a love letter to losing youth

A few weeks ago I felt very lucky to speak at One Track Minds’ 10-year-anniversary event at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. It’s a fantastic event, my very favourite to perform at and listen to: each speaker chooses a song that has changed their life and speaks about it. Then they must sit on stage and listen to it, all in front of hundreds of people. Every time I laugh and cry and think about my life. It was One Track Minds that started me thinking about the role music had played in my life in a way that led to Hark existing.

There’s another OTM show happening in October - I strongly recommend you get a ticket - but in the meantime, for those who couldn’t get a seat before the last event sold out, here’s what I spoke about. Subscribers can read the whole thing, or listen to a (tremulous!) live recording.

It’s funny how a band can soundtrack your life without you realising. That, while you’re just going about your business - running for trains and meeting people whose names you’ll later forget and sending text messages to those who will break your heart - a group of strangers are making music that will lie there, dormant, until you didn’t know you needed it.

Then, when you’re least expecting it, some cosmic intervention or twist of fate will bring these two things together: the events of your life and these songs that have been written and recorded and performed in a whole other part of the universe, and suddenly something you’ve been struggling with will just make perfect sense. You thought you were alone, but you’re not and you never were. You just needed someone to reach out and tell you: I know what you’re going through.

You could never really call me a proper fan of LCD Soundsystem, and the more I think about this the weirder it seems. I was in all the right places at all the right times. When I was 19, I spent a few weeks traipsing around Shoreditch as an intern for Vice magazine. It was 2007, weeks after LCD Soundsystem’s sophomore record Sound of Silver had been released; the other kids I ran around with were obsessed with that album.

Three years later and I was interning again, this time in New York, shortly after the band’s next record came out. I’d moved to the city knowing basically nobody, with nowhere to live, and four unpaid days a week at a magazine with three years of savings under my belt. Soon after I arrived, someone passed me a lovingly made PDF of insider tips for New York; around the edge of the page were printed the words ‘New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’ - LCD Soundsystem’s lament to the city that made them, a reference that had wholly passed me by. How, I thought, could this city, this shimmering, fantastical feverdream of a place, bring anybody down?

But the pennies began to drop. At some point in the early 2010s I saw LCD Soundsystem’s front man James Murphy DJ at a festival in Portugal, during one of the last good holidays with a boyfriend I stayed with for too long. Murphy, by then a kind of indie music legend, seemed vaguely baffled to be up on such a strange little stage, and I remember feeling a bit the same. I was on a minibreak that looked sunkissed and aspirational on social media; wasn’t this meant to feel better? A couple of years after that the relationship began to break down. I was sent to cover the world’s saddest Glastonbury - relentless rain, Brexit, doing big ugly cries during Adele’s headline set, alone - and do something about my broken heart.

LCD Soundsystem headlined the Other Stage on Sunday night. I’d had enough of the World’s Saddest Glastonbury several days earlier - it was one of those years where people had gone home early because it was just so wet. But I was down to review them; I had to deliver. The rain slowed, then stopped. Scott, an acquaintance who had become a good friend that weekend, due to picking me up over and over again, pulled me to the front of the crowd. A blanket of cloud tucked us in. As Murphy and his bandmates pummelled us with the hits - ‘Losing My Edge’, ‘Someone Great’, ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ - I realised that I would be fine, eventually. They closed with ‘All My Friends’. Scott held my hands, we found a patch of mud to ourselves, we span around until we were dizzy, giggling incessantly, yelling WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS TONIGHT when we had the breath. Until that point, all I could think about was endings - the ending of my relationship, the ending of my home and my life as I knew it. Little did I know how I was actually at the beginning of so much.