Roads

Life changing?

It is 9pm on Friday night. I am at home with the baby monitor whilst Anita is down the street in a bar with her girlfriends.  No-one told me this is how maternity leave was meant to be!  In a bid to break my Mad Men habit (series 2, episode 2 so far; gripping) I thought I'd write something.  I fully intended to write about skiing, but fate (the gods, serendipity - call it what you like) intervened, in the form of Portishead's 'Roads' - my favourite song of all time. Track 20 of 40 on my 'ambient' playlist. Ah, the wonders of iTunes.

Last New Year's Eve Anita and I spent a quality evening in Evian-les-Bains in the company of Nina and Paul Bowyer, a disproportionately large portion of which seemed to be taken up with naming our favourite songs of all time.  Anyone who has even the slightest interest in music will immediately appreciate how difficult this is.  I've often lain in the bath making and re-making the list of eight tracks that I would select if ever chosen to appear on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (I accept that I am unlikely ever to get invited on for my services to the learning and development industry, but I can dream).   Choosing even eight songs has consistently proved impossible, so choosing just a single track as my favourite of all time seemed like a fruitless exercise - although aided by several beers and free reign on Paul's spotify account I gave it a good go.

Then not long afterwards I was running to work whilst my iPod shuffled its way through my four star playlist.  Roads came on and I immediately knew this was it. I didn't need to waste time trying to choose the right song.  The right song simply chose itself.  To explain why I need to rewind to the 1990s - early 1995 or thereabouts.  I was sitting with a load of people I didn't know in a student room at my sister's Cambridge college, having been invited down to Trinity Hall for an ultimately unsuccessful interview. This was my first of two unsuccessful Cambridge University interviews in two years - at least I was consistent. I can't remember who the owner of the room was, or even whether they were a friend of my sister or merely a passing acquaintance, but they had a huge album poster of Portishead's 'Dummy' above the fireplace.  I recall asking whether Portishead were any good.  The friend/acquaintance/room owner confirmed, with an air of authority, that they were. He may even have added a "man" at the end - he was an undergraduate student after all and I, as an impressionable A-level student, was in awe.  

But I was also slightly perturbed.  I considered myself to have anti-establishment leanings.  The music I liked could be described as "indie" or "alternative"; I owned a Rage Against The Machine t-shirt and was experimenting with wearing all black.  I think I had only just stopped riding my skateboard, although I was most likely still wearing ex-army combat trousers (although not to my Cambridge interview, I should add).  My idea of cool bands included Dinosaur Junior, Pearl Jam and Faith No More. Guitars! Lots of noise! Vocals that were sometimes shouted instead of sung! (I also owned the entire Guns n Roses back catalogue, but we won't go there). Portishead didn't even have a drum kit - they used decks and samples and keyboards and loops. My God, to my mind that made them Dance Music.  

I don't know how I reconciled this conflict in my musical sensibilities, but not long afterwards I purchased Dummy by Portishead. It felt like a brave new world, although maybe I just probably wanted to be as cool as the friend/acquaintance/room owner. He had long hair and a hoody with a zip down the front.  What I do know is that I was blown away.  From the opening warbly samples of Mysterons through the classic scratchy loops and jangling guitars of the singles Glory Box and Sour Times, and all interlaced with Beth Gibbons' frail, haunting vocals (once described as sounding like a wounded sparrow) this was music like I had never heard - the defining sound of what later became known as trip-hop.  Ironically my double Cambridge failure later led me to study in Bristol, only a few miles from Portishead, at a time when trip-hop was at its height - Massive Attack played a series of sell-out 'homecoming' gigs at the Bristol student union in my third year, although needless to say I wasn't cool enough to get a ticket. 

But Roads, track number seven, stood head and shoulders above the rest for me.  Something about the muted, echoing mellotron base, the stripped back drum machine beats, Gibbons' delicate vocals, the crescendo string arrangement, the lyrics that I still don't know the meaning of - it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck then, and still does now, almost twenty years later. I would play it over and over, anticipating every pause, every subtle manipulation of the minor key. I listened to it through headphones so I could hear the barely-audible sound of Gibbons opening her mouth to sing the next line.  It felt like the purest, most beautiful song I had ever heard.  And more importantly it felt like it was something I had discovered for myself - it wasn't a song that had been recommended to me by a friend, it hadn't been played to me excitedly as the Best Song Ever! by my friend Kieran like Pearl Jam's live version of 'Alive'.  It wasn't released as a single and got no airplay that I was aware of. I didn't even know whether anyone else liked it. 

And then, I can't remember how many years later, I was watching TV one night when I chanced upon Tank Girl - a low budget cult film based on an underground cartoon strip.  I was about to change the channel when suddenly the scene changed, and there was Tank Girl showering the desert dust off herself - bizarrely fully clothed as I recall - to the sound of Roads.  It was a lightbulb moment - someone else liked the song! I felt like my discovery had been vindicated - whilst the radio was playing Sour Times and Glory Box, I had chosen to like Roads. I had made my own choice, and in doing so had stumbled upon a song that someone, somewhere considered good enough to use on the soundtrack to a Hollywood film. 

There have been a few big life changing moments for me over the last 35 and a bit years.  But there have been many more smaller moments that have all been life changing in their own way.  Discovering Roads was one because it showed me that I could think critically.  That I didn't necessarily have to like what everyone else liked. That I could make choices for myself that might well differ from the mainstream, but that was ok. That I could follow my instincts and my own path. Roads is my favourite song of all time because whenever I hear those unmistakeable opening bars it reminds me that I have an independent mind. 

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I have officially disappeared up my own bottom.  Radio 4, I await your call. 

Conspicuous Consumption and the Big Mac Index

 

The same in any language.
Apple Store, Shanghai, China.

Twenty years ago when I was studying high school geography I was introduced to the idea of the 'Big Mac Index'. I don't remember it ever being referred to in those terms but I clearly recall our teacher, Mrs Austin, telling us that the best way to compare how expensive countries were relative to each other was to look at the price of a Big Mac.  It's one of the few human geography insights that has stayed with me (along with the fact that motorways cost £1million per mile to construct - or at least they did in 1993). Physical geography - glaciers, mountains and plate tectonics - was more my thing.  I thought about the Big Mac Index a couple of weeks ago when Anita and I were visiting Istanbul for the weekend and again today as I wandered along Shanghai's main shopping street.

I'm in China this week for work, delivering training to lawyers in our Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong offices.  I'm doing fifteen sessions across three cities in five days, so my schedule doesn't allow much time for sightseeing - half a day at each end of the week at most.  So this afternoon, fuzzy with jetlag, I made it out of my hotel and into downtown Shanghai in search of something to eat.  I last visitied Shanghai in 2003 - almost ten years ago to this day - on a drinking weekend from Hong Kong  in the company of JC and The General.  Within an hour of arriving we'd lost our guidebook, by the first afternoon I'd lost my glasses, and by the second morning we'd lost JC. I don't remember too much else about the trip other than walking along the main shopping drag and never being out of sight of a McDonalds.  It was one of the clearest signs you could want of the creep of capitalist enterprise into communist China.  Today, as you wander Shanghai's shopping streets you would be forgiven for thinking that you were in the west, if you could overlook the plethora of mandarin character neon street signs, the incredible mass of Chinese people, and the communist one-party political regime (this one's a big ask, admittedlty). Gap, Nike, Pizza Hut, Mango, Apple, Rolex, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, Haagen Dazs, Costa Coffee - its all here. And everywhere you look people are buying clothes, carrying bulging shopping bags, trying on watches, eating ice cream, spending money. 

Despite not having eaten for eight hours - and even that an insubstantial aeroplane breakfast - I was determined not to sumit to the lure of the golden arches, so I am afraid I can not report first hand on where China sits on the Big Mac Index.  Instead, I ate with a load of locals in a small side-street noodle bar. I ate stir fried pork noodles, whilst the well dressed lady next to me opted for deep fried chicken feet. But a quick bit of google research reveals that according to The Economist's 2013 Big Mac Index China is seriously undervalued against the US dollar (and sterling) - in other words, it is a cheap place to live. 

On the one hand, I can see for myself that this is so.  I enjoyed a massive bowl of noodles and a coke for around £3 this afternoon, and I write this at a mahogany desk in a king-sized suite in Shanghai's Waldorf Astoria - complete with marble walk-in shower and automatic toilet seat - which is costing significantly less a night than our Istanbul hotel room. On the other hand, it is clear that the Big Mac Index tells only half the story.  An iMac in the Shanghai Apple Store costs more than in Covent Garden, which I find strange considering that it was probably put together by an army of cheap Chinese labourers a few hundred kilometres down the road. Similarly Nike trainers, Gap clothes and Levis jeans also cost more here than in the UK.  So a quick shopping trip reveals a truer picture - whilst Big Macs might be cheap, there is undoubtedly an appetite (and the spending power to support) a healthy market in luxury goods.  Conspicuous consumption is alive and well - in this part of China at least.

One of my resolutions for 2013 is to learn more about global economics. I guess lesson one is that if you want to really know what's going on, stay out of McDonalds.  Its probably better for your health too.