The Day My Mind Exploded

I was fourteen years old, sitting in my friends council house bedroom. When he stuck an audio cassette into his broken down, single tape deck boom-box and uttered three simple words that changed my life forever.

“Listen to this.”

With a decidedly rusty mechanical clunk, the opening bars of Holidays In The Sun by the Sex Pistols rattled out of the one working speaker, sending a torrent of electrical impulses across my supple young brain. New synapses were jaggedly carved in savage grooves, filling my mind with white light and igniting a sonic passion that still burns brightly decades later.

Sure, I’d heard plenty of music before, it was always around. On the radio or on the television but this was the first time I’d been exposed to the raw, uncompromising energy of punk rock and it sure as hell wasn’t the fucking ‘Chicken Dance’.

I had no idea what they were singing about. I didn’t know the names of the band members or where they were from but an indelible impression stained my brain like industrial cattle dye.

These days I consume an incredibly broad spectrum of music, Synthwave to Classical, Funk to Metal, experimental noise tracks and philosophy lectures set to lo-fi beats to name a few.

But when the day is done and the sun has set, I’ll always be a PUNK at heart.