Waow.

This is my favorite Portishead song on my favorite Portishead album. Lifesaving good.

Glory Box (Dummy) Portishead

Just before Christmas in 1994, there was an explosion in my abdomen. Shit was leaking into my system as a result and I was in bad shape. I had four surgeries in five days, and at one point my family was called to the hospital as they felt I only had an hour or two left to live. I survived that day, but the prognosis was not good, and my doctors decided that if I were to have any chance of survival, they should keep me in an induced coma so that my body had some chance to begin to recover. I was under for around a month, and when I did slowly come to I found myself immobile, unable to talk, totally reliant on life support machines. I had about seven weeks in all without any significant movement. I had to learn to do so much from scratch, I actually had to learn to breathe by myself again, which was strange. There were people to help me walk, talk, eat again, but muscle tone and motor functions were not the only things that needed work. I was lost.

Music had always been vital to me, like oxygen. I listened to it, made my living from playing it up to a point, it was always there. In the weeks and months after my hospital release I was so far removed from my previous mostly happy life, and music just seemed to remind me of all I was missing. For the first time in my life, I could not concentrate on listening to music, in fact doing so would only make me resentful. Concentrating on anything was pretty tough. For most of my days I would just sit in front of a constantly on but mostly ignored TV. Therapists and nurses would come in and out, and another day would disappear. I didn't have the strength to even pick up a guitar let alone play it. Music was lost to me, life seemed lost for me, and all the time if I thought of anything, it was to ask "Why me?"

One evening, the TV was on and I momentarily glanced at it. Jools Holland's Later was on, a UK showcase for live music. The sound I was hearing was different from anything I had ever heard, yet the component parts were familiar. There was a guy scratching on two decks, a guy with synths, an older man playing guitar and wringing out these bluesy licks which were at odds with the rest of the music yet complimented it all perfectly. I was being drawn in. Then, there was this fragile waif like woman with an alarming jazzy voice crying "Give me a reason..." and I thought, yes! It took a while for me to realize why I was crying myself. I was having an emotional response to this new music, having a positive reaction to a new experience for the first time since I became ill. Music was reaching me again. As Portishead lurched toward the end of "Glory Box" I understood that more of Beth Gibbons lyrics were ringing true. "This is the beginning of forever and forever..." The next day, I asked someone to go get me the album Glory Box was on. I played and played that album. This was not a miracle cure, but it was a turning point. I had at last felt something good that I would not have felt if I had not of survived. It would take two more years of surgery and rehabilitation for me to be able to re-enter the world on anything like my own terms, but it was a start.