That music just seemed to get better and better. By the timehe’d reached his late-teens and started drinking in pubs, Britpop had arrived.In 1994 he’d lost his virginity in his bedroom to a girl called Mandy whoworked in a Little Chef. This landmark moment in his life was played out to thebackdrop of Blur’s Parklife, still his favourite album of all time. Lifewas exciting and full of promise. He nurtured dreams of becoming a rockstar himself.To that end, he decided to teach himself the guitar and then form a band.
Unfortunately, his attempts to play the guitar wereappalling. It wasn’t for want of trying, but he had no natural ability in thatarea whatsoever. Just as with the DJ’ing, his interest in it fizzled out. Hespent a year bumming around after leaving school, trying to decide what to do,before settling for the considerably more mundane life of a career in the policeforce instead.
And then, frustratingly, the music changed. He couldn’t pinpointthe exact moment when he fell out of love with the music scene but he guessedit must have been some time around his 30th birthday.
He had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the proliferationof manufactured plastic pop in the charts in the early 2000s. Of course, boybands and girl bands had always been there, but he hadn’t minded them so muchin his younger years. Perhaps it was because a lot of them back then still hadgenuine talent, as well as writing a lot of their own material. But after the Millennium,there was a distinct change in the musical landscape.
Kent blamed TV talent shows which had become very big aroundthat time. It was suddenly all about a procession of wannabe stars beingparaded on TV singing songs that the audience already knew. Performance waseverything, creative talent and songwriting skills were irrelevant. Songs thatthe public didn’t know weren’t good for viewing figures. Rehashing tried andtested former hits was.
He absolutely hated this kind of approach and the morepopular it became, the more he railed against it. But what could he do? Everyoneelse seemed to love it, it took up a huge amount of space in the tabloids, andit was all his younger colleagues at work ever seemed to talk about.
He couldn’t even escape it at home; his wife was glued to itevery Saturday and Sunday night. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also feltthe need to waste money phoning in votes for the talentless morons whoperformed on the shows. In Kent’s opinion, it was blatantly all fixed, so whatwas the point in voting anyway? His opinion was vindicated on this a few years laterwhen a voting scandal erupted.
At least there had still been some decent music around atthe time to keep him sane. He loved The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, Keane and Maroon5. But over time even these bands seemed to fade from the scene, squeezed outby an increasing number of artists filling up the charts that Kent had neverheard of. By the time the decade drew to a close the charts were full of unfamiliarnames to him.
Nearly every song in the chart seemed to be by some overegotisticalDJ or rapper with a silly name featuring someone else with an even stupidername. Quite apart from the ridiculous monikers these new acts went by, couldn’tthey even stick to their own stuff anymore? What was with all thecollaborations? He couldn’t make sense of it all.
Top of the Pops went off the air around this time, anotherpiece of his childhood stripped away, though in truth he had long since stoppedwatching it. As for Radio 1, that had become about as relevant to him as a weatherforecast for Jupiter. He was grimly aware that he was no longer part of theirtarget demographic and that the station he had grown up with no longer wantedhim. It wasn’t just the music they played that he couldn’t relate to, but the DJs,too. They spoke a language he no longer understood.
On the few occasions he got a chance to listen to the wirelessnow he found himself increasingly drawn to Radio 2, despite the fact that hehad mocked the station not that many years earlier. He remembered one nightwhen he was out on a colleague’s stag night and some of the lads had tried toleave early because they were on duty in the morning. At the time he had rippedthe piss out of them, quipping, “You lightweights! You’ll be listening to Radio2 next!”
It didn’t seem so funny now. Those chickens had well and trulycome home to roost. Most of the DJs he had grown up listening to on Radio 1 hadbeen moved across to the sister station, and grudgingly he was being forced tojoin them.
He had also been gutted when John Peel had died – in hisopinion, the best DJ of all time. Unlike many who claimed to have spent theirformative years listening to Peel in an attempt to look cool, Kent genuinelyhad. As the years flew by, more and more of those who had had such an influenceon his early life through music and TV passed on. With each death, Kent felt atiny piece of himself dying inside, too. This process seemed to be acceleratingby early 2016, when hardly a week went by without some childhood hero or otherdying, leading him to question his own mortality.
There was no danger of his friends finding out about his shamefuldefection to Radio 2, as he no longer had any proper mates. His social life haddisappeared into the abyss around the same time he fell out of love with music.He still spent a lot of time in the pub, but they weren’t the type of nightsout that he had enjoyed when he was younger. Then, him and a bunch of other
