Let the unmelting snow
Lie on black fields forever …
OSIP MANDELSTAM, ‘The Staff’
It was a small flat above a shop but the living room – entirely white with a deep white carpet – seemed vast. I remember no details, no chairs or pictures or windows, just this whiteness and softness, and a stereo of such power and clarity that I felt as if the music I listened to at home must be a shrivelled version of itself. Here, that music was lushly rehydrated. We four, two boys and two girls, each sat against a separate wall, relaxed and apart, not drinking but sharing a joint, and I realised that I was in a room with boys and music but nothing was meant to happen.*
Nick played soul – songs I listened to while dancing, flirting, crying, studying or putting on make-up. Even when I was doing nothing I was still not really listening, still thinking about something else. As a rule of thumb, rock was for boys and disco was for girls but soul was a place we might meet. America was still far away and English soul was like English jazz or disco, unconvincing. Soul was Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Eddie Floyd, Teddy Pendergrass, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge. In England, these would be the names of priests, gardeners, farmers, teachers and grandparents, but coming from America wiped them of association. What these people looked like, how old they were, their names, meant nothing. Soul was about voice and authenticity, and to us these were real singers and this real music, a serious pleasure.
I was already serious about music, by which I mean I did not have to think about whether or not to listen to it. It was part of the day’s machine. Despite this, at fourteen I had rarely concentrated as I did that night in the white room over the shop, for once not using music in order to feel things. The song I remember from that evening is not in the end Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett, not even real soul, but Earth Wind & Fire’s ‘That’s the Way of the World’, a ballad so shrewdly orchestrated that it can balance one teetering hyperbole on top of another. I am still not tired of listening to it and think this has to do with its expanse. In that room it went on for ever, not in terms of time but space. It filled the white room with space so that I was further and further away from everyone else and deeper into the blank realm of pure happiness. As soon as the music ended and someone spoke, I would have to step back outside.
* Years later, I saw Jim Cartwright’s play, Road, in which two men ask two women back to a flat where they hand out bottles of wine and put on Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. The women, the audience, wait for the inevitable moves to be made but nothing happens. The four sit, as we did, apart and in silence.