a hatful of hollows

During the previous trip out here I would cheer myself up buying CDs on play247.com. Of course, I couldn’t get them delivered to me here. It was still cheering, a bit, to know they’d be sitting at home. And this was all part of a bigger plan, too. I need to rewind a bit: I sold my record collection, with almost everything else, when I moved to Spain in 1998. That’s a whole other story. But now I’m trying to re-collect it all, on CD this time.

So that’s how I’m now listening to The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, now. I’ve been saving it up for the last five weeks and it’s like uncorking a bottle of my youth, whisking me back twenty odd years to being a student, remembering the parties, the friends, the buildings, the clothes I wore: white baggy trousers, a red and white Indian cotton shirt. And the music sounds as fresh as it did in nineteen eighty whatever it was: Morrissey’s articulation of our comical anguish. And there’s never been anything else quite like Johnny Marr’s guitar-playing on this album.