Number 5

A Man I’ll Never Be

Boston

I don’t rate Boston that much. I can see the rock appeal, but I think their songs are overproduced and there are too many clashy bangy guitar sounds. It’s all like an over-rich meal that you long to get to the end of. However, this song has been going through my mind recently and has always had a place in my heart. It reminds me of someone I truly loved.

I met Kev when I was at university. A friend had come to visit and we were busy getting drunk in the bar (I may as well be honest) when he came in with some other blokes. My friend was always good at chatting to strangers and she started up a conversation with him. It was probably about rock music. Anyway, for a while I thought of him as her territory, but then one day, I realised I really liked him. I liked his looks, but I also loved his Mancunian accent and his intellectual way of talking. It was unforced. He just used words I had never heard in a way that I never knew you could. He impressed me, and others, by the way he could lie on his bed listening to Radio 4 for hours, then get up, write an essay that took up three sides of A4 and get a really great mark for it.

If I said what’s on my mind
You’d turn and walk away
Disappearing way back in your dreams
It’s so hard to be unkind
So easy just to say
That everything is just the way it seems

Anyway, Pat, my friend, relinquished her rights to him quite happily (sounds awful doesn’t it?) and we got together. We had a few great months and then things started to fall apart. At this time distance (I was at university in the early 1980s), I don’t really know why. By then I knew I loved him, but maybe he wanted to be alone, to be able to study and do “manly” things without this rather over-the-top girlfriend. (I was insecure, to say the least.) At some point he started playing this song to me when he visited my room and I could see what he was getting at, although maybe it was just its great guitar work that he was interested in. Nowadays, I realise that men are often much simpler creatures than women think they are. They don’t really do hints, or at least the ones I know don’t. Direct speak is more their style.

So we split up. And I was devastated. But all was not lost because over the next few months we often got together and listened to music in my room, especially after a few drinks. Eventually we got together again and had about six years in a fun and loving relationship. We ended up in London after graduating and his work opened up opportunities for him that just didn’t include me. When it finished, it was him again who made the decision. It took me years to get over it. I come from a stable family and believed love lasts forever. It’s hard to trust love again when you learn that it falls apart like that. I still find it odd that one person can love another with absolutely no encouragement, even when they’re explicitly told “no I don’t love you anymore”. How on earth can that be. What is love? Now I imagine maybe I did see him as a “man he’d never be” and I am happier without him, but there is still a part of me that will never relinquish that love I felt for him.

For me that line, ‘It’s so hard to be unkind’ has extraordinary resonance because when you have cared for someone, you know exactly how you’re going to hurt them. I’ve never heard the word ‘unkind’ in a song before and it’s such a strong one. The song starts so softly and gently, that’s what draws you in. It gets more rocky and passionate as it progresses with all those electric complex guitar sounds. I’ve read that Tom works forever on his songs and it shows because there is a lack of spontaneity in them. I bet that the start of this one was done in a single session though.

A Man I’ll Never Be

Boston

I’ve recommended the live version because it’s brilliant. There’re no covers to speak of. Sadly, the vocalist Brad Delph committed suicide in 2007. “J’ai un ame solitaire” was written on one of his suicide notes.