Living Space - The Curator's 2023 ambitious studio album - is a conceptual work that forms a lament for a lost future.

 

This is not the future we expected or were promised. In 1969 when I watched the moon-landings (with hundreds of millions of others) it seemed that my life would span an unprecedented era of change. Even as a 9 year old, watching the old films and hearing about the changes my parents and grandparents had lived through, I had a sense of the world (and The Beatles) changing before my very eyes. I don’t suppose my grandmother (who was born when Victoria was on the throne) had even thought about man going to the Moon until a few months before she watched it unfolding in the middle of that July night. I wondered then what the world would be like when I was 20 or 30. I knew it was going to be unimaginable.

 

But that - at least to me - was not how it turned out. Instead by my early 20s it had seemed that change had slowed to a crawl: commercialism and the straightjacket of economic fashion had made the world smaller and slower; the counter-culture changing into the shop-counter culture. Only a fraction of what was predicted in films and books, in the late 60s and 70s, seemed to have come about. The things that technology had brought us were somehow idiot offspring of television; social media, sat-nav, childish ideology and division. I had been left holding a lost future, a-might-have-been, a-should-have-been, an only-wish-it-could-have-been. The only echo of it left, down the years was in the music that remained ever present 50 years later, unlike Al Jolson who was lost and gone long before 1977, the 50th anniversary of The Jazz Singer.