by
Sean Murray
It is Christmas Day 2005, and finally, the CDs are mine. I play them once, loudly, in my bedroom. I want to absorb all the sounds at once, as if they could reshape me. When ‘Mother,’ the first track on John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, begins, the lines “Father, you left me/but I never left you” make my breath hitch. The words leap from the speakers into my soul, articulating my own distance from my father. I have never heard anything so raw, accusing, and intimate, speaking from somewhere I cannot name.
I never played the album again. It stayed slotted in my CD tower for years, case gathering dust. It was one of the last CDs my father bought me, along with Goo by Sonic Youth — two albums I had been reading about and imagining endlessly. He handed them over at the till without a word or question. Still, the gesture mattered more than the music: my father had bought me something before I had to start paying for everything myself.
He rarely put his hand in his pocket, even for me. Often, if my mother told him he needed to buy me something important — a new pair of football boots, for example — he had to ask his wife first. That he bought these CDs — even though they were Christmas presents and outside the “budget” — without argument or fuss, felt like a gift of attention, an acknowledgement that I still mattered in a way that usually went unspoken. His attention, when it came, felt precious enough to keep forever.
Nearly a decade earlier, in 1996, we drove around Liverpool in a hired convertible — or maybe a company car; I can’t remember exactly. The sun was high, the windows were down, and the air was hot and sticky. Wide roads, red-brick buildings, shuttered shops: Tuebrook passed by like a mirage. I had ‘Return of the Mack’ by Mark Morrison on tape, and we played it on repeat.
When the remix came on, he explained what a remix was. I remembered the quiet thrill I felt from my father teaching me something and a longing sense of possibility: moments alone with him felt sacred; for hours, it seemed nothing else in the world mattered but having him beside me. That afternoon, he became the father I wanted more of. That drive was what he could have been but never was.
Music divided us. He played it constantly in the car — never what I wanted. I would sit in the back with white knuckles, trying to tune into the rhythm of Motown and nineties R&B, picking up bits or songs that I liked (the eleven-minute version of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’) but still craving the albums I wanted to hear. He had a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks tucked deep in the glove compartment, but never played it, claiming I was “too young.” I longed for that silver disc behind its garish yellow sleeve, wishing I could hear other music that spoke to him and, through him, to me.
Years later, I had bought the CD and loaded it onto my iPod. Walking to the shop for him one Saturday afternoon, ‘Bodies’ blasting in my ears, I became aware of defiance and hope building within me. When I returned, I handed over the crisps, counted the change, then pulled the earphones out and turned the volume up, imagining that he might glance at me, catch a hint of what I was hearing, and respond. But he didn’t. Silence enveloped us, and when he turned up the volume on the television, it felt like a wall I could not scale.
Music became the space I tried to reach him — and eventually the space I found myself. I spent hours on music forums. I posted recommendations, crafted obsessively detailed album reviews, made endless playlists, and read Pitchfork critiques — all in the hope it might anchor me in the online world, and, vainly, in real life. At eighteen, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I dressed as if I belonged to the bands I loved, especially The Strokes. He once called me a “tatty-haired scruff” and said I wanted to be Julian Casablancas. He was right, and I was glad he noticed. My scruffiness was deliberate — a small declaration of who I was becoming.
I was obsessed with music then. I spent roughly seventy per cent of my wages on CDs and vinyl, trying to shape myself through sound. I wanted to belong to something bigger than my friends, my family, and my hometown. I sought out every album mentioned in NME or 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, a book worn and battered, yet still on my shelf. They were bands and albums I was supposed to know; owning them felt like a lifeline, a way to prove that I could become part of a world I had never yet touched.
Indie music became my language. Each new album release on a Monday was a marker, a way to remake myself, to belong to something I could control. In the city, passing buskers and faded posters, I pictured myself outside my family, outside our small routines, already rehearsing for the world ahead. Music gave me a private vocabulary, a way of feeling larger than I was.
Sometimes I pluck Plastic Ono Band from the shelf and hear the lyrics in my head: Father, you left me, but I never left you. They struck somewhere private, a space I could not name. I had played the album only once, yet the sound of that moment — the voice cutting through my bedroom, giving shape to the distance between me and my father through language — remained sharper than anything else. Music had become both a mirror and a map: the place where I tried to reach him, and the place where I ended up finding myself instead. I wanted music to bridge the distance; instead, it taught me to live with it.
Years later — just last week — walking through Church Street with Johnny Rotten sneering in my ears, I feel the same quiet pulse of independence. The city had moved on: shops had closed, been demolished, or had relocated around the corner. New faces filled the streets; old ones were missing.
I had moved on, too. Music remained entirely mine — a space I had claimed for myself. I understood then that belonging was never simple. Even when he gave, drove, spoke, or stayed silent, there was a distance that could not be crossed.
But for a few minutes once, in a convertible under the sun, the distance did not exist. Even now, walking through the city with Never Mind The Bollocks in my ears, I feel both the distance and the trace of closeness, inseparable. Music never closed the gap between us, but it gave me a way to live inside it. The CDs stayed in the tower, gathering dust, but the music lived in me, a rhythm that carried me on.
