Music has an incredible capacity for teleportation. It can pick you and drop you off quicker than the DeLorean, taking you ten, twenty, however many years backwards to a single moment and time. It’s funny, you can almost smell it, taste it and see it. Memory is like that dream you never want to wake up from, and sometimes it just drifts back into your head, but the more you try to catch it the more it slips through your hands like smoke. Here’s one of our own that we’ve managed to capture in words.
As soon as the opening riff to Buck Rogers kicks in, it all floods back. The winter car journeys to pick my mum up from work. Something so mundane, but something I just can’t quite forget.
“He’s got a brand-new car, looks like a Vauxhall Vectra,” Dad sings quickly, rewriting the lyrics as we sit in an empty Morrisons carpark. “It’s got leather seats. It’s… not got a CD Player!” As the drums kick in, we nod our heads in unison; the seatbelts are the only thing keeping us from rocking the car.
If I was lucky, I could sometimes experience this through the sunroof, stood on my tiptoes in the backseats as we drive the car through the empty spaces. The faint glow of the Morrison’s sign lights up the white and yellow lines below us, as we drift around corners. Wind in my hair, without a care.
Looking back on it, it was probably something more like the Slow and the Steady instead of the Fast and the Furious, but with the wind ripping through my scrunchie, and the booming chorus, it felt like a moment out of a blockbuster movie.
“I think we’re gonna make it, I think we’re gonna save it yeah, so don’t you try and fake it, anymore.”
At this point, we would always peak the interests of those around us, who started to look bewildered at this small head sticking out of the top of a car shouting gibberish. But to me, all that mattered was the Welsh grunge. Absolutely butchering every melody Grants Nicholas formed, we sung our hearts out, often on repeat as doing donuts wasn’t the same with any other song.
Just as the last line rang out, and we finally caught our breaths, around the corner my mum would appear as if she was waiting for our little performance to end. And even if the show was over today, tomorrow we’d bring back the Bucking encore.
Listen to Feeder on Spotify and Apple Music.
