A quotation from a Peanuts cartoon. Lucy is giving advice to Charlie Brown at her little wooden psychiatrist stall:
Lucy: Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward – they want to see where they’re going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?
Charlie Brown: I’ve never been able to get one unfolded.
I note this today because it’s on a programme about politicians being funny. Denis Healey used it in the Commons to describe John Major.
***
While wondering about my own creative direction, I find myself drawn to an article in Spin magazine. It’s about people who used to be in bands – though far more celebrated than mine – before giving up music altogether. Justine from Elastica is now an abstract painter in California, having married a university professor. Once the Queen of Britpop, she says she ‘wanted out of England’ and has no plans to return to music. ‘That’s the great thing about anonymity,’ she says. ‘You have the freedom to reinvent yourself.’ An attractive, dignified sentiment, but it has the air of regret. That music was a mistake, and she’s much better now.
It’s certainly true of her former bandmate Donna, who went from being one of those people who take heroin while making music, to just taking heroin, to getting clean, and now – an equally familiar path – finding God. She’s a trainee priest at the Ichthus Link Church. ‘I realised how selfish I’d been.’ Is making music really more selfish than being a priest, if you’re having hit albums? I wonder here about the ‘selfishness’ of band reunions, too. But then, all decisions are selfishness of a kind. Charity can be vanity, too.
Tanya Donelly of Belly (and Throwing Muses, and The Breeders) is now a postpartum doula. Which I had to look up. It’s a sort of post-birth non-medical midwife. She says she found the rock band life incompatible with being a mother. I was going to say, well, Courtney Love managed it, didn’t she? Bad example.
My favourite quote, though, is from Miki Berenyi, formerly the singer with Lush and now a copy editor at Web User Magazine:
‘My job now isn’t as fun or exciting as it was to be in a band, but on the other hand, I don’t have to worry about complete strangers approaching me and telling me I’m a c—.’
This is what’s now known as Tall Poppy Syndrome. It’s particularly associated when contrasting the UK with the US, hence Ms Justine’s solution. But in my case, I’ll always attract that sort of thing, recognition or no. Even when I’m trying my hardest to seem normal.
Last week I was taking a break between bleachings and walked around the city with cropped dark-brown hair. I was also wearing my glasses, which I thought must surely have made me even more invisible. Fat chance. Two girls on the Archway Road:
‘OY! Harry Potter!’
(Once more unto the bleach…)
Tags: manesakes, Peanuts, people in bands, quotes
