Mac Demarco Memories
Reminiscing on my youth, listening to MacDemarco
I have Mac Demarco’s Salad Days (2024) on again, for what must be the third or fourth time this month. I stopped listening to Demarco for a while, but I’ve found myself drawn back to this album, hypnotised by its simultaneously jaunty but melancholy tones, like The Beach Boys on Prozac.
T—I’ll just call him ‘T’ for now—introduced me to Demarco back in the hazy days of 2016. It was eye-opening. It’s not like I’d never heard Indie music before, but there was something special about Demarco, about Daniel Johnston, about Aldous Harding; all these artists that T brought into my life. I retain a lot of mixed and confusing feelings about T, or more appropriately, the memory of him—I haven’t seen or heard from him since 2019. Those mixed and confusing feelings surface whenever I consider the hard-to-define legacy he’s had on my taste, listening to the music he shared with me during our three tumultuous years together. It’s strange when I listen to someone like Demarco and remember that T’s the reason I know about them, something that a few years ago I would have found impossible to forget, the music intrinsically, perhaps intractably, linked to him.
Last time I listened to the album, about a week or two ago, I saw a short video advertised below celebrating ten years since the release of Salad Days. The thought made me feel slightly sick. I’m frequently reminded that my life is slowly crawling away, and this was yet another of those unwelcome reminders. Next month I’ll be 25; almost ten years since I started college.
The years between 2016 and 2018 were incredibly fortuitous for me. I had sex for the first time, something I had been made to believe would never happen, labelled at secondary school as frigid, ugly, manly, celibate, etc. I met people that seemed to enjoy my company genuinely, not just because we were forced to attend the same educational institution—or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. I was finally in the company of people who knew more about politics than the name of the Prime Minister, knew more about history than whatever they were taught at school about the Second World War or the Tudors, who actually enjoyed talking about films and albums and books. I was intellectually fed in a way I had never been before, by peers, not just worldly and weather-worn adults. It was exhilarating.
We had parties properly divorced from the ones we’d had at school; the kind organised by neurotic mothers involving awful meaty vol-au-vents, displayed on luminous orange and pink plastic plates. At one of the more memorable house parties, where two of the boys decided to break up an un-flushable poo with a wire coat-hanger, me and a friend watched Withnail and I (1987) in the early hours as people, drunk, collapsed around us. That was the same party where I stroked a girl’s leg and was almost initiated into a threesome, which was speedily prevented by the party’s host. At another shindig, I ran around naked on a public footpath and had all of my water and toilet roll pillaged, leaving me in a compromised position as the night wore on. I’ll leave you to imagine the details.
For all the chaos that it ushered into my life, I wouldn’t exchange that time for anything. It relieved me from over a quarter-of-a-decade of rural-malaise-induced boredom. It revealed that there were young people, like me, bunkered in the countryside, lonely and dissatisfied until the moment we found each other, our idiosyncratic and eccentric selves finally indulged. The unpredictable and extreme fluctuations of T’s dominant and unstable personality gave that period a particular edge, but I could have forgiven him anything then, and I did. He was a genius to me, a repository of all knowledge. And he had a massive dick.
I have very fond memories of the people I knew back then. One of them happens to be my long-term partner, two others are long-time friends, but for the most part the last nine years has caused what Moses warned of in Deuteronomy: past friends are now scattered, from one end of the earth to the other, gone without a trace. I listen to Mac Demarco and feel sad that in all likelihood those relationships will never be recovered.
There are people I tried to rekindle relationships with, to varying levels of failure. As I bumble here-and-there, I expect to see people I used to know around in the towns they hail from, but never do. I am forced to assume they have moved on. Where to, I cannot know. Maybe I’ll find myself in a pub in Devon one day and see the friend with whom I watched Withnail and I, as he talks to the barman about whatever new ideology he’s subscribed to. Probably he’ll be as heavy-set as when I knew him, still subsisting on takeaway and alcohol. Will I approach? My better-self hopes so, although I doubt he will be pleased to see me; he never was after our brief summer fling. I don’t think I have any hope of seeing T again, although whenever I see the silhouette of a lanky, tall man walking towards me, I always think it’s him, and my pulse races like a mouse that’s seen a cat. But it never is T. It probably never will be T again.
I am forced to accept these people are now in my past, as I am in theirs. All things going well, I will finally complete my BA degree this year, and then I’ll have to move on to the next thing, whatever that may be. Soon 2016-2018, my salad days, will feel like a lifetime ago.