Review: Fast Times at Barrington High — The Academy Is

This review was written purely to satisfy my own curiosities. It wasn’t for any particular website or reason, I just fancied writing it and putting it on here.

In 2008, I was 14 years old. High school had become an endless slog. I wished so much to be rid of it. I yearned to grow up, gain my independence, and leave my hometown. I wanted to see the world I’d learned about. I irritated my teachers and they irritated me; I daydreamed about girls who knew my name but didn’t like me; any social capital I managed to gain was rooted in how I molded my hobbies and fashion senses to fit around what was “cool”. There was a lot to maintain, a lot to juggle, and not every method yielded positive results, but what else could be done? High school was a hotbed for judgement, heartache, and boredom. For a nerdy and uncertain teenage boy like myself, growing up in a sleepy, mostly forgotten town in northwest England, these were the slow times.

But since then, more than a decade has flashed by. I left my hometown aged 18 and came back aged 24 because I missed it too much. I’ve endured personal changes beyond my control. The freedom to have stupid crushes on girls who hate me, or to care deeply about my fashion sense and social reputation — it’s all a fading light that I can’t switch back on. In fact, with time stood between me and my youth, I now believe that the stress of sustaining my social clout in high school was actually a positive experience. Not because I enjoyed the race exactly, but because I want my world to feel that small again. Plus, the wonderful friends I did have, and the fond memories I created with them, made it all worthwhile. We definitely weren’t cool kids but we weren’t “edgy” either, nor were we total outcasts. We were just an odd assortment of misfits, comprised of emos, nerds, and queers. Each of us either had big glasses or an over-sized backpack or bad skin (or all three) and only a small handful of us liked sports. We were stared at a lot, normally by kids who seemed much happier and more popular than we were. We were often at “war” with them.

These are the trials of our youth.

In many ways, though, I’ve come to believe that we were actually identical to those kids that seemed much happier and more popular than us. The war was pointless. Because despite our different experiences and opposing opinions of each other at the time, we were silently unified by our ignorance. Ignorance of what was to come and how much our worlds were about to change. Our summer nights (which were often sprinkled with lukewarm rain, such is the climate in Greater Manchester) would soon be no more. Our sleepless sleepovers and house parties were suddenly fewer and farther between, and then we stopped organising them altogether. All those irritating teachers, all those stupid crushes, and all those arguments about who was coolest — they would all become pieces of a simpler past we could no longer reach.

They were the fast times after all.

Recognising all of the above — perhaps more than any other album of its era — is The Academy Is’ third and final record, Fast Times at Barrington High. With its affectionately dreadful font, its MySpace-era title, and by preserving a split second of clumsy, innocent romance between boy and girl, its artwork calls out to me from a very specific moment in time. The moment just before the ubiquitous influence of smart phones and social media; the moment just before the 2008 bank crash and subsequent global recession; the last moment that my innocence and ignorance were still intact. Its brand of power pop is fast and light on its feet; its lyrical concerns are exclusively teenage; its execution leans close enough to the likes of Paramore and Mayday Parade to fit in with that crowd; its name comes from one of the defining cult teen comedies of the 1980s. It’s a special album and, with a bit convincing, I think you could have anybody believe it to be quintessential listening for ordinary suburban kids like me.

It goes deeper than that for me, though. Quite significantly.

This is an album that inhabits a world full of insecurity, innocence, and romantic clumsiness. It immerses me from its opening strands. It’s not just an album that’s concerned with topics of teen romance, high school drama, and coming of age; it’s an album that strives to protect and preserve those topics too. It’s nostalgic about the formative, character-building nature of high school politics (with reservations and caveats), and it wants to tell its story without the influence or pressure of outside disturbances — parents, adult authority figures, and people who weren’t in the teen trenches in 2008. The stories in these songs are told by whispered voices hiding under bedsheets as parents stand on the other side of the bedroom door; they’re told by hushed giggles behind corner shops while security guards make sure nobody’s smoking underage; it loudly gossips by the lockers in the corridors before hiding in the school photography department’s darkroom.

This record is made up of real people in real places having real experiences, and it’s desperate to protect all of them.

The band might have been in their early twenties by the time this album was put together, but they inhabit their teen selves so precisely that the imagery presented in the lyrics goes beyond evocation for me. This is for adolescents by former adolescents. I hear “Last night, I knew what to say / but you weren’t there to hear it” (from ‘About a Girl’) and all I can think of is some awkward scenario with a girl that I dreamed up but never enacted. “I hope, before the night is through, one fumbled touch will finally hit the spot” (from ‘After the Last Midtown Show’) distils the nerves and awkwardness of affectionately touching another human being for the first time. “Don’t you wonder why, suddenly, we’re all running out of time?” (from ‘Summer Hair Forever Young’) is the kind of lyric that I should have appreciated on a deeper level while I was 14 and thought I had still had years to waste. I was living through the fast times without stopping to look around.

Now, all of the evocative imagery in the world would be for nought if the tunes weren’t up to scratch. But there’s something about emo-adjacent power pop that makes me so susceptible to it. Nothing here is particularly adventurous or extravagant, but power pop doesn’t have to be. It just has to make me ache. My first encounter with this record was the single ‘Summer Hair Forever Young’, back in 2008, and the connection was instant. It’s a four-chord gem — a plea of desperation from one teenager to another to never forget their friendship, or this moment, or this summer. Other highpoints from the record — ‘About a Girl’, ‘His Girl Friday’, ‘The Test’, ‘Coppertone’ — revel in the heightened melodrama and seemingly endless frustration of unpredictable, shifting dynamics within teen social groups. There’s no linear narrative to these songs, and it’s not a concept album, but what ties it all together is focus and understanding: The Academy Is were an entire ocean away from me and yet they spoke about my teen years as though they had lived them.

And encapsulating it all — the memories, the nostalgia, the melodies — is the one slow-burner, ‘After the Last Midtown Show’. It gives me feelings of such intense nostalgia that it’s actually quite hard to listen to these days. It’s the album’s crowning jewel. Its first two verses are presumably autobiographical, but in telling a story so personal they manage to achieve universal appeal and connect to my own experiences. I might as well recount them to contextualise things: fast forward two years to the summer of 2010, which was one of the hottest we’d had in England for some time. I was 16 and had no responsibilities. I spent 80% of July & August either out in the streets or in other peoples’ houses. Neighbourhood walks until after midnight; Left 4 Dead 2 and Smash Bros. sessions until we collapsed as the sun came up; I lost count of how many times I went to see Toy Story 3. Nostalgia is cruel. My head knows these experiences were never that special, but you try telling my heart that.

I return to Fast Times as a way of forcing myself to relive it all. “Right here, the best days of our lives.”

Something also occurring during the summer of 2010 was my first ever proper relationship. We’d been going steady for 18 months by this point after she breezed into my life towards the tail end of 2008. As a boy who hadn’t looked a girl in the eye before, let alone kissed one, I was swept up in it all. It was as dramatic, possessive, and formative as only teen relationships can be. We drove each other mad, but she was so much cooler than me and miles out of my league. She dressed like nobody I’d ever seen in my life before and she had her ear to the ground for bands I’d never heard of. She also lived over a hundred miles away, in another city — another country, for that matter — with a different culture and upbringing. During that summer, in between all the neighbourhood walks, sleepovers, and visits to watch the new Toy Story, I took several three-hour train journeys to be with her. The weather really was glorious that year, even in her native Scotland. Well, I like to think it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But anyway, when I was there I’d wake up before her as the sun came in through her Velux window. The rest of her house would slowly wake up beneath us. The clatter of a teaspoon stirring in a mug; her dad trudging up and down the stairs; her sister’s bedroom door opening and closing at 30-second intervals. I just closed my eyes and smiled.

‘After the Last Midtown Show’ features the following line: “The morning light fights through the cracks, cascading across the bed, and you are mine / your parents start to wake for work, between the sheets I’ll keep a watchful eye”. Listening to it at the time, I thought I might as well have been the protagonist of the song. Her parents knew about us basically from day one, and we never had to hide our relationship, but it still felt like a secret. Not only did she rarely meet my friends from school, which meant we moved in entirely different circles, but her bedroom was up in the attic of her house — even under her parents’ roof we were still in our own little universe.

She took me out of the world of high school politics and gave me a break from it. I could partake in the gossip but without any personal stakes; I didn’t daydream about girls who hated me anymore because I was daydreaming about a girl who loved me. I was just a casual observer to the chaos now. My actual human girlfriend lived 200 miles away so I had a mainline source to what was basically another planet, like that Only Ones song said. She was my own ‘Ticket Outta Loserville’, as that Son of Dork song said. Despite my close connection to ‘After the Last Midtown Show’, the rest of Fast Times at Barrington High started to take on a different role in my life at this time: it was now a reminder of the nonsense and drama I’d managed to become detached from. I was going through the intense changes that all teenagers experience, so the lyrics stopped speaking directly to me and started speaking to a version of myself that I no longer recognised — a version of myself that was just so 2008 and, therefore, significantly less cool. I was busy growing up, thank you very much.

‘After the Last Midtown Show’ makes me ache now because after years of trying to escape 2008, it’s the only place I want to get back to. Part of my emotional development remains trapped somewhere within the walls of my own Barrington High. Between the ages of 14 and 16, I felt radical and invincible. I thought my girlfriend and I were radical and invincible too. The Academy Is and Paramore and Mayday Parade kept telling me so. But truthfully, summer 2010 was the last time my girlfriend and me were ever truly settled and happy with each other. We drove each other mad for too long and, the following summer, we broke up. It wasn’t amicable. And in the ensuing decade, we became just like everybody else. Not radical, not invincible, just regular. I guess the outsiders and adults won in the end.

It’s the constant threat of interference from those outsiders that ultimately puts the bow on top of Fast Times. ‘Beware! Cougar!’ immediately follows ‘After the Last Midtown Show’, and it’s the cautionary tale of how our male lead fell out of love with his girlfriend and into the arms of a rebound much older than him (this is where I can no longer call myself the album’s protagonist). Trying to grow up before his time ends up being the very thing that defeats him. The eponymous cougar in question takes on an identical role to the parents who walk by the bedroom door in ‘After the Last Midtown Show’. The behaviour of those parents reflects the watchful eyes of security guard in the same song. The security guard might as well be the teachers who try to stop students from entering the photography department’s darkroom in ‘His Girl Friday’. And those teachers might as well be the steady hands of time that will gradually erode any teen innocence, teen purity, or teen privacy that this album is desperate to protect.

Fast Times reinforces something I know to be false these days but still believe: it tells me, despite being a perfectly ordinary kid from northwest England who became a perfectly ordinary adult, that my memories were special and the worthiest of preservation. I wasn’t the only person who spent their teen years getting to know their neighbourhood like the back of their hand, and yet this album makes me feel like I was. My friends and I weren’t the only nerds playing video games until our eyes were square, but here I am, believing that to be the case. I don’t even think I was the only person travelling between Manchester and Glasgow to maintain a long-distance relationship at the time either. I saw a few familiar faces on several occasions during my numerous trips up and down the country. But then again, who am I to tell myself that none of it was important? It spoke to me then and it speaks to me now.

I might be more than a decade removed from high school politics now, and I’ve been mostly grateful for the peace ever since, but what I exclusively viewed as a chaotic whirlwind of judgement and boredom came with a heap of good times worth my affection too. Lord knows those days have a bucketful of affection from me now. There’s a tinge of jealousy too. If only there was a way to experience those days again but without the aforementioned whirlwind qualities. What if I could only experience the gaming sessions and the train journeys? Could I hear Fast Times at Barrington High for the first time again on this expedition? Until then, the CD is the best time machine I’ve got. So thank you to William, Mike, Michael, Adam, and Andrew. Thanks for making sure that a part of me stays forever 14 and forever young.