Friedrich Nietzsche never wrote a truer sentence. I can’t begin to imagine a world without music. A world where someone decided that songs, symphonies, guitars, drums and the occasional man in a beret playing something incomprehensible on a cello were all unnecessary. What a bleak place that would be.
Music is woven into all our lives. A song can turn us into time travellers in an instant, transporting us back to a particular moment, a particular person, a particular summer, or even a particular haircut we now deeply regret. It can take us back to moments of happiness or sadness, love or loss. It can stir emotions more powerfully than almost anything else.
And yet, when you strip it all down, music is essentially a collection of noises that somehow our brains have agreed are pleasant.
I’d say a love of music is universal, although what one person considers beautiful can sound to another like a wardrobe falling down the stairs. Music is intensely personal. What moves one person can irritate the living daylights out of someone else.
I was fortunate enough to spend the 1970s neatly positioned in my teenage years, which means I grew up surrounded by some wonderful music. My dad liked classical music. My mum loved the folk scene of the 1960s. I absorbed both, whether I wanted to or not. They became part of my musical DNA.
And what a decade it was.
I loved all sorts of music during the seventies. Slade, Sweet and Pilot were pop gems and deserve more than a tiny footprint in the sands of musical history.
Then there was Showaddywaddy.
Yes, I know. Showaddywaddy.
A joke to many, perhaps, but they were another band you simply have to see live. They introduced me to Buddy Holly, a musical genius who died before I was even born. Their album Step Two remains one I still listen to, a joyous mixture of rock ’n’ roll and pop that never fails to put a smile on my face.
So that is my first album for the afterlife.
If there really is an afterlife, I want to arrive at the pearly gates carrying my suitcase, only to be told, “Sorry, excess baggage.”
“It's music.”
“Oh, carry on then.”
During those years I was also listening to Genesis, Yes, ELP, Be Bop Deluxe and Barclay James Harvest. Nursery Cryme was, and still is, my favourite Genesis album. Its highs and lows sweep you into an extraordinary musical landscape, full of strange characters, fantastical stories and melodies that seem to stretch beyond the boundaries of ordinary pop music.
Nursery Cryme becomes album number two.
It introduced me to progressive rock, which in the seventies was this wonderful fusion of classical music and rock.
People said punk killed prog rock.
They were wrong.
Prog is still filling concert halls around the world. Apparently, it is rather like a particularly determined cockroach. You can throw everything at it, and it simply carries on playing a twelve-minute instrumental.
Punk.
As a prog-rock fan, you might imagine I would have hated it.
Not a bit of it.
I loved the simplicity. There was something wonderfully refreshing about three chords, three minutes and somebody shouting because they were thoroughly fed up.
The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and The Clash were all brilliant in their own way. I bought the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks.
Well, technically, I bought it on cassette. My dad wouldn’t allow the record into the house. The cassette, apparently, was less dangerous. Presumably because it was smaller and hidden.
The new wave that followed produced some fantastic music too. Elvis Costello and The Jam became favourites.
The eighties, however, were something of a musical wasteland for me.
There were exceptions. The early Human League, Big Country and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark occasionally rose above the musical fog and stirred my interest. Overall, though, the decade left me rather cold.
Then came the nineties.
Oasis.
And suddenly my musical brain emerged from hibernation, blinking into the sunlight.
Guitar bands were back. Raw energy returned. Driving rhythms, huge choruses and songs that seemed determined to kick the doors of your brain off their hinges.
I started paying attention again.
Franz Ferdinand, R.E.M., Nirvana, Muse and even early Coldplay became constant companions. Album after album seemed to bring something new. Life suddenly felt more colourful.
The eighties had been beige.
The nineties and noughties arrived with a paintbox.
Music can do that. It changes the way we think and feel. It can lift us when we are low, comfort us when we are hurting and remind us of who we were when we thought we knew who we were. Magical really.
Albums three and four for the afterlife are What’s the Story Morning Glory? by Oasis and Black Holes and Revelations by Muse.
Then there is Let’s Eat Grandma.
Their first album was so experimental that at times it sounds as though two teenage girls had been locked in a room with a pile of instruments and told, “See what happens.” What happened was rather wonderful. Quirky, adventurous and gloriously avant-garde, they stretched my musical palate in directions I hadn’t realised it wanted to go.
Their third album, Two Ribbons, is particularly affecting. It is unflinching without becoming sentimental, emotional without becoming mawkish. A beautiful, sustaining morsel of an album.
Two Ribbons goes into the afterlife suitcase.
One thing I miss about albums is the idea that they were meant to be listened to as a whole.
Not skipped.
Not shuffled.
Albums once had a flow. Songs created a journey.
Very few albums these days seem designed that way. Music is increasingly made for playlists. Then I discovered Californian Soil by London Grammar.
It felt like an album in the old-fashioned sense. Something meant to be listened to from beginning to end. There are elements of pop, disco and electronica, but running through the whole thing is a distinctive mood. It is elegant, atmospheric and strangely timeless.
Perhaps it is what Schubert might have produced if he'd been born two centuries later, given access to synthesizers and told to make something rather classy.
It earns its place in the afterlife.
I went through a very rough patch in the mid-2010s. My self-esteem and anxiety crashed me into places I never want to visit again. I struggled with life generally. I withdrew into myself and, for a while, found it difficult simply to function.
But throughout all of it, there was music.
It became a kind of balm for the soul. Something I could put on when words were too difficult and silence was too loud.
During that period, I discovered She Makes War. Her songs are built around relatively simple arrangements, but the words carry enormous emotional weight. They are thoughtful, understated and honest.
Paper Thin, such a beautiful song.
On bad days, both then and now, I play it to myself. It is about coping when the world seems determined to beat seven bells out of you. About vulnerability. About accepting that sometimes your protective skin becomes thin and fragile.
And perhaps that is what makes it so powerful.
It tells you that being vulnerable isn't necessarily weakness. Sometimes it is simply being human. I find it almost impossible to express what that song has meant to me. There are songs we enjoy, songs we admire and songs that become part of us.
Paper Thin is one of those.
It doesn't merely make the list.
It goes straight to the top.
And if there really is music in the afterlife, I hope they have decent speakers.
Because I've got a playlist to get through.
