A-One, a-two, a-one-two-three-four…
Does anything fit better together than beer and music?
Of course not.
For millions of us, they are the twin foods of the soul, the bacon and eggs of spiritual happiness, the strawberries and cream of wellbeing. Wherever you look, beer and music work together, complementing each other and setting light to the experiences we remember above all others.
The connection is there on a practical level: a club gig without a can of overpriced lager or a festival without a foaming paper pint cup is like watching The Beach Boys without Brian Wilson, or New Order without Gillian. Looking at it the other way, a well-curated jukebox can transform a pub, and for better or worse, karaoke is the most popular participative leisure pursuit in the country.
It’s there in history: the music hall grew out of the early Victorian pub. Out of the music hall grew variety theatre, and out of music hall and variety came the beginnings of popular music. A century and a bit later, pubs were the venues where bands learned their craft in front of a few mates and a lot of indifferent punters, taking the knocks, thickening skins.
And it’s there on a much deeper level too. Beer and music are both celebratory. Both transport us. Both are highly ritualised, with their own customs and conventions. We use both to bring ourselves closer together, to build our identities as individuals and groups. In both, there’s a wide variation in personal taste and huge disagreements about what is good and bad, but at the same time, true classics are universally acknowledged, even when they are not universally loved. (Look, I know Queen were phenomenally talented, I respect their achievements, I just don’t like them, OK?)
The link between beer and music has been underlined in recent years as everyone from Status Quo to Professor Green, Elbow to Iron Maiden, has launched a beer of their own. There’s a straightforward marketing sensibility to this – people who like certain styles of music also like drinking beer – but there’s more to it than that. Bands get genuinely excited about designing their own ale, contributing to the recipe, visiting the brewery and seeing how it’s done. People who regularly stride across arena stages in imperious fashion become nervous fans when they get to mash in their own brew.
My Generation is a celebration of beer and music: how they overlap and work together, and also how they exist individually, what they mean to us, and how they have shaped us. We are fanboys of both. We sit in pubs and talk about music, or go to gigs and talk about beer (until the band comes on of course.) My Generation is, first and foremost, an excuse to do more of that, more often, with more people.
Over the coming weeks, this blog will muse on what we love about music, how it makes us feel. Sometimes we’ll talk about how rock and pop came out of pubs, or we’ll explore the neuroscience behind how beer and music work together to alter perceptions of flavour. Other times, we’ll simply muse on what makes a grown man spend a large amount of money on an EBay auction to buy the drum kit that was used on Live Forever, or giggle like a schoolgirl when they meet a man who had a minor top ten hit two decades ago.
We just can’t help it. And that’s why we’re here.
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