Youth

Later on this evening I will be attempting to recapture mine. Music is a funny thing. It’s bizarre how a snatch of tune or a lyric can send you hurtling back to the time when you first heard it, be sad, happy, there are very few things that are as evocative at prodding your nostalgia bone as music.

I got into the whole boy band thing late in life. Age wise I should have been a Take That fan, and much as I like them I was never the crazed fan that a lot of people were. Growing up in Spain meant that our exposure to the boy band phenomena was pretty limited. Most of the people in my class at school were into Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses, Aerosmith. And whilst those bands are in my personal discography they were never a passion.

The Summer I was sixteen I was at a GMTV early morning beach party in Spain and met Boyzone, a combination of lonely teenagedom and those delicious Oirish accents meant that they had me from hello. I turned into one of those obsessive teenagers, clipping magazines, recording tv appearances, had I been internet savvy at that age I imagine that I would have had a blog detailing how gorgeous I thought Ronan was and how much their music meant to me.

Boyzone were my secret passion that no one at school knew about. Amongst friends who loved Blues Traveller and classic Beatles I was a bit of an oddity. So I kept my love for Boyzone locked in the closet and sung along in my bedroom dreaming of the day that Ronan would come along and sweep me off my feet. The only concert I have been to in my life was a Boyzone concert. I was one of the oldest there other than the parents who had taken their young children. I took my younger cousin and when we sat in our seats the Dad next to me mentioned how good he thought I was to bring her and sit through the screams of young teenagers that are a special pitch all of their own. I think I got away with it until he saw me standing, swaying and crying when they sang Key to my Life.

Then university came and the shame grew. I used to have sneak out to buy Boyzone singles and hope no one I knew saw me! Time went on and I grew less rabid and began to see what it was my friends saw in classic Beatles tracks and Nina Simone. I found that there was a depth to other music that was perhaps missing in the sugar coated lyrics of the love of my youth. The Boyz and I grew apart and drifted away and eventually they broke up. I wasn’t on the news crying my eyes out although I may possibly have shed a small tear on my own not at the break up but at what I saw as the final nail in the coffin of my teenage teeny boperdom. The inevitability that growing up was actually happening.

Now though, I am no longer ashamed. I will stand proud this evening and sing along and shimmy in my seat along with all the other fans who are recapturing a moment of their lost youth. Times where everything was right with the world so long as the Boyz kept on churning out the hits and singing into my hairbrush was a nightly event. G is going with me and I know he will forgive me if I regress just a little bit and shout that I love them and possibly shed a tiny little tear for the marvellous life that Ronan and I could have had together if only he had known! Him and Yvonne, it will never last you know!