Old enough to know better, young enough to pretend: 25 Years of The Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About

There’s quite the line outside the Oxford Art Factory. Hoodies and canvas jackets are tied around waists, freeing hands to vape or authenticate, photographically, claims of ‘the last time they were here….’. The distribution of flannels is more than standard, but not in-your-face; offset by the chinos that accompany a Thursday evening show, along with the winces (is that ageist?) of a dawning acceptance of a 9.30pm — ticketed as 7.30 — start-time. I’m excited to spot Jawbreaker, Knapsack, and Orchid shirts. Inside, we will fork off from those queuing for the up-and-coming young musicians’ showcase, and into the main room for The Get Up Kids. 

Zealous and scrappy, the Kansas City-based band’s debut studio album Four Minute Mile was recorded in two days. Vocalist Matt Pryor hates the vocals on it; their off-key tinge makes it one of my favourites. The titular Something to Write Home About (1999) record, too, is packed full of noisy power and octave chords. It channels, true to form for the ‘emo guitar sound’: a ‘fondness for dramatic contrast between clean and distorted amp sounds and loud and soft dynamics’; tempered slightly by poppy keys and synth and amped-acoustic hooks.

I’ve gotten a fairly good scratch of the surface (Appleseed FM on SURG FM; 4-5PM Fridays) of TGUK’s contemporaries — and above that, friends. In ’97-8, they toured with Promise Ring, Mineral, Jejune, and Jimmy Eat World. I’ve been chatting with Pennsylvanian mathrocky second-wavers Ethel Meserve, with whom The Get Up Kids (and Braid!) kicked off a national tour the day after drummer Ryan Pope’s high school graduation.

I too-enthusiastically relay this to Ryan. Cool, cool…that’s great. Yeah, those guys are awesome.

The double pick slide for Holiday rings out. In a near-perfect metaphor for emo’s lineage, I am sandwiched between a teenage couple with razor-cut coifs and forearms decked out in kandi and studded PVC cuffs, and, behind me, a forty-something dude whose outbursts betray (is that ageist?) the plainness of a grey-blue t-shirt and salt-and-pepper beard and send chuckles through the pit: We all had sex to this album!….Couldn’t tell you the name, but when they play them it all comes back – did too many drugs… 

As somebody born at the crest of ‘third-wave’ emo and who revelled totally, at fifteen, in the ‘emo trinity’, TGUK (perhaps to their chagrin, and profuse apology) haunts the power-pop and pop-punk riffmakers of the mid-2000s. It remains, to the gratitude of people like myself for whom mainstream third-wave acts were the gateway to their emocore and hardcore progenitors, that bands like Fall Out Boy ‘would not be a band if it were not for The Get Up Kids’. The ‘moshpit existential bliss’ traceable from Joyce Manor’s ‘Catalina Fight Song’back to The Get Up Kids washes over the crowd as the intro of ‘I’m a Loner Dottie, a Rebel’ (the video of which I cannot share due to the non-human shrillness of my ‘Come tomorrowww……’) plays.

The title of the record came from a telephone conversation between Jim and his mother. Her response to Jim’s description of the recording process and the band’s upcoming shows: “Well, you definitely have something to write home about.” Though I try to collect photographs of as many of these shows’ flyers, and watch as many VHS rips on YouTube (I keep going back to The Actuality of Thought (1998), on which Off the Wagon from Woodson, their first non-single release, appears), I am aware of how misplaced my nostalgia is; how simultaneously troubling and stupid the imploration is to carve out and justify a place in a sonic world and time I can only hope to reconstruct.

Self-indulgent contemplation on emo historiography, and my place within it, evaporates the moment the opening chord of ‘Shorty’ resounds. I bolt down the stairs of the mezzanine of the Oxford Art Factory and back into the crowd, where a friend’s and my best efforts (not really; more like a hesitant nudging) can’t prompt a push pit. That’s alright. Everybody sings ‘The last time I saw you act like this, we were kids’ with expiating verve.

Billed as a retrospective, I found an unreckoned clairvoyance in the The Get Up Kids’ 25 Years of Something to Write Home About Tour. The frustration, heartbreak, maturity, and self-reflexive immaturity captured within their music is as optimistic as it is nostalgic. The Get Up Kids have broken up, reunited, toured across the world, and raised kids and record labels; I’ve done none of that. Yet. But I’ve been given more than enough to write home about. Not least, that Rob Pope was happy to send me a ticket.