‘Dress Sexy at My Funeral’ by Aoife Barry
Dress sexy at my funeral, my good wife. I was seventeen when I first heard those words, sung by a baritone voice coming from small black speakers perched high up in the corner at the local shop I worked in. Every Thursday evening for many months, while on a late shift, I’d hear that song waft down from above where they kept the penny sweets, and each time I’d wonder about its meaning.
The radio show’s presenter was Dave Fanning, the band was Smog, and I had no real idea what the song was about. As I’d hand out change and pack cereal boxes and sliced pans into plastic bags, I’d ask myself: why would somebody want their wife to turn up to their funeral, dressed sexy? It was one of those things that didn’t make sense when I was seventeen, when I didn’t really understand sex, or revenge, or even the permanence of death.
But I knew that there was something about this song, something I couldn’t verbalise, which drew me to it. I sang it to myself, my soprano voice shifting the vocals up from the deep well of the baritone. Still, when it came to music, I saw myself as a listener, not a performer. Performing was for those with a gift, for people who grew up having music lessons and had the confidence to take to the stage. Not for people like me, who couldn’t play an instrument and didn’t even know how to go about learning one.
As for the thought of getting on stage, as much as I wanted to see myself as someone who could do that, I went from an outgoing, talkative person to a shy wallflower once the opportunity presented itself. It was like any ability I had suddenly hid in the dark when the spotlight came for it.
As a child, I attempted to audition for a play at a youth group – the only role I was suitable for was that of a cat. A cat who didn’t even meow, much less have any lines in human language. When I tried a few years later to audition for a musical, I was told I had the voice, but ‘the performance let you down’. My shyness and lack of confidence held me back. So I left music to those who could actually perform it, and buried deep down the desire to one day become that singer I felt I could be.
It was when I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager that music caught hold of me. I went from a teeny-bopper worshipping at the wipe-clean altar of the boy band – Boyzone first, then Backstreet Boys, assorted bands in between – and their sanitised look and sound, to someone grabbing hungrily at the other genres music had to offer me.
I grew up with parents who loved all the good stuff the 1960s and 1970s had to offer: Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, CSNY, Carole King, James Taylor. We’d sing along to Sweet Baby James in the car, four children sandwiched in the back seat.
There was a summer, too, when we went on holidays in France with just one album to listen to: Stars by Simply Red, on tape. I was too young to care about whether it was cool or not. It was cool to me, in that roasting-hot car as we sped past fields of sunflowers. My dad told me one afternoon that lightseeking sunflowers turn their heads towards the sun; hours later, as the flowers stood with their backs to us, I saw that he was right.
*
But despite all of this absorbing myself in music – making up radio shows, taping songs off late-night shows on 2FM, and compiling mixtape after mixtape – I continued to believe I could never be someone who could make music myself. I’d watch friends start bands and take music lessons, and never think I could do that too.
I didn’t think about the reasons why I believed all of this. So I decided to do something else: to write about music, to analyse it, to look critically at it. And to play records – to be a selector if I couldn’t be a performer.
As I got older, being female and ‘into music’ felt a little like a battle at times. A battle to show that, yes, I do know my stuff. At DJ sets when I was in college, the question ‘what label were Nirvana on?’ would sting. I’d ask myself: if I were a guy would I be asked that basic question? I’d wonder if every query was really underscored by the belief that I couldn’t actually know anything about music at all; that it was just pretend.
And yet, I was different to a lot of the boys I knew – the things that I remembered and catalogued about the music I loved were not always the same things they remembered and catalogued.
I wanted to spend the night writing the lyrics to Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ into a notebook more than I wanted to memorise every single label he was ever connected to. I knew I’d get to that information when I wanted to. But I didn’t want to think that my version of obsession was somehow inferior because sometimes I didn’t remember the minute details of someone’s career. Knowledge is power, but what power does emotion have when it comes to music?
But there were also the guys who saw my interest and fed it: with tapes and CDs, and DVDs filled with back catalogues of obscure bands I’d only heard the name of. They saw my love and handed out albums like sweets: taste this one, you’ll love this one, try this.
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It took a long time for me to take that leap from listener to wannabe performer.
It took a long time for me to take that leap from listener to wannabe performer. Perhaps it’s not a leap, more of a few shaky steps in heels on a cobbled street. I don’t have a desire to become a multi-million-selling rock star. But I wanted to see if I could play guitar, so at the ripe old age of thirty-two I took lessons and learned a few chords.
Though it became clear that my progress would be slow, lacking the teenage dream of hours of practice time, it felt freeing to try. (Even if the guitar, these days, spends a lot of time judging me silently from the corner of the room about the fact I haven’t practiced.) It felt powerful, too. I realised that I had venerated the idea of ‘learning guitar’ above what it actually deserved. It is, at its most basic, a series of repetitive actions that need to be learned by heart. Your muscles need to be awoken to learn new movements. Those who turn those actions into something special – well, they’re the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place.
Still, the ability to simultaneously play guitar and sing for friends eludes me. I have taken the first steps towards becoming that person who can be called upon at a sing-along, but I’m still not at the stage where my knees don’t knock together when I sing. I started taking singing lessons, and at first found them a nerve-wracking experience, waiting for the moment when I’d get the confidence boost I craved. In April, at a jazz singing lesson, I sang in front of the class and for the first time felt a surge that told me that, yes, I had finally done it. I had shown what I was capable of. The sheet music trembled in my sweaty, shaking hand.
There have been other moments of progress – for one, actually singing in public, outside of a singing class. At my sister’s wedding, my mother’s partner could be relied on to whip out the guitar for group sing-alongs. So I did what I’d always wanted to do but never had done, and learned songs to sing. I was shaking after that first time singing The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’ as faces around me were lit up by fairy lights, but it was a mix of excitement and fear – not just fear alone – that caused that reaction.
Like a flower unfolding, slowly I’m going from a blushing, reluctant singer to someone who has songs she can actually sing in front of others. Am I brimming with confidence? No. Am I a step closer to who that teenage me wanted to be? Yes.
I’ve also, despite myself, done something I thought I would never get to do: I joined friends for a few no-pressure, low-key practices, and sang my first songs with a band. When the thump of the drums kicked in for the first time, it became crystal clear to me why people join bands.
That deep thrill of energy as each drumbeat hits, starting at your feet and running like sparks up through your body. It was the same thrill as when I listen to a stirring piece of music, a thrill that I can’t fully define, but one that shouldn’t be denied to someone because of the accepted, restricted belief of who or what a musician should be.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me how it felt to perform with the band, but it was an emotional jolt – what Oprah would call an ‘aha!’ moment.
Aha! Playing music is as great as they say it is.
But I felt some sadness, too, for the young me who never had the opportunity to do this because she told herself she couldn’t. Is it too late to learn this lesson at thirty-three?
*
We had a childminder, Theresa, whose eldest daughter gave me two tapes when I was twelve: Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette, and Tiger Bay by Saint Etienne. I ignored Saint Etienne and fell for Morissette’s songs about broken hearts and bad boyfriends. I didn’t understand what going down on someone in a theatre was about, but I knew it was something I probably shouldn’t be doing at that age.
That year I also became obsessed with Whatever by Aimee Mann – that impossibly cool cover of her, dressed in black and wearing Doc Martens, lying in a weird recovery position on a beach. I’d retreat to my bedroom to listen to my special tapes, sit on the wooden floor and prise open the plastic cassette covers, then pore over the lyrics to learn them by heart. Like with Smog and Alanis, Mann introduced me to concepts that I also wondered about: she sang about ‘Jacob Marley’s chain’, and ‘calling someone uncle’. I had no idea what these things meant, and their exoticness made the album even more meaningful.
When I was fifteen, my dad’s friends from Australia – who he met while they were hitchhiking, back when hitchhiking wasn’t associated with the idea of being murdered – visited Ireland. In a small town in Cork on a drizzly day, they handed me a present: a CD copy of Frogstomp by Silverchair. Three grungy teenagers from Oz with long hair, a pretty blond frontman, and lyrics that belied their young age. I fell hard for them, and their album with a grotesque frog on the cover.
At sixteen, a soon-to-be boyfriend pressed a taped copy of Grace by Jeff Buckley into my hands. He’d first heard this guy, this dead guy, this tragic dead guy, while on a school exchange in France. His host was heartbroken over Buckley’s recent drowning, and would spend hours listening to him outside in the back garden in the sun. Such tragedy, such beauty.
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In my apartment, there are thousands of CDs, a few feet of vinyl, and a plastic box somewhere filled with old tapes. They’re half-heartedly alphabetised, and most of them need to be rehomed in a new set of shelves. But they’re a little history of my life, from the early handmade mixtapes with sun-bleached handwriting, to the dusty records picked up in Dublin charity shops. When my mum visits, she always casts an eye over them and says ‘So, you’re not planning on selling them any time soon?’ We all have our objects that we’re attached to beyond reason, our talismans that we imbue with a certain power.
Music can fall so easily out of our lives. As I get older, I have to make more of a deliberate attempt to discover new music. I realise that gigs are on that I knew nothing about. I have dry spells where nothing new I listen to moves me. I question if I’ve lost the ability to know what’s good and what’s not. I get frustrated with myself, and with music.
But then, when I find my way back to music, the relief is glorious. I feel emotions deep inside me that are stirred again, thanks to melodies that remind me of my formative teen years. I’m taken back to when my friends and I would save up to buy longed-for albums, when I’d carry around a Walkman and a stack of tapes or CDs and talk to whoever would listen about this great new album I was obsessed with.
I’m transported back to that holiday in Greece with my friends where I listened to nothing but tapes of Elliott Smith; to the infamous family holiday in Gran Canaria where us kids fought all the time, but I sought solace in the first Coldplay album – and then the music snob in me flinches.
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Music is intangible and tangible.
You can observe as a woman moves her fingers into the arthritic claw of a D chord on the fretboard of a guitar. You can hold a CD near a window and watch as a prism of colours appear when it catches the light. You can blow the dust off a vinyl record and watch it skip over the grooves.
But you can’t touch music. It exists, and it doesn’t exist.
*
Over the years, I started to question more why I didn’t see myself as a music creator. I slowly realised that I had absorbed much of the sexism that’s ingrained into the music world. I hadn’t questioned enough the acceptance of a male-heavy canon – why, when I bought classic albums they were invariably by a male musician or all-male band. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Jeff Buckley, Simon & Garfunkel. For much of my early listening, I didn’t really question why I was being told I had to listen to certain albums, always made by men, to ensure I knew enough about music. It was as though it simply didn’t matter whether I listened to female musicians or not – that their music meant nothing special.
And as I grew more aware of this, I noticed too the absence of women from lists of best guitarists or best drummers, and the reappearance of the same male musicians on the front of magazines like Hot Press or Uncut. The message was silent but unsubtle: there’s something inherently male and inherent in males about having musical knowledge and musical ability.
But none of that is true. A person’s talent doesn’t come from their gender, or their race, or their age, or their colour. Almost anyone can pick up an instrument and learn. It’s a combination of luck, hard work, talent, timing, and contacts that turns a person into a legendary multi-million-selling rock star. But if we want to make music, we can. Even if we think it’s too late. Even if there is a small voice inside us telling us we shouldn’t try.
Though the years move on and music moves on, the emotional hold that music has over me never dissipates. Every album I have loved has worn a new groove on me. Put a needle on my skin and hear them pulse and swell through my veins.
From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017
About the Author
Aoife Barry is a Corkonian journalist living in Dublin. She works for TheJournal.ie, has been published in the Irish Times and Irish Independent, and contributes regularly to RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena. When she’s not writing, she’s indulging in her obsession with music in some form or another.
