26 Feb, 2009 OPTIMISM
Last week with some great shock the Sunday Times stated that my hometown of Glasgow now has the highest murder rate per capita in Western Europe.
One week later, I also read that the very same city has been awarded a position within the top ten of what is being termed as the most optimistic of 75 European cities. All thanks to the can do mentality’ of its people.
The latter news sounds great to me. But then again I am a Glaswegian and proud of it. Nevertheless given the reputation of being good at getting things done, why then the impotence in stopping the violence behind the tragic body count?
Warts and all, I love the city of my birth, I still feel that I belong to Glasgow, and that it belongs to me. Others might say, how come when you have spent so much time away, and you have even lost some of your accent?
In turn I’d reply in a fairly typical Glaswegian manner. ”Mind yer ain business nosey!”
I would also defend my town in the face of any wide of the mark criticisms, but truths do hurt sometime and the accompanying pain does not always leave.
In 1988 a younger friend of ours, the brother of one of my closest friends, was stabbed to death. In the wrong place at the right time there was no apparent reason for the attack other than the fact that the guilty ones were high on glue and brandishing knives.
A horrifying experience for all who knew him, as well as for his family whom I know have never been able to get over the death of their youngest son, it was the pointlessness of the whole act that reverberated the most, chilling me even now as I look back on it.
Speechless at the time and with no words that I could conjure to offer the depth of my sympathy, I did later somehow manage to write something that was part poem and part letter, which in turn surfaced as the basis for the lyric that I used on the title track of our Street Fighting Years album, released a year or so later.
Therapy for me, the song despite being a requiem at heart, does however blossom with a final note of optimism. But where did I find the remotest glimpse of that when considering the savagery that lay behind this singular young death?
Inevitably that came with an awareness of a bigger picture that I momentarily focus on everyday while never forgetting the fragility of life and for that matter how precious each and every living thing is.
I live in hope that I am never again to witness such a sad scene as I also live with a hope – no matter how beaten up – that my hometown and cities all over the world can find a way to much more peaceful days.
That notion of hope is evident on the new album Graffiti Soul. More so on a song called ‘This Is It’, that is mostly about the re occurring changes we all want desperately to make as we navigate through our lives. But it was probably also influenced by some of the euphoria during Obama’s election campaign.
Words do have a special energy and that transmitted can be the spark that ignites a momentum towards substantial change. What is the alternative after all? To accept being crushed by the headlines and that hand of fate when it seems to be strangling us?
Meanwhile back to the song. Situated as the last track on the album, it takes you out on a real high and is the closest that I feel we have come to revisiting a Sons And Fascination type track.
Charlie’s skyline guitar is the factor that pulls the track bang up to the current time however as it crackles with an energy both haunting and yet emotionally reassuring. No throwback this is the sound of SM determinedly moving forward with much optimism. Possibly the same type most natural to Glaswegians.
JK