So this'll be it then. Saturday. Back in the day Saturday was the shiny jewel that nestled between the forced march of the working week and the long exhale that was Sunday.
Back in the day it would have found us, Johnny T, Rich, Squire and me, straining at the leash to be gone. Doors slammed on bodies crammed into Johnny T's dark green Cortina. We, the collective known as Freeway, young, dumb and full of come. A legend in our own lunch break, barrelling down the old Reading road to London through a swirl of autumnal leaves, and all the while, in the name of practise, singing in something approximating harmony of a mythical land where the sun shone to a greater purpose. California our way.
Soho,Denmark Street, Shaftesbury Avenue. Kinsey's, Sound City and Orange. The places to be. Was it really always mid-day? Gazing in wonder at the guitars and amps that we would never own, and the girls that we would never cherish. In hindsight we didn't really know what we where doing with the first, although we mistakenly thought that we knew exactly what we would be doing with the second. But it was all one, as in any case, we couldn't afford either of them. But Oh! the magic of the looking and the longing.
Today I tumble out of bed and spend my rehearsal time surrounded by an array of instruments the like of which we could only have dreamed of back in the day. I play (extremely averagely) through an amp that any one of us would have cheerfully murdered the others for. And I reflect upon the fact that whilst I love and value that which I now own, I realise that I have traded the intense magic of the looking and the longing - the anticipation if you like, for the quieter pleasures of ownership.
The magic is still there, thank heavens, but now rather than star burst and sunshine it is like the silent fall of ash from a gently lodged fire.
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