One Crowded Hour
Hush. Like all the best things in life, it starts quietly.
By streets and miles, leaps and bounds, there is absolutely no competition for the song that meant the most to me in 2006. Unusually, it even manages to be a track that was released over this past rather strange year, too. For me, that’s almost unheard of in these times of feeling so pathetically out of touch.
I have been known to listen to One Crowded Hour, by the Australian band Augie March, some thirty or forty times in a row. I will admit to having cried whilst it played, and to being unable to stop the tears once they started flowing. I will confess to having been almost unhealthily obsessed by the song - by the lofty classicism of its lyrics and the dreamlike atmospherics of its music, all of which is then intricately carved round a melody that can only possibly exist in the couldn’t-care-less musical freedom of the 21st century, whilst at the same moment sounding so instantly recognisable that it seems as if it might have sprung fully-formed out of any decade from the 1930s onwards.
“Far from these nonsense bars and their nowhere music,
It’s making me sick and I know it’s making you sick.
There’s nothing there, it’s like eating air
It’s like drinking gin with nothing else in,
And that doesn’t hold me together …"
I’m drinking gin tonight too, albeit with something else in. Tonic, of course. Purely for medicinal purposes, I assure you, because after six months without so much as a drop of alcohol passing my lips I am having to be careful. Very careful. Tonight, I’m a long way from the thudding beats and cacophonour noise of those nonsense bars too, although some four hours before the new year dawns I can already hear the first revellers carousing their way to the drunken hellholes of south-west London. For a moment there, I wanted to be with them. It is New Year’s Eve, after all. But quite honestly, with or without the events of the past few months, I think this end of year evening would have found me exactly where I am now. I can’t bear the seemingly enforced jollity. Give me solitude and an overgrown path through my own thoughts any night of the week.
“Well, put me in a cage full of lions,
I’ll learn to speak lion, in fact I know the language well.
I picked it up while I was versing myself
In the languages they speak in hell …”
You talk, and I’ll listen. I’ll cast nervous, shy glances in your direction, and I’ll appear to be distracted, but I will be listening. I’m all ears. Always. I may even reply in frames of reference that we can both understand, because I’ve taken the time and care to learn how to communicate in those terms. Your terms. Everyone else’s terms. I have to be able to do that just in order to get by, to exist. I can seem normal, and sometimes I even want to pretend to be that way. When everything is too confusing, I really do desire such small town normality. It makes the day-to-day reality easier.
But look behind my eyes, and you’ll see me thirsting for the words that only you and I understand. Our secret code. I want to open my mouth and let loose mundanity, but have it mean so much more by the time it has wormed its way into your mind. I want you to read the movements of my lips and hear the cadences of my speech, and be able to grasp their meaning as if I was the dusty, cobweb-covered Enigma machine inside your head, decoding clarity from this banal ball of braying confusion. Will you do that for me? Be that for me? I will for you, I promise.
“And for one crowded hour,
You were the only one in the room.
I sailed around all those bumps in the night
To your beacon in the gloom …”
There. That’s it. That’s the sum total of all I ask for in life. I don’t care for popularity or to be appreciated simply at a surface level. All surface, no tension. For one crowded hour - and all our hours are crowded, because that’s the nature of this frenzied modern whirl - I want to be the only thing you see. The only person. The only target in your sights. Uncaring as to what’s happening out there, in here, even right next to us. Just to be, because if we never get the chance for being then there is little point in continuing our pitiful existence. Constantly rush, rush, rushing can never replace even one single moment of simply being with one who understands you, one who gets you and all your foibles, oddities and strange ways. Can you spare sixty minutes for that? Do you have a window for me in your hectic schedule? Because I do. I’ll clear the decks for you, I promise. I’ll move hell and high water and heaven besides. I’ll take an eraser to every appointment if it means that I get the chance to appreciate you and what you mean to me.
That’s all I ask of a true friend, a confidant, a relative and, naturally, a lover. And since we’re alone and there’s absolutely no one listening, you can tell me. Whisper it in my ear. Take a confessional risk as the year draws to a close. Go on. I know you don’t like to admit it because it seems selfish, wanting and needy, but that’s all you ask too, isn’t it?
Augie March are my secret. My own wonderful secret. Over the past twelve months, I have warily revealed their existence only to those people whom I could be sure understood me and would grasp the true nature of sharing sixty minutes in my company. I still want this eerie, timeless music to be mine and mine alone, but for this moment I want to share it with you too. I don’t know why, and I may come to regret it tomorrow. But for now, call it a parting gift to a year when this four minutes and fifty seconds of sublime melody rarely left my heart or my head.
Close your eyes and listen, but tell no one. This is our secret. Our understanding. Our silence in an all too crowded hour and an all too crowded, maddening world.