The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and me

And OCD, abortion, and looking for answers where there are none

At the time of writing, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones – the Boston, Massachusetts born ska-punk nine-piece who have announced their break-up after eleven albums over almost four decades – have received 94,071,730 streams of their 1997 smash hit single ‘The Impression That I Get’ on Spotify. On YouTube, the song’s video has been played 31,859,195 times. Neither Spotify or YouTube existed in 1999, when I was 19. But if they had, both numbers would have been considerably larger.

Since the song was released, there’s been a pertinent belief that the song is about being tested for HIV. Whether it actually is or not has never been confirmed by the band, though there is a decent argument that it might be. “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested,” croons singer Dicky Barrett over gentle upstrokes in the song’s bridge. “I’d like to think that if I was, I would pass. Look at the tested and think, ‘There but for the grace go I’…”

And then the kicker. “Might be a coward. I’m afraid of what I might find out…”

Alongside – to a far lesser extent – Spearhead’s 1995 single ‘Positive’ (definitely about being tested for HIV) and the really very lovely ‘Slide Show’, the closing song on The Man Who by the briefly gargantuan Travis (definitely not about being tested for HIV), a day rarely went by in my nineteenth year where I didn’t play ‘The Impression That I Get’ multiple times. 1999. The year I saw my favourite horror movie, The Blair Witch Project. The year my favourite film director, Stanley Kubrick, died. The year my football team, Doncaster Rovers, won the Conference League Cup.

And the year I woke up one day and decided I was HIV positive.

I didn’t and I don’t have HIV. But still I poured over ‘The Impression That I Get’ daily, looking for clues within that might reveal whether I did or not. Not that I didn’t seek answers elsewhere. That year I went for four HIV tests – the maximum then possible in a twelve-month period - a ritual that took place every three months and that involved me travelling to the outskirts of Newcastle, knocking on the peeling green paint of the hospital’s GUM clinic, and having blood taken. By the fourth time I felt a bit like Norm in the American sitcom Cheers. Only more miserable.

With hindsight, it had always been there - I’d had strange, upsetting, sometimes difficult obsessions for years prior. But the time I woke up and decided I was HIV positive was the first time I had a thought that genuinely derailed my life. All my obsessions shared the same central tenet; what if? The inability to know for certain was what tormented me, and in 1999, it reached the demented state such ruminations had always threatened to. I looked for signs and symbols in the cosmos that might guide me; were I to find myself on a street that housed a branch of HMV, it was ‘proof’ I had the virus. Were I to touch a wet surface of a bar, it was ‘proof’ I’d got it even if I hadn’t previously. You’d think that a blood test would answer my fears definitively. Yes, but what if they mixed my blood up with someone else’s? What if they’d labelled it incorrectly? What if… One evening I plotted to break into the clinic with the green door on the outskirts of Newcastle to check they hadn’t.

In the earworm chorus to ‘The Impression That I Get’, Barrett roars the line “Never had to knock on wood” over the parp of trumpets and saxophones that defined the largely wretched output of most 90’s ska punk. This was music that at the time infuriated me – fey, soppy, cerebral – and yet, with hindsight, embodies a time in pop – fun, communal, tuneful - I would welcome back warmly now. And so I did knock on wood. Repeatedly. I knocked on wood so often that you could see the varnish on my sore knuckles. It’s a phrase that’s thought to derive from the folklore of the ancient Indo-Europeans, since the belief once prevailed that spirits lived in trees; to knock on wood was to summon the good spirits to help you, or to deafen the bad ones who might seek to do you harm.

When I found out I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in 2008 – a diagnosis I wouldn’t truly accept, then embrace, until a second diagnosis, in 2018 – I learned that the idea of seeking reassurance for an obsession is a very bad idea. Healing from OCD, if there is such a thing, involves living with doubt. It involves living with discomfort. Feeling uneasy. It’s hell, but it’s the hard road to somewhere better. I never knock on wood now. I don’t throw salt over my left shoulder. I don’t look for confirmation in songs or films or tell myself that if a yellow car drives past me then a family member will die. Me and my wife have a phrase we repeat when I try to attach meaning to the metaphysical; “that’s not how life works”.

Incidentally, there’s another belief that the Bosstones hit song might be about abortion. The song did appear on the 1996 compilation Safe and Sound: A Benefit in Response to the Brookline Clinic Violence, alongside music from a host of my favourite artists (Morphine, Scarce, Folk Implosion and Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz). December 1994, the month 23-year-old John Salvi walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, pulled a rifle out of his duffle bag, and murdered two receptionists – Shannon Lowney, 25, and Leanne Nichols, 38. Five other people, clinic employees and volunteers, were injured.

People with OCD are told not to interrogate the origins of our obsessions – the content of the thought isn’t as important as the broken cognitive process. And yet I’ve met too many who suffer from the condition, of a similar age and of an identical theme, not to confabulate the existence of the UK’s AIDS awareness public service broadcasting with the terror that nestled in my developing mind. Thoughts that lingered and grew until they came to the forefront like an emerging cicada, torpedoing my life, changing it beyond all recognition, in the year of 1999.

Hey. The first season of my ten part podcast series about the emotion Shame recently concluded with an interview with the journalist, author and broadcaster Jon Ronson. You can listen to that here. Season two will be here before you know it.