continued...
During that period my Caravan albums supplied me with ready-made roots. This
was a role I had created for them: I'd never seen the band live; I never
read the music press, so I didn't know anything about their personal lives
or their philosophies; and thanks to the rather murky photography common to
album covers of the time I didn't even know what they looked like. So no
extraneous information got between me and my Caravan albums, and I was able
to project on to them whatever I wanted or needed to.
Now I think you can understand why an unexpected invitation to see Caravan
live, more than a quarter of a century on, filled me with dread.
Caravan's career, like so many, was pretty much snuffed out by punk. While I
was co-opting them as the soundtrack to my own world, in the real world
their star was plummeting. Now a new interest in their back catalogue had
brought them together again, and they were touring. Did I fancy a ticket? I
supposed I did.
The dread had nothing to do with confronting the passage of time. No, my dread was more in the nature of the misgivings that come with meeting a pen-pal face-to-face at last: can they possibly bear the weight of expectations, suppositions, and imaginings
you've loaded on to them? How big a let-down is reality going to be? And it
was worse in my case: the lads from Canterbury had been a pretty well
permanent fixture on the juke-box in my head for over 20 years. Would
everything I had projected on to them dissolve the moment they walked on
stage?
You'll be glad to know that it didn't. They looked their age, of course; you
can't help that. But they were good, very good; and my own personal
soundtrack, which I had worried might be too fragile to withstand the shock
of seeing its creators in the flesh, proved far more robust than I had
feared. When I got home I put the records on again, and they hadn't
mysteriously transmuted from gold into base metal. They still took me to the
same place. The blue imagined hills were still all there.
Later, I took the brave step of looking up the band's web site and
discovered that Caravan's leader, Pye Hastings, now runs an equipment-hire
company. And you know what? I don't care.
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