Songs of Angst and Pain

Music has been my main preoccupation, for lack of saying obsession, for a good thirty years of my life. I breathed it, woke up with it, slept with it, and in between played and consumed it. In other words, I lived by it. Of course, back then the world was a different place, when youth manifested its own restlessness and concerns, in the physical sphere, the streets and the various outlets offered and opened to it. No one would have ever thought that pumping videos and using social media from the isolation of a bedroom to disseminate what would be tools to gain recognition, popular acclaim, modest or viral, as people today say, would be the way of the world. Space was space, and the young occupied it to feel alive. Back then people played in garages, and if you played loud enough, the neighbors, if they had not frowned upon you by then, would glance over. In the Eighties and for most of the Nineties, I played guitar and bass in many bands, in several countries. Though with hindsight, I acknowledge that they were really the same band, with close to the same identical sound, a mash of Mods-British Pop-Rock-Grunge, The Who flirts with the Jam and Dodgy, and Nirvana with Killing Joke courting Led Zeppelin, and also to be fair, with the addition of some distant fluid whiffs of the Chili Peppers. A symphony of energy and angst, of sound and free rebellion, the manifestation of rawness, were youth’s voice of choice. Yes, to be heard you had to be loud. Lots of travels were associated with all these bands, but regardless, I was always an integral part of the song writing team.
All the lyrics included in this volume reflect this gone-by world. Some were set to music, got recorded and or performed live. Others never went beyond the worn out coffee-stained pages of the notebook . . . They were songs of angst and pain, made of fickle flames desperate to find a hearth to express themselves.