Something Changed (on music and memory pt. 1)

On Pulp, the Junior Proms and the problem of being your own unreliable narrator.

I am going to tell you a story that’ll sound like a lie.

When I was about ten, I was in the Junior Proms. I can’t prove that it happened, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to trust me.

I think I am the only person in my family who remembers this. I wouldn’t know how to find the other participants even if I tried. All I know is my Dad’s then-girlfriend heard tell of a summer music programme for kids. So me, my sister, and my quasi-step-sister armed ourselves with our instruments and set off for London.

For a hazy series of weekends, I’d be bussed or trained up to the BBC studios in Maida Vale and would spend a day in a rehearsal room with a bunch of other kids and my violin, composing something or other.

My sister and my not-sister, older and probably more interested in being cool than I was, got bored and dropped out. I stayed. I don't remember a single name or face. I don’t recall making any friends. I remember rehearsing in a room with a recording booth. The booth had a plaque which claimed that Bing Crosby had recorded White Christmas there. I remember two older girls playing a song on the piano which made me feel weird inside. I recently learned, from Janet Jackson’s resurgent summer hit Someone to Call my Lover, that the song was Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1.

I’ve told my sister these stories. She doesn’t remember any of it.

This is the problem with memoir, with memory. It’s a community endeavour. You need other people to back you up. You can’t build a house with one brick, you can’t put together an orchestra of children with just one instrument. I’ve tried Googling Junior Proms 1995 and I’ve come up blank every time. There’s a frustration attached to this. I’ll never know more about this moment in my life, I’ll only know less as time goes on. It makes today a desperate act of archiving.

There is a reason I am telling you this. Today; Pulp emerged as a surprise act at Glastonbury. Jarvis Cocker said he first played the festival 30 years ago. And 30 years ago, probably within weeks of this performance, Jarvis Cocker and I met in the canteen at the BBC studios where I was practising for, yes, the Junior Proms.

I didn’t know who he was at the time, but he was the first celebrity I’d ever met. I queued up with those other kids to get him to sign a scrap of paper for me. Of course, I don’t have it now. I was, am, a chaotic, messy child. Another aide memoire lost to time. I remember him being comically tall, a floral shirt perhaps, but not much else.

For a short time after our fateful meeting I became a superfan, a devotee. I bought their singles on cassette from Our Price in Letchworth. Disco 2000, then Something Changed. The tape had a fold-out insert, various close-ups of a woman getting undressed. I’m sure they’re in my expansive tape collection that sits in my dad’s shed. I am anxious about mould and rot setting in.

As a ten-year-old old I couldn’t get to grips with the lyrics, I wrote this song, two hours before we met. I’m still not sure that I understand it. But the song gave me that feeling you get at that age when you don’t really know what love, or even attraction, is. A longing, a sense that it’ll mean something, later.

Like all the things I’ve lost since then, memories, autographs, sometimes hope, my love for Pulp did not sustain. Alas, as I am writing this Jarvis sings out of my TV and I am only vaguely paying attention. My boyfriend is rapt, he saw him exactly two weeks ago in London, I went to see Beyonce at the same time. Last year I bought us tickets to see Pulp in Cardiff, but I went to see Jill Scott with my mother instead. Something Changed.

Something Changed plays. We sing loudly and hold hands.

Where would I be now? Where would I be now if we never met? Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?

Maybe.

In December a few days before or after our anniversary, our friends took us to a cavernous underground bar in Edinburgh. It was one of those rare, perfect nights out that you’re not expecting. A quick drink that just gets away from you, goes down in legend for years to come. We wandered into a karaoke room and a man was singing a lacklustre, obnoxious, affected rendition of Something Changed. We stood at the back, joyfully screaming the lyrics back at him. It’s one of my most carefree memories of us, grateful that we are still ridiculous, after these long years.

As far as I recall, my whole family attended my Junior Proms performance. Apparently it was broadcast on the radio, though I never heard it. We were offered tickets to the real Proms later that day at the Royal Albert Hall but nobody had the appetite to drive into central London. I maintained a fixation with the Proms for a few years through my tweens and teens, even though I quit playing violin when I was eleven. Something Changed.

Pulp is wrapping up a nostalgic performance. Jarvis Cocker rips up a letter, utters the words;

“History and stuff like that doesn’t matter, we’re here now”.