My favourite album – ‘The Real Thing’ by Faith No More – turned thirty years old this month and quite simply I am in awe of that, because I’m still listening to it after all these years, and it’s still sounding as fresh as it always has done.

I’m not an especially young person – which is somewhat depressing to admit – but only in very recent years have I started to acknowledge how long I’ve actually been around for.  Up until what still seems like not long ago, many things still seemed ‘new’, but somewhere between then and now, some of my friendships passed the quarter-century mark, and some of the music I grew up with celebrated similar anniversaries of dancing around in my lugholes.  I can clearly remember when these things were still brand new to me, which is why this realisation seems so bizarre.

Older generations will understandably think little of these timescales in comparison to theirs, but to me they’re still amazing.  Time itself is amazing.  We live, day-to-day, feeling as though today isn’t that different to yesterday, and won’t be that different to tomorrow either, but somewhere it all changes.  Life is only punctuated by the sleep which separates one day to another yet somehow, somewhere, we turn from babies throwing tantrums to fully-blown people.  Possibly still throwing tantrums.

To think that there can be music out there which still feels as magic to listen to as the first time you heard it, decades ago, is remarkable to me.

 The Real Thing has traveled with me for most of my life.  Having a big age gap between my older brother and sister was a blessing in introducing me to great music at an age where without them, my choices probably wouldn’t have extended much beyond the top 10.  I used to hear them playing this record in their bedrooms or through their Walkmans (the cassette ones with the metal headphones that had that awful, itchy foamy stuff around the ear-pieces) on long, family car-journeys.  And then I got into the music too, and this one remained a firm favourite.

I’ll refrain from going into detail about why I like this record and what it has meant to me over the years, as that sort of thing is unlikely to interest anybody else, but I just want to take a moment to publicly appreciate records like this, and music’s meaning and power generally.  It’s not just a fleeting form of entertainment, but it can also be a life-long companion, and a soundtrack to many cherished and perhaps not-so-cherished yet significant moments.

Do you have a record that means to you what The Real Thing does to me?

Song of the Day: Faith No More – Epic

An obvious choice for this month’s post, but a good choice all the same.  I was torn between this and, ‘From Out of Nowhere’ which I love just as much. The final couple of minutes – largely instrumental – are particularly emotive.  I just can’t believe this stuff is thirty years old.  Well done FNM.