The pound was retailing at 250 rupees, London was in the throes of a tube strike and my herb dealer wasn’t answering calls. I should’ve been in a bad mood. But I wasn’t. How could I be? In 4 days I was to see The Police. When I tell people who my favourite band is, I get a look. Especially from people who know their music. It’s a polite look, because people who know their music are usually polite people. But it’s a look that says I should know better. That Sting, Stewart and Andy may have had a few hits, but they were hardly the band to end all bands. But I disagree. In over 20 years of obsessing over recorded sound, I have loved many bands. I have been generous and promiscuous with my love. Sometimes naive. But only one band hits me between the arteries, makes me giddy, and, for me, stands atop the highest mountain and sings the sweetest. If you’d like to know why, you’ll have to take a journey through JVP controlled Colombo, provincial New Zealand and finally, to Twickenham on a gloomy Saturday. It’s a journey I had little choice in making, but it’s one I’m glad I took.
* * * * *
In the late 80s, anarchists clad as marxists all but ruled Sri Lanka. They used guerilla tactics mixed with mafioso methods to grab a nation by the jaw and push it to its knees. It was a time of terror, chaos and burning bodies. But for 13 year old me, it was only one thing. A time of TV reruns. It’s not that I was ignorant and insensitive, even though I was both. But shit had been colliding with the fan for as long as I could remember. Bombs, riots and curfews had punctuated my childhood. But even I could sense that here something was different. When our family watched the Killing Fields at the Liberty, my parents pulled me out of the theatre. I couldn’t fathom why. The body count wasn’t as high as Rambo or Missing in Action which they had let me watch and re-watch. When I queried my mother, clearly disturbed by this depiction of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, her answer perplexed me. “If this JVP thing keeps going, Sri Lanka will end up like this.” It perplexed me because I thought the JVP thing was kinda cool. No, really. Schools shut for months on end and Rupavahini, with not too many programming options, was re-running old award shows. When you’re a kid, old is the enemy of good. In 1988 I was wondering whether to stop calling a-ha my favourite band because their last hit was over a year old. Whatever was current was good. Whatever wasn’t, wasn’t. Sting was far from current, but when I saw him opening the 1985 Grammies with a song called Russians, I was mesmerized. The song didn’t have a catchy chorus like the collected works of Bros, nor did Sting have fancy dance steps like Rick Astley did. (Rick Astley actually couldn’t dance, but in those days I was easily impressed.) It was a man in his 30s standing before an orchestra and singing about “rhetorical speeches of the Soviets” and name-dropping Reagan, Kruschev and Oppenheimer. I thought pop songs were for telling your baby not to forget your number and such like. “I hope the Russians love their children too.” What was that? My family had just bought a VHS. And with the world grinding to a petrified, bullet-ridden halt around me, all I could do is press record, press rewind and then press play. I memorized the 1987 Oscars. (Best picture: The Last Emperor. Most ridiculous outfit: Cher.) I counted the amount of times Lionel Richie said “Outrageous” at the 1986 American Music Awards. (38) And then, in August of 1989, came the 1984 Brit awards. It was a hum-drum affair with none of the glitz of its American counterparts. Lots of people I had never heard of like Sade, U2 and Frankie goes to Hollywood were nominated. I was considering pressing stop instead of record when they announced the lifetime achievement award. It began with a medley of 4 songs. And it changed my life. A scruffy blonde man, who I thought I recognized, was squeaking in an obscenely high voice to a girl called Anne who apparently Rocks. The same man jumps around with 2 equally scruffy blonde men and yelps about sending an S.O.S to someone. The songs were as catchy as anything Nick Kershaw ever did, but they had other dimensions. There were beats like Aswad, and grooves like the best of Michael Jackson. And vocals like I’d never heard before. I didn’t know what a beat or a groove was, but I did know where I’d seen this band before. They were on a hardcover cassette in the window of the shop next to KVGs in Liberty Plaza. So here was me, the boy who made fun of people who liked ancient songs like Tarzan Boy, buying an album of a band that had formed when I was wetting beds and who had broken up shortly after I had stopped.
To be continued…
