Finding meaning in music

By Ali Jones.

Summer 1991. Two years after the release of The Cure’s eighth album, I was just sixteen and beginning to discover the joys of spending Saturday afternoons thumbing through the used vinyl in the two independent record shops in the small market town where I grew up. Like many of my family members before me, books had been my freedom, escape into stories and other worlds, and I was on the cusp of finding that music could do the same. This particular summer had taken me into the words of Camus and Hesse, Eliot, Yeats and Rilke. My storybook self strode far away from the 1960s estate I lived on in a fading post-Thatcher farming community. When I found Disintegration on one such afternoon, it was on cassette, and the Walkman I had allowed me to transport myself immediately into swaying narratives, and cascading sound. It soon became a treasured and much played possession and I was delighted to find a picture disc of it too, so I could play it in the front room and stash It with my parents’ collection of classical and folk records. Once, I returned home from a day out to find my mother hoovering and dancing to Pictures of You, and I was shocked to realise that she too had been, and was still young! Now, at nearly twenty years old, the album still works for me and thousands of others, the skill of music and words combined. It can still get me up and dancing too.