Life in 10 tracks #4: The Style Council — My Ever Changing Moods

Having a mind that won’t rest

I didn’t know why it was until recently but my whole life I’ve been conscious of my mind constantly turning over. The only way I can describe it is like a machine that won’t stop, and I have to make sure I feed it with the right stuff.

In my mind’s eye it’s like shovelling coal into a steam engine, which is a bit weird, I realise.

Sometimes this is a good thing — if I’m interested in something, then I just can’t stuff it fast enough with anything I can find on the subject. My first focus of choice was cars, and I was obsessed with how they worked. Being a mechanic was my first choice profession. The drive to know how things worked meant I was later hyper-focused reverse-engineering and writing code from when I was about eleven, which ended up becoming a living for me. My other hyper-focus of football would have been nice as a living, but unlikely. In the eighties and nineties the multimillionaire international DJ wasn’t really a thing so much, and more commonly a weekend side-hustle for mobile jocks.

The downside of having such a neurology is you can disappear off down more anxious rabbit-holes on scant and incomplete information which gets tiring. On the plus side by virtue of the fact that the thoughts come so thick and fast usually something else comes along to finally get in the way.

I always loved The Style Council — I remember The Jam, but The Bitterest Pill was about as far back as I go with them being current in the charts. I can still remember recording My Ever Changing Moods off the radio on a Sunday afternoon anyway. I recently located a mint copy of Cafe Bleu which still sounds brilliant even now.

This (accoustic) version seemed to sum up the inside of my head quite nicely anyway, especially being something of a night owl.

Daylight turns to moonlight, and I’m at my best,
Praising the way it all works and gazing upon the rest,
The cool before the warm, the calm after the storm,
Oh the cool before the warm, the calm after the storm,
I wish to stay forever, letting this be my food,
Oh but I’m caught up in a whirlwind and my ever changing moods.