30 Days of Music: #016

Today: A journey back into my generic-indie-kid past.

An initial disclaimer: both ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are used loosely here.

Apply Some Pressure was never my favourite Maximo Park song. To be clear, there were some of their songs I really loved. I haven’t listened to Maximo Park for ages, but I’m not ashamed of liking them, the way I might be with other bands I liked around the period: y’know, the likes of ___, ____ and even The ____s! Cringe!

I once saw frontman Paul Smith cry at a gig*, which is enough guarantee of authenticity for me. They had enough of The Smiths’ stainless-steal melancholy/wit combo about them (and some of the tortured vocab-testing t

hat I’d come to treasure as ‘density’ in bands like Los Campesinos!) that means their lyrics hold up. I don’t have to cringe at remembering my teenaged self earnestly emoting to them.

Not that I don’t have some embarrassing memories of myself soundtracked to this song, you understand. But that’s my fault, not Maximo Park’s.

I realise I’ve spent the majority of this ‘hate’ post defending the song. That’s because I don’t have anything against the song, and I don’t want to deny the music that helped form me, cool or not. The truth is, though, that now the song just doesn’t really do much for me. I can listen to it without thinking or feeling one way or the other. Overexposure, I suppose. Years of clubs and parties and radios playing this song and its lasting legacy is this:

I was never very good at it on Singstar. It was always harder to sing than I expected.

*An anecdote which, when told to any girls I foolishly thought it might impress, inevitably became heard as ‘I cried at a Maximo Park gig’. This was immediately hastily denied. I’m afraid, readers, that I was once not the sex machine you see before you today.