So a crisis of some sorts, albeit the nice variety. I’m Pete, 56, happily divorced with kids at uni, moderately healthy, and through a combination of blind luck and excessive adherence with the corporate lifestyle I find myself on the verge of an early and comfortable retirement. Zero idea what to do with all this freedom, I’m more focussed on what I won’t have to do than I am on what I will actually do. Childishly obsessed with the cult of youth (as definitively defined in the late 70s/early 80s), I only recently realised that the revolutionary, non-conformist and anti-corporate punk ideals that I gobbled up unquestioningly might not have been the best background for the path I trod, but I’ve come up smiling, and somehow retained an openness to new music and a willingness to put up with a lot of shit to get a pop thrill.
I had a pretty impressive backpacking career in my 20s, mostly South East Asia but blasts in Cuba, putting off the inevitable slide towards careerism, mortgage, marriage and parental responsibility but succumbing in the end. As the marriage dissolved, after decades of (very pleasant) French campsites and (much maligned) Majorcan fly drives, I found spicing up my travels a way of voicing defiance to convention and bringing my current self back from beyond the pale in the judgemental gaze of my passionate, virile and urbane former, guevarista self. Trips included Cape Verde, Senegal, Colombia and Bristol, and, at the risk of post-rationalising (they were all attractively cheap) a common theme was the prevalence of what could be loosely termed Afro-Cuban music, which I grew to love.
Naturally, clinging on to the psuedo-intellectual ideas I formed when I was ten, worshipping ephemeral moments in youth culture and a version of myself that pissed around half the world with no responsibilities, wishing I was cooler while disregarding the substantial achievements of my career as merely things I did to pay the rent, it only took me a couple of years to work out that pissing around the world writing about youth culture and ideas would make me cooler. What could be more straightforward than hopping on a plane to Cuba, declaring yourself an Afro-Cuban music blogger and immediately regaining the sexy vitality of your youth? We’ll find out.
El Grito 