SUNDAY, 2 FEBRUARY 2025

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go all icky and tell you how I lost my virginity – not that sort, anyway. I’m going to describe my first encounters with various works of art, the ones that are imprinted on my memory in the sense that I remember where I was and exactly how I felt at the time. I apologise for what is a rather self-indulgent piece this week as I wallow in nostalgia.

A few weeks ago in another essay, I described when I first heard The Marble Index by Nico. I was in what we called ‘the middle room’ of my childhood home where I used to listen to John Peel’s radio programme and suddenly this music came on:  distorted bells, the drone of a harmonium, and finally the Gothic gloom of Nico’s voice. It chilled me to the bone, and I can still remember the icy streak that shivered down my spine as I listened. It felt like I’d found the perfect music for my teenage angst (I recognise that word sounds pretentious, but I don’t know what else to call it: I was scared a lot of the time in my mid to late teens and early twenties.)

My first meeting with Captain Beefheart was the Strictly Personal album and the track called Ah Feel like Ahcid. I was sitting in the front room of my next-door neighbour and schoolfriend, and his elder brother put the album on. I knew nothing at the time about Delta or Chicago blues or Howlin’ Wolf and I had never heard music remotely like this before. On this occasion, my strongest emotion wasn’t chilly fear, but a kind of shock, a very pleasant shock. I know that people, including Beefheart himself, criticise the album for the hippie-trippie bits which were added to make it sound more ‘weird’, (as I also do in retrospect), but I fell in love with the album immediately, partly, I have to admit, because of those awful hippie-trippie bits, and it was the start of a lifetime of loving Beefheart.

I often read people (for example, Matt Groening of Simpsons’ fame) say that it took them many listenings to like Trout Mask Replica, but I fell in love with it at once, although I can’t remember when or where I first heard it (perhaps at the house of another friend – sharing musical finds was a huge part of our social life in those days). I misunderstood it completely, believing it to be improvised by a group of musicians who couldn’t play their instruments very well, something that now embarrasses me deeply, but the love was immediate. Even if I didn’t ‘get it’ intellectually or technically, I got it on another level.

Although I can’t remember the first time I heard Trout Mask, I can recall the first time I listened to Beefheart’s next two albums: Lick my Decals Off, Baby and The Spotlight Kid. Both happened in a record shop in Dudley where you could listen to an album before you bought it, which must be about the only time in history where Dudley has been anywhere remotely near the cultural cutting-edge. I didn’t take immediately to Decals in the way that I had to Trout Mask (although it was soon to become my favourite Beefheart album, and still is), and I absolutely hated The Spotlight Kid. I can remember shouting out in the shop, my earphones still on, ‘He’s sold out! Beefheart’s sold out!’ God, I was embarrassing at times.

It wasn’t only ‘avant-garde’ stuff that I remember, though: I recall my first hearing of Wilson Pickett’s Land of 1000 Dances very clearly. I was on the back seat of a coach (although we called it a ‘charabang’) on its way to Blackpool for my family’s annual holiday and the song came on the driver’s radio. Again my love was instant. It just sounded so exciting and I couldn’t wait to find out what this song was. I also remember the first time I heard Reach Out, I’ll Be There by the Four Tops. I was back in our middle room, this time listening to the Sunday programme which played the Top Twenty (and later, I think, the Top Thirty). The intro to the song knocked me out, and I still think that somehow, and I can’t begin to explain why, it shows instant class, something that demands that you listen to the rest of the song.

OK, enough of music. Let’s turn to painting.

Almost the only time I can definitely remember first seeing a specific painting was Richard Hamilton’s collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?. This was on the front cover of a book about Pop Art that I found in my little local library (at least, that is how I remember it – it is possible that it was inside a book about post-war painting because I also seem to remember a Jackson Pollock in the same book, which I didn’t like at all). I suspect that my memory here has more to do with carnality than with Art. It is hard for young people in this age of mass porn to imagine, but at that time any public show of male flesh was exceedingly rare, so, for a gay teenager like me, this was about as good as it got. Anyway, the male flesh led to my borrowing a book which spelled out that Art didn’t have to be boring religious pictures from hundreds of years ago which I felt no connection with at all: it could be about now, just as music didn’t have to be Mozart and Beethoven and the stuff that my school tried so desperately to make us appreciate.

After the previous paragraph, I recognise that I need to up my cultural capital, so I want to add that the only other painting I specifically remember seeing for the first time is The Potato Eaters. When I first went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was aware of only the most famous paintings by Van Gogh such as the various Sunflowers, The Starry Night, The Night Café, Wheatfield with Crows, and so on. At the time, the exhibition was broadly chronological, so one of the first things I saw on entering was a painting which felt totally unlike a Van Gogh work to my untutored mind, The Potato Eaters, plus several other paintings from his time in Nuenen. I liked it at once, though, and I feel that I have never learned so much in one museum trip as I did during that visit (at the time there were not the crowds with cellphones that often make visiting famous galleries such a joyless chore nowadays).

One movie I remember seeing for the first time is Eraserhead by David Lynch, who passed away this week. To be more precise, I don’t remember sitting in the cinema and watching the film, but I do recall the journey home with my friend. It felt as if the bus was taking us through the twisted, surreal urban landscape of the film and we had entered its nightmare world. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling at all and we both felt it. Other than Eraserhead, I have many vivid memories from films, an artform which generally seems to implant its visions in the brain, probably because of their oneiric quality. One in particular I remember was watching Hitchcock’s The Birds on TV and then going to the pub across the road to buy some cigarettes and seeing the birds gathered on the telephone wires and feeling very scared indeed. The ship slowly drifting into the port in Murnau’s Nosferatu, followed by the mass exodus of rats, the visual arrival of evil, is another scene I will never forget.

I’d like to end my reminiscing now and talk more generally about our immediate reaction to works of art. There are artists with whom we feel an immediate connection: in my case, these would include Munch, De Chirico, Magritte, Ensor, Nolde, Bosch, Hopper, Rothko, Caravaggio, the Goya of the Black Paintings. Although I don’t remember the first time I saw the work of any of these, I do know that my liking for them was instant. Something clicked. I would contrast that with painters who I didn’t like that much at first but I learned to appreciate: Degas, Velasquez, Manet, Matisse, Rubens, Pollock. But no matter how much I now admire this latter group, I don’t think there will ever be the effortless connection that I felt, and still feel, with the former group. Nor should there be in my opinion. It’s good to learn about Art with a capital A, but when that destroys our instinctive preferences, I think something essential has been lost.

I also wonder why I have very little memory of the first time I read poems or works of fiction. Some of the plays of Strindberg and Genet had a strong effect on me when I first read them, as did fiction like The Catcher in the Rye and Siddhartha, but I don’t remember myself in the process of actually doing the reading (although I do remember sitting on a bus and reading The Pit and the Pendulum for the first time and being totally engrossed in the horror). I also remember reading Aesop’s fables as a child, in a set of blue encyclopedias in my home, and specifically a drawing of the fox who says that the grapes are sour. But other than that, I generally don’t remember my first reading of poems or novels. I think one possible reason why I don’t store literature in my memory in the same way as music or painting or film is that I am a writer myself and therefore I never quite switch off my critical faculty and lose myself in the work in the way I do when I approach artforms which I could never in a million years aim to emulate.

There may be something intrinsic to specific artforms that tends to make them more or less memorable. On one level, painting hits us in the face. We see the whole work at once before we begin to look at the details and start to take the work apart in our mind. There is a moment of instant reaction that we don’t get when we read literature as a process taking place in time. Despite also being temporal, music is different from literature in the sense that it surrounds us in a way that writing doesn’t and has a kind of immediacy and power which the latter can sometimes lack, as well as the visceral quality of sounds, especially drums and bass, reverberating through our body. A sense of occasion may also be important; there is something special about going to a concert or to a gallery which is not replicated by sitting quietly at home reading a book. Thus, a visit to the theatre is likely to be remembered more than reading the same text in an armchair and a movie may be more memorable in the cinema than when we watch it on a DVD.  Lulled by the darkness and the presence of an audience, we enter the world of a movie or a stage show. I know this entrance into an imaginary world is also true of reading in the sense that the story unfolds in our mind as we read – like me reading Poe on the bus – but we are more in control of the process and perhaps this makes our reaction less spontaneous.

In a way, I feel rather sad that we can never recapture that first moment of meeting a work of art that we love and which we sometimes become so habituated to that its shine begins to fade. I guess this is balanced by the gain of growing familiar with works of art that didn’t speak to us so instantly and elementally, and broadening aesthetically as we learn. But I personally find there are limits to this process. I don’t know if I’m typical, but my deeper loves rarely change all that much, and I will go to my grave loving Beefheart, Strindberg and Munch.