Exploring the Back Catalogue: Hiatus Reflection

Welcome back to my open music journal. It’s about to get underway again after a hiatus, and here’s why it’s been a year since I wrote anything new.

Last year I took a break from it to move the material from a forum onto my own space. You’d think that the best place to write this stuff would be a public forum specifically for the audience of the band whose back catalogue I am exploring. After all, my husband has a thing for writing recreational essays on the Cyberman episodes of Dr Who audio dramas, and duly places them on Gallifrey Base…

Exploring the Back Catalogue: Self-Titled, The Promise, Pain, Grief, Faith & Other Personal Crises

Dickens is a master at summing up people in brief but evocative descriptions, and I think The Cure have a similar talent for summing up emotions and situations in (relatively) brief but evocative pieces of music.  The Promise is a vivid portrait of deep disappointment and grief, and it instantly took me back to the last time I’d heard someone express these emotions, to the same painful extent.  The fact that this was also on my iPod and in the garden probably helped to link the two; the brain does things like this…

Déjà vu

Is anyone else here who lived through the 80s (or earlier relevant epochs) experiencing a sense of history repeating itself, with the invasion of Ukraine and all that entails, and the consciousness that there’s nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen? When I was a teenager, there was a painful awareness of this. Here’s a …