Music Monday

"Early morning, Sunday dawning/It's just the wasted years so close behind."

This music Monday brings back memories less of a particular person, more of a particular time.  In my first year at Leicester University I lived in halls in a block of 18 blokes (mostly rugby playing Southerners, with a token Londoner who reckoned himself for a wideboy and an aloof Mancunian skater thrown in for good measure) and 5 other girls.  The numerous ways in which I was set apart from my hall mates included: having black/red/pink/bleached hair (delete as appropriate for various times throughout the 9 months I lived there); being interested in philosophy and politics; preferring the divey indie clubs to the awful student night at Krystals or Le Palais De Dance (classy names or what?).  It was a fairly lonely year and not what I had expected from university, my fantasies being more of the 'sitting in sunny quads reading the metaphysical poets and debating feminism' persuasion than the 'watching the rugby club chug their own weight in lager while the girls looked on, enraptured' reality.

I developed various routines to get me through the year, my favourite of which was to go out and drink chartreuse (I thought it was glamourous) by the gallon on Saturday night, then wake with the dawn on Sunday morning and play The Velvet Underground & Nico.  The lazy, hallucinogenic feel of the record (on scratchy vinyl, naturally) allowed me to believe, for a short while, that I was somewhere more glamourous than lying hungover on a single bed, in a poster-filled bedroom, in suburban Leicester. 

On my birthday (a Sunday) last month I woke early, rueing the cocktails and cider of the night before.  I came down to my kitchen, turned on the radio, and Sunday Morning was playing.  It seemed like the perfect birthday present and a wonderful reminder of, if not better times, then younger and different times.