Something happened that summer.
⚡A moment of calm and inspiration from The Buzz⚡
There are teenagers in houses across the country right now with revision timetables on the kitchen wall.
Textbooks on the table. Colour-coded notes.
And a constant kind of low-grade tension that lingers around the house.
GCSEs. A-levels. The annual ritual where young people are solemnly informed that absolutely everything in the rest of their life depends on the next few weeks.
You watch them stress and you remember being exactly that age.
And what do you remember?
Not the revision. Not even the exams.
The music.
That’s what exam season actually was. Not the grade you eventually got that felt like life or death and then turned out to matter significantly less than advertised.
It was the cassette you had on while pretending to revise.
An album that owned that particular May and June, the one that became the soundtrack to a summer that hadn’t quite arrived yet but felt absolutely inevitable.
The summer I was revising for my GCSEs was the Second Summer of Love.
Acid house was exploding.
The Haçienda was at its peak.
The Smiths had just split.
Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was everywhere.
It was the perfect summer to be 16.
As for my A-Levels, it was also a magically musical summer.
Spike Island had just happened. The Stone Roses, 28,000 people, a reclaimed chemical waste site in Widnes. “Fools Gold” had changed everything the previous autumn.
Madchester was at its absolute peak. Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, The Charlatans all ascending simultaneously.
And then Italia 90 started in June.
England vs Germany in the semi-final. Gazza crying. Penalties. New Order’s “World In Motion” on every radio. The country was simultaneously heartbroken and euphoric for about three weeks solid.
It was such a great time to be alive, great for partying but not so great a time to be revising.
And if you put one of those songs on now.
I’m back in that room. Window open. Slight breeze. Text books laid out on the desk in front of me.
The whole summer still ahead and completely unwritten.
At the time, the exams felt like everything.
But, they weren’t.
I don’t remember even a moment of them - the revision, the stress, the exams, the results.
I remember the music, and how it made me feel.
The music was everything.
Still is.
And for those kids with their noses in their books right now, I wonder what the soundtrack to their summer will be.
I just hope for their sakes that it has the same life affirming effect on them that it had on us.
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That feeling of your life stretching out in front of you, unwritten.