What Does Music Mean To Me?
WORDS BY CHARLIE GLADSTONEORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR OUR FRIENDS AT GUITAR SCHOOL
Photo by Department TwoCharlie Gladstone is co-founder of Some Good Ideas, The Good Life Society, Glen Dye Cabins & Cottages, Hawarden Estate Farm Shop, The Glynne Arms and much more.
He is a serially optimistic entrepreneur. And a man who describes music as his main thing. Here, in an article originally published by Guitar School, Charlie tells us what music means to him.
Over to you, Charlie.
The short answer here is a great deal. I don’t know where it came from -certainly not my parents who had no interest in music whatsoever- but I was hit hard by the bug when I was six years old.
My first record was Little Jimmy Osmond’s Long Haired Lover…. (I know, but everyone has to start somewhere and with no older siblings or cool friends that was just what grabbed me). Pretty soon I was hooked; Top of the Pops was my weekly highlight and I tuned in to the Sunday evening chart show on Radio 1 with deep, butterfly-inducing fervour. Would the bands I loved, my bands, be in the charts?
Soon I had started to spend every penny of my pocket money on records. Then came music mags, especially the NME (a bible of sorts) and then -heaven- gigs. By the age of 13 I was in really deep, music was my principal passion. I loved football too and being outdoors, but music was the main thing.
It’s stayed that way. I’m 57 now and I still buy records every week, read the mags, go to shows (or did before Covid and will again soon), chat music whenever I can, listen all of the time. I am deeply -profoundly even- interested in music and retain knowledge in ways that surprise even me.
“Why do I love it? It speaks to me, it comforts me, it consumes me, it lifts me up, it brings me down, it excites me, it infuriates me. I think about it, dream about it, live it.”
Part of the answer to why? is that I am one of those people that might easily be characterised as an enthusiast, I am predisposed to find joy in stuff. I have a lot of enthusiasms -reading, walking, food, football, design, travel, art- that I think about every day. But music is the one that I hold above all of the rest and in seeking an answer to the question at the top of this piece I have been trying to figure out what that is.
Of course, the answer is that it’s a lot of things. But one thing that occurs to me is that music is about people and community more than it is about anything else and that excites me, because I love people and they are, perhaps, at their very best when they’re joined by shared love and enthusiasm.
In trying to find the catalyst to writing this piece I was flicking through a new and very beautiful coffee table book about the band The National, a group that really speak to me. And there, in a double spread photo, was the singer in the middle of a seething crowd. He does this at every show, jumps across the safety barrier and takes a walk amongst the audience.
“It’s a bit like Jesus walking amongst his believers, but with more sweat, more camera phones and a thousand smiles.”
That, I think, is the essence of community, the band and fans coming together in a moment of deep shared euphoria. Until that moment they are a sort of community, living where they live and all thinking about -or indeed being- The National. But that community is separated by distance. And then they all make plans and travel and stand and wait and then -boom- that moment happens, that intense sense of belonging hits them…. we’re all here, in this together, happy, sharing our love for this magical thing called music. These are our people. This is our community.
So, I think that that’s what I love most about music, community. I love the chat in a record shop with others that feel the way I do. I love that chance meeting at a party or an event when you discover that someone you’ve never met before feels the same way that you do about The Smiths. I love my gang of family and old friends that come to gigs with me; I love the fact that we all love the same songs, the same messages, the same record sleeves. We’ve all listened and read and studied the sleeves alone so that when we come together to hear those songs that we know that we truly belong where we are.
This morning I was listening to the outstanding final show played by LCD Soundsystem before the split up (long story…they reformed a few years later). This was a big deal and they played a series of farewell shows in huge arenas in New York. Anyway, this is a band absolutely at the peak of their power, playing all of their hits. But it isn’t the music that really speaks to me, it’s the community. At the very beginning of the show they play one of their bona fide classics, Dance Yrself Clean and as they launch into the opening bars the crowd roars like I have rarely heard people roar; deep, raw, joyful and -this is the main thing- they scream as one. I don’t know quite what each one of them is thinking but I think it goes something like this ‘we’re here and it’s now and I love this band and so does everyone else here and I want to hug them and jump up, and down and for this magic to never, ever end. These are my people, this is my place, the rest of the world can wait’.
