Clevor Trever

I want to play music.

The problem is I can’t.

I have no musical skills. I sing in the shower. I sing while I am working. I make noises when nobody is listening. But I don’t play an instrument and I have no idea how you take something that exists inside your body and turn it into sound.

And yet I listen to music almost constantly.

Daytime. Nighttime. Working. Walking. Cooking. Lying down.

Sometimes I find one song and play it for an hour. Sometimes for a day. Occasionally for a week. Again and again and again, until I am not really listening to it any more.

Something happens to my body. I walk differently. I breathe differently. My shoulders change. My face changes. Sometimes I feel stronger. Sometimes desperately sad. Sometimes sexy. Sometimes furious. Sometimes ten years old.

Mostly, perhaps, I simply feel myself.

Writing doesn’t quite do that. I write all the time. Occasionally I find a rhythm in the words and then I know something is working. A sentence catches the next sentence and suddenly the whole thing starts moving.

But I have begun to wonder whether even that rhythm comes from somewhere else.

Perhaps it comes from music.

For the past six months there has been a lot of it. Six months of fear, loss, panic, desire, grief, growth, then despair again, then something opening, closing and opening once more.

I could probably reconstruct the whole period through what I was listening to.

At the moment it is Baxter Dury.

My brother introduced me to him only a few weeks ago and suddenly I am completely lost in him.

Yesterday it was Isabel’s Sleeping. Now it is The Cocaine Man.

There is something about Baxter Dury that feels completely familiar to me. London without having to announce that it is London. Englishness without costume. A man who doesn’t appear to be trying terribly hard to prove that he is anything.

Perhaps that is partly inheritance. His father, Ian Dury, arrived on television when I was about ten years old and seemed to come from another planet.

I didn’t understand him. I loved him.

Clever Trevor. “Knock me down with a feather.”

Baxter has something of the same thing in his bones, but more battered, more European somehow. A Londoner slightly displaced from London. He sounds like somebody who has been around. Somebody for whom life has not necessarily been straightforward.

There is style without much apparent effort. Sadness without asking you to pity him.

I recognise something in that.

Before Baxter there were other periods.

For a while I disappeared into the 1950s.

Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Helen Shapiro. Don’t fence me in.

I don’t entirely know why.

Perhaps there are times when the nervous system wants simplicity. A voice, a bass line, a melody. Something from before all the noise accumulated.

Then there was the Doors.

Lots and lots of the Doors.

Then somehow Snoop Dogg appeared inside the Doors as well, because music doesn’t respect the historical categories we construct for it.

It wanders around.

And once I started following it, everything seemed to turn up.

Van Morrison singing Whenever God Shines His Light with Cliff Richard, of all people. God arriving not through church or theology but through two slightly improbable men singing together.

Sinéad O’Connor singing Famine, history coming out not as a textbook or political argument but as rage, grief and memory.

The Pogues, where Ireland, London, drink, migration, love and ruin somehow occupy the same few minutes.

Sunshine on Leith, which can make belonging to a place sound almost unbearably tender.

Lee “Scratch” Perry, where rhythm seems capable of taking the physical world apart and rebuilding it differently.

None of these things really belong together.

Except that they do.

Ireland. Jamaica. London. America. Scotland. God. Famine. Punk. Dub. Country music. Rock and roll. People leaving home. People trying to find it again.

Music refuses to stay where we put it.

A song written by somebody twenty years before I was born can suddenly become the most accurate description of a Wednesday morning in Warsaw.

A voice recorded thousands of miles away can somehow contain something I have never been able to say.

A song I have heard a thousand times can become an entirely different song because I have become an entirely different person.

Perhaps that is what I am discovering.

For years I have tried to understand things.

Politics. Countries. Love. Poland. England. Other people. Myself.

I write about them. I analyse them. I put them into sentences and theories and stories. I pull things apart because somewhere inside me there is still the belief that if I understand something properly, perhaps I can control it.

Music does something completely different.

It asks for no explanation.

It enters the body.

Pain can be pain and desire desire.

Grief doesn’t have to become a lesson.

Joy doesn’t need to justify itself.

God doesn’t even have to be believed in.

For three minutes, seven minutes, an hour on repeat, I don’t have to solve anything.

Maybe that is why I want to make music now.

Not because I particularly want to become a musician. That seems unlikely.

I want to know how to put something into the world that bypasses explanation.

My pain. My pleasure. My ridiculousness. The people I love. The people I have lost. London. Warsaw. Sussex. Ireland. Ageing. Sex. Fear. Mortality. Acceptance.

All of it.

Writing gets close.

Sometimes.

But there is still something between the feeling and the words.

Music seems to cross the distance.

So I keep listening.

And perhaps for now that is how I make music.