I don’t throw parties.

Historically, I’m an introvert. There’s a clear way of spotting introverts. Recorded music versus live music. I prefer to stay home and listen to CDs (or the ipod). When I played music, I preferred writing and rehearsing to playing live. Even the great live bands…I prefer listening alone, in comfort.

Take the Hold Steady, a band that Q magazine are touting as one of the 10 hottest bands on the planet. Their sound is bar band – Replacements, Bruce Springsteen, etc, and a hot one at that. Yet I put that disc on (yes, the disc) and I’m taken away. I lie in my bed and imagine I’m at the gig. If you don’t understand that, then I’m never going to be able to explain it to you.

The Hold Steady album is amazing. It’s called Boys and Girls In America and it’s just that, a snap shot of drunken nights out, big nights, the meat market of modern dating and suburban life. As Jarvis cocker said – we drink and dance and screw cos there’s nothing else to do.

The album cover has a bunch of kids cheering, as if at a gig, looking up at the sky. It’s been quite a lauded album. All it does is celebrate normality, maybe even mundanity. But maybe that’s where we are heading.

So my household threw a party. I thought a lot about the Hold Steady song ‘Massive Nights’, and enjoyed it for what it was. Meeting people, dancing, wasted myself and more, and less, and all around. And I loved it. And we built nothing useful. We wrote no songs, made no progress, but we laughed and had fun and kissed and hugged and fell further and further away. The opposite of the Rimbaud tortured artist. Rimbaud can go get fucked. I never liked the guy anyway.

So maybe it’s not artistic. It’s not big. Maybe every orgasm we have is another novel lost. Myeh. The Zen revelation I had when I sat on my back step a good 16 hours later with a cup of tea is that you have to enjoy every moment that lets you enjoy it. And maybe we are passive. Maybe we could have left the house and saw some painting. Maybe we could have been chaining ourselves to a tree.

The party was great. It ended. We survived. And by surviving – we lived. It’s good enough for now. I put on the Hold Steady album, and listen and become introverted again. So yeah, like that dude John Mayer says, we are the generation that is waiting for the world to change more than doing something about it. This is life on earth, 2007, London. It’s as valid as anyone else’s. And we had some massive nights.

I smoked too much.

Danny

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