I prefer their early stuff

Laura Foulger

Finn felt off-kilter that morning, as if all his clothes were on back to front. He didn’t find out what it was until he sat at his desk in the sitting room, opened his laptop and hit ‘play’ on his ‘September curation’ playlist.

The music made no sense. What seeped through his two hefty speakers was a collection of noises that had no purpose or unity. Puzzled, he stopped and restarted the track. It was an enduring favourite of his by a Glaswegian indie band he’d discovered while down a rabbit hole of watching old gig clips online. He’d introduced the others to them and been quietly smug when they were admired by all.

But restarting didn’t help. The sound was a senseless cacophony. He shut down the app, reset his speakers. The problem persisted. In his tightening grip, the plastic mouse threatened to crack.

Next track. To his mounting anger it too resembled only scrap parts jumbled on top of one another. He clawed both hands at his scalp.

The bottom stair creaked; he heard Nan shuffle into the kitchen.

‘Nan,’ he called.

‘What, pet?’

‘Come here a sec.’

He heard her sigh and mutter, but her slippered footsteps made their way towards the sitting room.

‘And a good morning to you too,’ she said from the doorway.

‘D’you do something to my speakers?’

His voice was heavy with hurt.

‘Don’t be a cheeky sod; I’ve not touched ‘em.’

‘Then why’s it doing this?’ His voice rose an octave without his intending it. He hit ‘play’ again and the noises repeated. Nan listened thoughtfully, her eyes trained on the middle distance.

‘What’s the problem?’ she said.

He stared at her with his mouth agape, tried to channel all his frustration into a stare of contempt.

‘It sounds like a load of crap,’ he said.

She tutted.

‘You know I don’t understand your music.’

‘That’s not-’ he began, but didn’t know what to add. He tested the possibility that she was pranking him – that she was perfectly aware of the nonsensical clashing and banging and was pretending it sounded like music. But he dismissed this idea almost at once. Nan, famously, had no sense of humour. She’d never cracked a joke in her life. Her comedic sensibilities extended to letting loose a croaky, ‘Ha!’ whenever her favourite TV detective made a pun and practically winked at the camera.

He turned off the track and attacked his scalp again.

‘Never mind,’ he hissed.

Nan softened and put a hand against the back of his head.

‘I’ll make you a bowl of porridge.’

And as she shuffled out of the room and down the hall, Finn allowed the full realisation to subsume him: he had lost the ability to recognise music. A horrible wave of panic soaked him cold. He treated it like nausea and stayed absolutely still, waiting for it to pass. Eventually, he turned the track back on and listened with straining concentration, eyes squeezed shut and face hovering next to the speaker. He could recognise that, yes, that was the bass drum, that other sound the snare. The tiny moments of silence in between. Then the horn, then the guitar. Then, overlapping them, the synthesizer. He could name these things and yet the whole thing made no sense. It inspired no feeling, told no story, brought no familiarity: it had no point at all. 

Where before he knew where a musical phrase would end up, felt with every note the anticipation of the next and its contrast with the previous, now each sound was a standalone, unrelated to the whole. There was no whole. It was an assemblage of noises no more meaningful than a roomful of toddlers crying or a rubbish truck tipping detritus into its depths. He tried the next track and the next, listening to the intros, but nothing changed, and with each new piece of evidence his anxiety snowballed.

He needed the loo. When he got there, he had diarrhoea. He thought bitterly, ‘Is this all life is now? Shitting and breathing and blinking and eating and drinking and sleeping, like an animal?’

A hard, large something clogged his throat and, against his will, he began to cry. 

Nan had left a bowl of porridge on his desk, a pool of molten brown sugar glistening at its centre. The sight angered him – the persistence of domesticity, oblivious to his Earth-changing tragedy.

The next evening he was supposed to be going to Dreyfus’s party. He’d been preparing for days to discuss Saul Sawyer’s new EP with the group. He’d shaped every sentence: his insights about Sawyer’s process, how clearly you could hear the influence of Violet Riot by way of Simon Kang. He had things to say about the choices in that first track not to move to the obvious note, and the holding back of the climax until the last possible moment, the confounding of the structure of the piece, which had no refrain, with rhyming schemes abandoned, with quiet moments where you’d expect him to belt, and that Hendrix-level dexterity during the guitar solo at the end. Finn had been refining all this since Monday in anticipation of the party, and now it would all go to waste. His spiel had become theoretical – it would be like reciting a poem in a foreign language. He wouldn’t be able to ad lib anything extra, wouldn’t be able to respond to the group’s counterpoints (and there were always counterpoints, arguments even, and so there should be, because this was the important stuff).

This was what set him apart. This knowledge and feel for music, his carefully honed vocabulary around it. When he gave a sure-footed summary of some obscure but talented songwriter’s new EP, his peers listened. There’d always be some, like Seamus, who disagreed no matter what, had his own take, but no one in the group ever doubted that Finn would have a smart comeback. He felt music more deeply than other people did.

And when, at one of these parties, some other teen wandered into their midst and tried to get involved, someone who hadn’t spoken to them before and didn’t know what they were about, well, then Finn would listen to them with every semblance of patience as they shyly admitted to their love of whatever generic chart pop was going round like a virus at the time, and when they’d finished, he’d say, ‘I’m not really familiar with their oeuvre’, and turn away with a pitying half-smile. This was the nectar of his life. 

Finn lifted his t-shirt over his face and mopped the tears away. He wondered if this was how Degas had felt when his eye disease started to affect his paintings.

A thought occurred. Something at once shameful and hopeful. Long ago – maybe he’d been eight – he’d had a favourite song. It came on Magic FM during car rides and something about it had resonated with him. He’d managed to record it onto a cassette one afternoon in his bedroom, and he must have listened to it five times a day after that. It was a love song, something about, Love me just for me. The singer was a woman with a soft alto voice. American. Nowadays he’d be able to say that it was shmaltzy, with a too-simple key structure and lyrics that were merely lists of cliches. But back then it had made his little heart inflate. Never in a million years would he admit that now. He’d thrown the tape in the bin around the time he’d bought his first Bob Dylan album on vinyl.

It was worth a try. He took the stairs two at a time and fished his phone out of the folds of his duvet. He opened the Spotify app, then thought better about it, remembering his profile was set to publicly display whatever song he was listening to. YouTube instead, then. He searched for ‘Love Me Just for Me’ and there it was, fourth one down the list. A picture of the singer’s face stared back at him, with her old-fashioned make-up and hair. A little smug. ‘So you’ve come back?’ she seemed to transmit to him.

He stuck in earphones and lay on his back across the bed. Maybe this would do it. A song that wasn’t cool, that didn’t bear up against analysis, that he couldn’t discuss with his muso pals, but which he’d nonetheless latched onto right away instinctively. That had – fine, let’s be honest about it – kicked off his love of music in the first place. He pressed play.

Noise. Unintelligible plonkings and pluckings over a dull beat. That familiar voice over the top delivering words that, without the support of the music beneath, were exposed for that they were: empty platitudes upon empty platitudes.

The pulse of hope that had bobbed in his chest turned to stone and dropped to his stomach.

He ripped out the earphones and hurled them and the phone across the room, where they hit the bookshelf and clattered to the floor.

Nan called from her room down the hall,

‘What in ‘eck’s going on?’

He slammed his bedroom door shut by way of reply.

*

The afternoon ticked by. Finn called the doctor’s surgery and asked for an emergency appointment. The receptionist told him his symptoms didn’t qualify for an emergency slot and offered him an appointment for two weeks’ time. Finn argued the point but eventually gave up, snarling his acceptance before hanging up and screaming into the flesh of his forearm. 

Evening brought a sad resignation. This must be what other people felt like. Just watching TV and eating the same old dinners, with nothing to elevate the soul. Finn spent his time between moping about the house, ignoring Nan’s concerned questions, and returning to his phone and earphones to try different genres of music previously held at arm’s length: opera, psytrance, K-pop (all sounded like different flavours of the same meaningless slop).

But by the time he was lying wide-eyed in bed that night, the melancholy had transmuted into panic. Tomorrow was the shindig, and although Dreyfus himself was a bit of a Philistine when it came to music, Finn knew that his own set of connoisseurs would be there. 

His little group knew the drill for these gatherings. Each would arrive armed with an opinion on the latest noteworthy album, EP, or single—a viewpoint meticulously crafted and refined at home through repeated listens, then rehearsed to sound spontaneous.

Last time was Jimmy’s birthday barbecue, when the group had clustered into a corner of the living room as far away as possible from the ‘jocks’, and the topic of conversation had been Nyah’s new single featuring Gerta Frahm. Seamus had surprised everyone by holding back, rather than jumping in to give his opinion first. He turned an attentive face to each speaker, finally waiting until Finn had delivered his own thoughts, before saying, very casually, 

‘Did no one else pick up on the nod to Zoe Rylance?’

He looked around with wide-eyed incredulity. 

‘Early ‘90s Rylance – Ghost Food, The Fifth Season? It’s all there, folks!’

Finn had been caught off guard.

‘Well, of course,’ he’d tried, but it was too late. Seamus had made an observation no one else had, and now he was enjoying the stage, letting forth his prepared speech on all the ways Frahm was referencing Rylance. God, and stopping every few words to pretend to be searching for a word, (‘Errr… ah! The multitimbrality…’). Sweet fucking fuck did Finn hate his stupid face.

He saw it there above him in the dark, the eyebrows raised in faux-surprise, the smugness of the slightly raised chin. And now Finn would never be able to best him. He thought of his new life as a music exile. He’d have to join one of the shallow groups who hung out in the kitchen at these gatherings, laughing too loudly and drinking too much. He’d have to talk about whatever inane things they talked about. Reality TV probably, and second-hand news about other people’s weddings and break-ups and pregnancies and promotions.

This final thought propelled him out of bed and to the laptop at his desk. He Googled ‘Saul Sawyer EP’ and opened up every review he found in a new tab. He found the EP on YouTube and Soundcloud and scrolled down to the comments section. Alongside these, he opened up a new Word document. He was going to fake it.

The feverish study that followed felt akin to the night before those first GCSE exams. Though, this time, things were really at stake.

*

When dawn broke around the edge of the bedroom blinds, Finn was pacing the carpet with his laptop in hand, mumbling the words from his document. It was now twenty-seven pages long, with colour coding and hyperlinks that connected different sections. 

He felt as if he were powered by insight; it fizzed in his brain and supplied energy to his limbs.

Here before him was his thesis on Saul Sawyer’s EP. It contained Finn’s final critique – a mixture of his original thoughts from before the incident and a heavy dose of other worthwhile opinions. He’d painstakingly collected all the thoughts he’d read online and ordered them into themes, but gave priority to reviewers from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, plus a couple of vloggers who always seemed to know their stuff. Where there were disagreements between sources, he logged bullet points for each side, then chose the argument he’d take on as his own.

He’d even – and this was completely new for him – added some thoughts of a more poetic nature. Just as the digital clock at the bottom right of the screen flicked over to midnight, Finn had skim-read an obscure comment on TikTok which described the EP as having a ‘purple aura’ – that all the songs were united by shades of that colour. Finn had scrolled past initially, scrunching his nose at the juvenile nature of it. But it had lodged a hook in his attention, and he circled back minutes later. The comment had a ton of likes and replies (‘100%’, ‘oh dam i feel this’). Thus, a new section of the Word document came into being, with notes about dusky lilac segueing into mauve that dips towards black. It was highly ostentatious. Finn couldn’t help smirk as he read it back. Seamus would never think of something like this.

The fizz of his brain subsided just enough for him to notice how heavy his limbs were, like he’d hiked Everest.

There was a crumpled sheet of A4 paper covered in blue tac on the corkboard by his door. He straightened it out, opened his door, and fixed it to the outer side. ‘DON’T DISTURB. SLEEPING IN.’ Door closed again, he took the three strides to his bed and launched himself onto it, face first.

There were echoes of commentary: subversive asymmetrical phrasing; a post-ironic twist on the retro-futuristic… Then there was oblivion.

*

The Finn of 8pm could have been no relation of the Finn of the day before. Stood outside Dreyfus’s terraced house in the dwindling twilight, he cut a confident figure. He wore a Kraftwerk t-shirt, jeans and a corduroy shirt jacket. His hair was tousled and held in place by the barest amount of product, a look that conveyed that personal grooming was an inconvenient obligation and one he could only squeeze in at the bottom of his list of priorities. Clutched in one hand was a tote containing a box of Oolong teabags and an earthenware mug.

The front door was ajar, spilling light and the homogenous murmur of voices into the night. Finn made his way inside.

There were twenty or so people already. A group of girls sat on the staircase with their arms around one another. In the open-plan kitchen and sitting room, six people were crammed onto the three-person sofa talking over each other loudly, and a bevy of others buzzed around the kitchen fridge. Seamus was among them, trying to fight his way through so he could put his craft beers in the fridge. As usual, they were wrapped in a plastic bag and duct taped so as to dissuade any of the others to nab them when their alcopops ran out. Finn spotted the rest of the group over in the corner, by the record player, and joined them.

‘Finn, just in time,’ called Andrew.

‘We’re putting on some music,’ explained Alan.

Finn clapped a hand on Alan’s shoulder by way of a greeting to all three of them.

‘What have we got here, then?’ he said, taking the collection of vinyl out of Norm’s hands and assessing them with a frown.

‘I know, slim pickings, right?’ said Norm, ‘We can’t decide out of Stevie Wonder, Pink Floyd or Bowie-’

‘But we have to decide soon or one of the morons will put on something of theirs,’ Andrew indicated with his head to the gaggle of boys and girls around the kitchen island.

They discussed the pros and cons of each and cast disparaging looks at the rest of the vinyl collection, until Norm made an executive decision. Just then, Seamus lumbered over, glass of amber liquid in hand. He saluted Finn. 

‘Now that we’re all here,’ said Andrew, ‘let’s have your thoughts-’

Fully formed sentences organised themselves in Finn’s head.

‘-on Parapet’s new single,’ Andrew finished.

Panic. Parapet? Finn resisted the urge to bring his clawed hand to his scalp. Could he say he needed to make his mug of tea? No, they’d only wait for him.

The record player zipped into life and there it was again: the wall of noise. Finn struggled to keep his face composed. Stevie Wonder’s voice rang out amid the sound of many different types of thing being struck at once. He could think of no justification for such a thing, and the Finn of two days ago who might have been able to explain it to him was out of reach, in the frustrating way that all past things are.

For a moment of indefinable length, Finn felt as if those noises came from below. That they were the product of the Earth beneath him, a moving of tectonic plates, a shifting of concrete and soil, a creak of pipes. A warning that you could build houses and attend parties and eat dinners but all of it was flimsy, manmade stuff, and under everything was the massive reality of the planet, unsentimental in its solidity, made of pure fact. Music had no meaning. Nothing did.

‘Nah, bored of Parapet,’ said Seamus. ‘Have you listened to Sawyer’s EP?’

Finn’s body unclenched.

Alan, Andrew and Norm had lots to say. Finn listened, and slowly the panic adrenaline subsided, draining into his extremities and disappearing. 

He was a new person since the last time they’d discussed music, and now every opinion the boys put forward seemed lazy and rehashed. Seamus joined in. His tone was casual but he shifted his bulk ever so slightly towards the centre of the group.

‘Hard disagree about the title track,’ he said. ‘It’s a load of cynical nostalgia. A poor imitation of original punk – those distorted power chords – with none of the… the anarchic sentiment to back it up.’

The other three nodded thoughtfully. Not Finn, though. He’d seen this same thought repeated across multiple comments sections. But an obscure vlogger had a more compelling take. Finn did his best to ignore the record player’s unholy clatter and began to visualise a paragraph of his Word doc.

‘That’s missing the point,’ he told Seamus. ‘That track is the product of a forty-year-old man asking what good the, I guess, political energy of his parents has done his generation. The guitar reverb references that punk mood, but it’s-,’ Finn rubbed his fingers together as if searching for the words, ‘sparse enough to give it a hollowness. That’s deliberate.’

The group’s eyes were on him. They looked impressed. Finn felt a splendid sensation—as if his insides were inflating, urging him to puff out his chest and thrust his fists skyward. With some effort he stilled himself.

Seamus smiled. 

‘Whether or not that is his intention,’ he said, ‘the effect is one of a poor-’

‘Poor homage to The Ramones,’ Finn joined him in unison. ‘That’s an easy trap to fall into, but Sawyer is clearly questioning, not imitating, the commitment of the original punk movement.’

Andrew nodded vigorously.

‘Nice. Nice,’ said Norm.

Seamus’s smile remained fixed.

The discussion continued, and Finn began to perceive a shift in the group’s formation. Gradually, they all began to angle themselves to face him, and seemed to address their points only to him. Even Seamus made fewer and fewer efforts to argue. In return, Finn was benevolent, nodding thoughtfully at their points before doling out relevant well-rehearsed soundbites to expand on them. When he hit them with the lilac-violet-mauve shit they lapped it up like grape juice.

What was eye-opening was that nobody made a point he hadn’t already read online. How unoriginal they’d been, all this time.

All too soon, the evening was over. Finn winked at the girls on the staircase as he left. He smiled all the way home, re-running his highlights in his head.

*

‘You’re chirpy lately,’ Nan observed a couple of weeks on. She had finished packing away her supermarket shop and had lowered herself into her armchair with far too much sighing than Finn thought necessary.

‘I have a very fulfilling project on the go,’ Finn explained. He was at his laptop at the desk in the corner, researching Baquido’s new single. That weekend, Norm would be having a film night for his birthday.

‘Good boy,’ said Nan. She turned the TV on with the remote. The theme tune to her detective show was almost at its climax. Finn clenched his teeth against the painful racket.

‘Why do you still watch that? It’s the same story every time. So formulaic.’

Nan tsked.

‘It makes me happy,’ she said.

‘There’s so much higher-quality stuff out there,’ he told her.

She put up the volume.

Finn sighed heavily and took his laptop out of the room. In his bedroom he sat on his bed and read the notes he’d already made. Already they were brilliant. He’d included a list of all the possible counterpoints Seamus might bat back at him, and he was methodically coming up with answers to all of them. He’d had a taste of Seamus’s humiliation and it was delicious. More delicious than the impressed faces of the other three. More delicious even than the feel of the words in his mouth, the rebuttal of a point like the swift thwack of a tennis ball. All these prizes he kept in his mind as he worked.

His phone buzzed. It was an automated text from the doctor’s surgery, reminding him of his appointment in an hour’s time. He turned the vibration off and tossed the phone to the end of the bed. No time for the doctor’s, he decided. He was in the zone. All else was distraction.