Fighting a Crystal.

Not long after I moved to London I was coming home from work with a friend and got on a train from Stratford to Homerton, which is a particularly untrendy part of Hackney. It’s the sort of place where people dress normally and listen to genres of music that exist for more than 10 minutes. In my standard lifelong-norm of jeans, hoodie and t shirt and now being in some form of punk band, I liked living there because I wasn’t forced to accept my own uncoolness on a day to day basis like I do in Shoreditch.

The train is an overground service and runs, at best, intermittently in the evenings, especially late at night. It was cold and I remember my scarf tugging at my beard and my breath trying to freeze itself to my skin. A guy sat opposite us on the train and asked what we were up to and, not being a huge fan of conversations with strangers while sober, I probably said something regarding coming home from work and being cold. Presumably, this was the opener he was waiting for, as he spent the rest of the journey talking about himself and his band and how awesome he/they were. I’m pretty sure he referred to his music as a “movement” as well. Just as soon as he had sat down, he left at Hackney Wick after having probably the most one-sided conversation of my life, and possibly even his. I didn’t know what to say, really. I didn’t care about his band, I didn’t care how awesome they were or how successful they might be. And it wasn’t because I have a problem with people that are excited about their bands, or talk a lot; it was because I was cold. So very, very cold.

People in bands do often seem to like talking about being in bands and playing gigs and its generally pretty boring conversation even for other people in bands. Bad gig stories? I could listen to that all day. Want to talk about gear? I’m a geek, I love that. Had a shitty tour or played with a terrible band? Tell me everything. But spend longer than one sentence describing your “sound” and what “messages” you want to “convey” and your “art” and I switch off and I’m lost forever. I guess I’m an asshole like that. I don’t like talking about that stuff at all.

I practically rushed home to check his band out, with probably some expectation of some overblown self-indulgent minimalist techno beat or something. I had no idea what to expect, as in all his conversation with me, he never gave me any real idea of the style of music they actually made. Anyway, I didn’t like it, as I expected. It wasn’t really bad, I just found it boring and pretty run of the mill. Maybe I never listened to it with an open mind, I don’t know. On listening to it now, I still feel the same way.

Well turns out they must be doing something right. I just saw them on the front-page of Myspace. So the question is, are they an awesome band, or am I an asshole?

I always preferred the name:

"Crystal MethHeads".