The View, indie, parallel universes of unceasing juvenile incarceration, etc

Mani, Bobby, Noel and seemingly everybody else can't be wrong.

And they aren't. The View are bang on the money. I've been waiting to get my teeth into this one for a while, stretched as my aural time is with general drum and bassery.

It's rare I'm able dip back into the by-the-bootstraps-indie trough for any sustained length of time, so when I do it's usually a precise reconnaissance mission — laser-guided by the careful instruction of a few friends. Or Primal Scream members.

And so, as expected, I find myself stirred by a rousing volley of youthful guitar swashbuckle, ears pleasantly buffeted by bristling slices of anthemic Scottish pugilism. It's great. The old swagger-by-day, pogo-by-night, collar-up hurlyburly of the late nineties begins to flicker in the recesses of my mind...

And yet. It's all so... academic.

Not The View, bless 'em, but me. The old reflexes twitch, but they're dulled and muffled. Those days of unabridged teenage epiphany have been replaced by sturdy, measured, mid-twenties appreciation.

As the feisty, retro-pepped verses wash over me, the best I can muster is a retrospective, vicarious projection: myself plus best friend, all 18 and beer-coiled and wild-eyed, reverberating through every totemic note of every track at a crowded View gig someplace. The reverie is charged with a strange, latent energy, and yet... It is a sorry substitution for the barely-ruffled calm of the present.

"They would have rocked. Imagine..."

Somehow a strange, erstwhile simulacra is the only medium through which I can "feel" the tunes; my head retains the trace of a rock-youth's discourse, but my body cannot articulate it. The 25-year-old can no longer cash the cheques his 16-year-old wrote.

Were we seven or eight years younger, I doubt not that The View would have slotted memorably into our roster of drip-fed sonic ebullience. The Stones, the Scream, the Roses, Liam and Noel: high priests administering meditative, headphoned communion on buses in the drizzling morning rain: that sense of one's burgeoning young identity mixing with the elements on a soaring phonic trajectory. Those formative, tribal days...

But then again...

Cancel those fucking violins. What's actually required here is a chest-beating, tear-soaked dance of relief. True, we'll never be carried breathlessly by the swell like we were, but in place of such knock-kneed emotive jiggery has come merciful, surefooted nous. It's a fundamentally necessary trade-off, and one to be blissfully thankful for — forevermore. Believe you me.

To immediately cease lamenting your lost youthful whimsy, just imagine the "juvenile indie-waif" parallel universe: one begins one's inscrutable tenure on this heap of floating rock as a wizened, mature, bespectacled, Peel-esque personage. Then, after about fourteen measured years of wit and wisdom, the wheels suddenly fall the fuck off. Your venerable green pastures dissolve into anguished, lovelorn, riff-ruled teenage wankery — and it stays like that for the next seventy years.

Unable to hold down a job, a relationship, even a conversation without spiralling into a blubbering diatribe about your eternal connection with Richey Manic, you're in for something of a bumpy ride. You've half a century of unfathomable moodswinging heartbreak to navigate, and all you can manage to "deal with right now" is the agony of not knowing whether today is a good time to pull off that potentially life-changing "bootcut to skinny-jeans" switch.

Shit/fan: repeat to infinity.

Away from me, fabled teenage Elysium. Stay exactly where you are.

"Youth endows every experience with unique flavour and significance."

- Italo Calvino