Oasis, "Columbia"

I took the ferry from Holyhead across the Irish Sea to Dublin twice during my twenties, in 1995 and in 1998, on separate backpacking trips through the British Isles.  The particular ride I’m describing here happened on one or the other of those trips, but I couldn’t tell you which.

Google reminds me that a line called Stena ran (and still runs) these boats.  At the start of the journey I’m recalling here, I was required to stand in line below deck, or at least inside, to complete some sort of transaction that involved the ship purser.  Most likely I was waiting to exchange English pounds for Irish punts.  There were two women working at the counter: they were about my age, they were identical twins, and their nametags identified them as Sinéad and Siobhán. 

Siobhán and Sinéad were beautiful and terrifying.  Three decades later, my mind’s eye can still conjure the image of their faces—face?—down to the minutest detail.  But if a picture of any kind is worth a thousand words, a picture that would do these twins justice probably calls for ten times that number.  For the sake of economy, then, I’ll provide only rough strokes here.  Sinéad and Siobhán had blond-streaked brown hair pulled back into buns, the bluest eyes this side of Dune, and blood-red, possibly blood-stained, lips.  Their makeup was so masterfully and completely applied that not only did it occlude any blemishes or imperfections, it outright precluded the observer—though I suppose I can only speak for myself—from even imagining that any could exist.  They wore blue Stena dress uniforms with white jackets over top.  Siobhán sat to the left side of the counter, with Sinéad to her right.

Despite my best efforts to get a jump on the line, I was parked a ways back, somewhere between ten and fifteen customers deep when the boat cut loose from the pier.  I had a wait ahead of me, but my Discman was on hand to keep me entertained.  The Discman, those of a certain age will recall, was a Sony product: a portable compact disc player powered by two AA batteries.  I carried mine in a Case Logic satchel strapped over my left shoulder and resting against my right hip.  The satchel had a zip compartment for the player and a tuck slot for a CD storage case.  To this day, that storage case sits atop one of the twin CD storage towers—come to think of it, let’s call them “Sinéad” and “Siobhán”—flanking my desk chair in our home office.  Just now, while writing this paragraph, I was able to swivel my chair and retrieve it from the top of the tower.  The case has inserts that will hold twelve CDs, if you don’t double-stuff them into the slots.  By nature I am risk-averse, so most likely I was traveling with the exactly twelve compact discs I’d brought over The Pond with me, plus whatever additional music I’d bought on my binges at the Tower Records and HMV outlets in Piccadilly and York Centre.

Stop and consider that for a moment.  You’ve planned three weeks of travel abroad, largely by yourself.  You’re looking down the barrel at plane rides, train rides, Tube rides, boat rides, hours and hours walking the High Streets of a dozen cities—and you can bring just twelve albums from your collection to keep you company along the way.  Fair to say more than half the time I spent packing for these trips went to making the hard decisions about which CDs would and wouldn’t make the ’95 and ’98 Traveling Teams.  Two particular albums were no-brainers for me, in that I didn’t spend a second thinking about whether I could live without them.  These were, of course, The Stone Roses (self-titled) (Apple Music, Spotify) and Oasis’s debut album, Definitely Maybe (Apple Music, Spotify).

There’s a ton I can say about both these recordings—I need to be clear: I am NOT picking a side—but for today (just today) my focus is on Oasis.  Definitely Maybe blew the doors off for me when it came out in 1994.  I played the CD for six days straight after I bought it, then marched off to the Arts editor of my college newspaper and demanded column inches so I could publish a review of it.  The Gallagher Brothers’ Roses-meets-Sex Pistols posture scratched me right where I itched.  The guitars were layered and prodigious, and surfing right on top of that massive wave was The Voice of Liam (Not Noel), bleating and sneering and stretching every line-ending syllable past its elastic limits.  I came for “Live Forever” and “Shakermaker”; I stayed for “Bring It On Down” and “Slide Away.”  Other albums would follow, with ten CD singles scattered in between, each one carrying at least one indispensable B-side track.  But Definitely Maybe was the first and best—being, after all, the record on which Oasis sounded most like Oasis, and not the Beatles.

But let’s bring this back to the ship purser’s desk on the Stena ferry.  Standing there in the queue with my monstrous retro headphones clapped over my ears, absently twirling their spiral cord between my fingers, I waited my turn and listened to Oasis. Over the course of five, ten, fifteen minutes, I made slow but steady progress toward the counter.  The music did its usual work to slot me into a just-right level of abstraction from my surroundings—standing apart from, and oblivious to, the small human dramas performed by the other passengers, but at the same time able to keep at least one eye cast casually and persistently over in the direction of Siobhán and Sinéad.  Watching them, but not gawking at them, was the balance I struck.

What was striking about these two women, aside from their aesthetic perfection, was that they were utterly unfit for employment in the hospitality industry.  It wasn’t that they were bad at their work.  Customers were able to conclude their business quickly, and they stepped away from the counter satisfied, if never welcomed.  As each one did, their corresponding S-Twin straightened in her chair, composed herself, and assumed for a brief moment the grace, bearing, and visage of an archangel, radiating supernatural beauty and strength and apathy toward all lesser creatures.  Then the next punter in line would step up and make a request of Sinéad or Siobhán, at which point, everything changed.  Crackling celestial neutrality gave way to white-hot hellish hatred.  Words can’t capture the intensity of the glares these purser twins inflicted on their customers.  (Again, one thousand words, times ten, etc.)  Let it suffice to say that these Glares communicated complete contempt, withering antipathy, and outright disgust.  There were pursed lips, too, and eye rolls and exaggerated sighs: these were the seasonings, variably applied, in accordance with the kind and measure of a given customer’s imposition upon Siobhán/ Sinéad’s tranquility.  But the atom-splitting Glares were foundational: every last one of us got one.

As I think back on it, Oasis was a spot-on music choice for the time I spent within the blast radius of Sinéad and Siobhán.  Two siblings managing at the same time to be irresistible and repellent?  Siobhán and Sinéad, meet Liam and Noel.  I had earlier watched Liam Gallagher spray cold fire out of his eyes during a live show at the Academy in New York City, just before he challenged half of the rapt, adoring fans assembled in front of him to a full-on fistfight.  Liam’s rage was unprovoked and unaccountable, but we ate it up and cried out for second and third helpings.  Amped up to a certain level, attitude has an attractive force more powerful than any of the four fundamental forces of physics.  I felt that power at early Oasis shows, and I felt it on the ship that day, in the hallowed, hellish presence of Sinéad and Siobhán.

No single customer turned to stone during that ferry ride, but it wasn’t for lack of either S-Twin’s trying.  The young mother just in front of me didn’t have bills ready and had to rummage through her purse to gather them up: Oh, fiddle-dee-dee, she said, flustered, wrangling her preschooler son with one free hand.  Because I was next in line, I had headphones off and was in a position to hear this mild Irish oath.  Fiddle-dee-dee.  It was a quaint utterance—novel to me, and arguably cute: hardly calibrated to the stakes of the moment.  Sinéad was white-hot, and she turned up her high beams.  Fiddle-Dee-Dee’s cheeks may have crusted over in that moment, but the petrification stopped there, once she was able to produce her three twenty-pound notes for exchange.  A handful of bystanders and I heaved sighs of relief.

I ended up transacting my business with Sinéad, not Siobhán.  Dual impulses gripped me while I did: part of me wanted to run like hell and dive into the Irish Sea, while another part of me composed desperate propositions of marriage.  I split the difference and hung in for my punts, then walked off, stammering unintelligible words of thanks as I went.  By the time I made it above deck, the ship was well clear of the shore, and Definitely Maybe had advanced to its fifth track, which is of course “Columbia” (Apple Music, Spotify).  The sun was shining, the boat was carving up the water, and three seabirds were hovering over the boat, tracking it.  I say “hovering,” because these birds were flying at exactly the speed of the ship.  Their wings were flapping and the headwind was fluttering through their feathers, signaling a meaningful degree of forward motion—but relative to the boat, they were hovering in place.

This was disorienting and beautiful.  On its own the sight of these birds might, or might not, have stuck in my memory for decades afterward.  Around me other travelers sipped drinks and talked their bullshit, drawing themselves and others out of the moment.  But I had Track 5: “Columbia” playing in my cans.  The trippiest, swirliest guitars on the record were soundtracking this ferry ride.  This was a song that never really registered with me until that day.  A six-minute freakout dropped in among ten other, more straightforward rock songs, it was filler, I had thought.  Before that afternoon I was as likely to give “Columbia” the Skip button as I was to let it play through to conclusion.  But now these three low-flying birds had arrived to advise me: Do not look past this.  This is as good as it gets.  I turned my eyes away from them for just a moment or two, so that I could set the Discman to one-song repeat.  Then I looked back up at the birds, at a sky bluer even than the four demon eyes below deck.  Feeling the sun’s warmth on my back and the cool sea air on my neck, I watched and listened, for at least the next hour:

There we were, now here we are.  All this confusion; nothing’s the same to me.  I can’t tell you the way I feel, because the way I feel is oh so new to me.