It's a Bittersweet Symphony this life.

I used to really hate the song Bittersweet Symphony, by The Verve. It started in my youth. Back when I was a budding music fan, all the way in Primary school, I was too involved in splitting my fervour between By The Way by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Steps debut album. Looking back, perhaps my tastes weren’t as developed as I thought they were. Once I imprisoned my parents and their friends in the living room and made them listen to the entirety of STEPS, as well as my own commentary.

When I was a kid, Bittersweet Symphony used to play on the radio all the time. It used to float to the back seat of my mum's white Mazda where I would sit, learning how to roll my eyes in the back of my head. It was too slow, and it would get played too often. Of course, my perception of time back then was different to how it is now. Back then, three minutes, relative to the time of life I had lived was still so long. To my young self, it felt like his drawl went on forever. And the way he sang ‘this life’? Why the embellishment? (My beloved H from Steps would never.)

When I got older, I found YouTube and music videos and watching the cinematic slowed song short film from The Verve made me hate the song less. Besides, enough time had passed where I now didn’t despise it being played every few moments, but I still wouldn’t consider myself a fan, not like my mum who would often cry at the opening strings to a pop song.

Fast forward to now. I am sitting in a pub in East Dulwich at the cusp of the rest of my life. On the precipice of what’s next and the song is filling an almost empty pub. People are outside the walls instead, for reasons that range from COVID to the sun. I started writing and his voice penetrated my eardrums. Something about the mundane nature of the words and the emotion in the delivery. That slow emotion I used to hate really got me and I found myself falling in love with it.

The bittersweet symphony at the heart of it is actually that The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft has been a slave to the money for 22 years, seeing all the royalties to the song go to The Rolling Stones until 2019. Why? Well, the beautiful, slow orchestral strings, the very ones that prompted my mum to want to play the song to death in the 90s is actually a rendition of The Last Time. They were meant to only use a couple of notes, but went a bit overboard and due to Allen klein, the Stones manager Ashcroft paid for his mistake until 2019. Even though it took him this long to get financially compensated, I’m glad they chose to put the full selection of notes in there. It would not be the same song without it.

But whilst the melody is what makes it so memorable, the lyrics are what has made me finally fall in love with the song after all this time. It got me thinking about what it really means to live this life and yes, that sounds quite dramatic considering the thoughts came to me drinking alone at an empty pub, but it’s more uplifting than it sounds.

So many times I trip over my own ideas. They run around in my head and crash into each other and then get too exhausted to get up and work, but so do we all. This is just part of the whole experience. Making good, bad and ugly decisions. Speaking up, protesting, succumbing, falling down. Sometimes we need to change our opinions when we learn something new. It made me realise how much of a bittersweet symphony this life really is, and the only way to make it through is to work hard at what you love. Don’t be a slave to the money, don’t be afraid to change and live your life.