed.

Experience makes us wiser, but it also makes us more guarded.

Yet there has always been one place where I can leave all of that behind.

Music.

I've loved music for as long as I can remember.

Like many people of my generation, my musical education began through somebody else's record collection.

My brother’s collection introduced me to Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Transformer , Led Zeppelin II and IV, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Black Sabbath long before I understood why those artists and albums mattered. I didn't sit there analysing lyrics or production techniques. I simply absorbed them.

As I started to buy my own records, the thrill wasn't always in just owning them. It was the hunt. It was finding them. My Police collection became a mental map of family days out. The “Message in a Bottle” picture disc came from Southport. The blue vinyl Six of the Best turned up in Rhyl during a visit to a small independent record shop.

Brothers in Arms and Too Low for Zero will always remind me of coming home to the news of the Challenger disaster, as I bought them both that afternoon, in Church Street in Liverpool. I can still remember the television replaying the explosion over and over again, in the days before 24-hour news channels. I can't listen to track six of Too Low for Zero, "Crystal" without thinking of Christa McAuliffe.

Years later, streaming has given me the chance to keep discovering. Artists I somehow missed first time around have become favourites in my fifties. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Zombies. Buffalo Springfield. Others are still waiting for me.

As I write this, I'm listening to Hats by The Blue Nile for the very first time. It was released in 1989, yet it's taken me nearly four decades to find it.

That's one of the great gifts of streaming. The best album you'll hear this year doesn't necessarily have to be one that came out this year.

I hope there are always more waiting for me, because I'll never stop exploring.

The older I get, the more I realise that songs don't simply remind us of moments.

They remind us of versions of ourselves.

When I hear INXS's Never Tear Us Apart, I don't just hear a great song. I'm back in Paris with my first love.

The song hasn't changed.

I have.

Stewart Copeland once described classic songs as carrying decades of "emotional baggage." It's a wonderful expression.

I've always thought the songs are simply the caretakers. The baggage belongs to us.

The songs keep looking after it until we visit those memories again by hearing them on the radio or by deciding to play them consciously.

Perhaps that's why music has never let me down.

Not because every album is a masterpiece, nor because every concert is unforgettable, but because music has never asked anything of me before allowing me to enjoy it.

It doesn't ask me to take sides.

It doesn't ask me to prove a point.

It doesn't ask me to buy into an ideology.

It doesn't ask me to become somebody else.

It simply is.

Whether I come back tomorrow or twenty years from now, the song is still there, ready to be listened to.

Music has always been the place where the noise of the world fades into the background.

For a few minutes, nothing needs defending, solving or explaining.

I can simply listen.

Maybe that's what innocence becomes as we grow older.

We’re not forgetting everything life has taught us, or pretending the world is simpler than it really is, but just allowing ourselves, every now and then, to experience something without suspicion.

To stop analysing. Stop arguing. Stop performing.

When I was young, I didn't analyse music.

I absorbed it.

Perhaps that's why, after all these years, music still feels like coming home.

Because it has never let me down.