MUSIC IN MIND

The music of your past can sometimes haunt you, and sometimes it just leaks into your present when you least expect it to. There are so many LPs that I used love to play back over and over again in the days of vinyl, and yet I’ve never replaced in a newer or shinier format. Some of those records were so familiar that if I was to play them now, I would recognize every note and be transported back to a time when deciding to buy myself a record might mean choosing not to eat properly for a week or two, such were the financial choices to be made back in those days.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, those once treasured albums fell out of favour and got sidestepped as newer, flashier, more contemporary releases were acquired, and those old favourites remained forever trapped in their vinyl state, caught in a cardboard sleeve with no means left to be heard by as I slowly divested myself of turntables and replaced them with the laser beam. Even the cassette tapes I made of these records so that I could listen to them in the car slowly came to have no equipment left available for me to play them on and so the tunes of my past began to fade into memory.

Every so often, though, one of those tunes would pop up unexpectedly, suddenly leaping towards the forefront of my thoughts after years loitering in the wilderness, and a long-forgotten fondness would be rekindled and, for a few brief nostalgic minutes, we would reacquaint ourselves and think about the old days.

During my recent weeks of to-ing and fro-ing from the hospital, I got into the habit of listening to Radcliffe and Maconie on Radio 2 of an evening, typically just discovering the show just in time for it to be shunted off to somewhere else in the schedule and away from the bandwidth of my car’s analogue radio. I hadn’t normally listened to music radio in the car for years, having generally become a “Radio 4” kind of a guy, but, because I wasn’t really in the mood for things like “The Moral Maze” after my skull-thumping visits to see my mother, I retuned and rediscovered the simple joy of listening to songs playing on the radio, songs that you happened to hear totally at the whim of someone else’s decision of what to pick and that you had no control whatsoever over the choice of.

Anyway, I started listening to their ‘The Chain’ feature where a song is chosen because it is linked, however tenuously, to the previous song played in that slot. One night the song picked was Donna Summer’s version of “State of Independence” which (as I was – despite my limited musical knowledge - fairly confidently able to explain to the beloved) not the version that I was the most familiar with, because I remembered a version by Jon and Vangelis on an album that I thought that the world had forgotten all about. I was therefore more than a tad surprised when those obviously very musically savvy presenters mentioned that very same album in their chat following the record, and the beloved just looked at me and said “You really have found a programme that finally speaks to you, haven’t you…?”

So, later on, I got home, and dusted off the old “Friends of Mr Cairo” CD and spent a jolly enough 45 minutes or so rediscovering yet another of the albums that I used to play within an inch of its life when I was a student but which has recently sat alone and unloved gathering dust on the shelf for the last couple of decades. I hadn’t heard it for years but the songs seemed so vivid and I was instantly transported back to the student disco during my first year when I first remembered hearing and being deeply moved by the track “I’ll find my way home” and, as soon as I had a bit of spare cash, I went out and bought myself the LP. Listening to it again, it was as if I’d only been standing in that hall yesterday despite it being over a quarter of a century ago, such is the magic trick that music can play on the memories. Some album tracks really stick with you and I can sometimes hear them in my head so vividly that it’s truly just like having an iPod in and I can rattle around the house for hours with the tune blaring in my mind as clearly as if I had my stereo on full blast.

I recently found out that Pete Townsend’s “White City” album was actually available on CD and had been for a while. When I’d last tried to track it down a few years ago, it wasn’t and didn’t look as if it ever would be, so I grabbed myself a copy just as soon as I could and this was exactly a case of precisely what I’m talking about. Every note from that album that I’d not heard in years was instantly familiar from the very second I hit “play” and the track “Face the Face” followed me round, bubbling away in my head, for most of the rest of that day (and beyond, if I’m being honest…).

Then there’s the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” that was so recently rediscovered by so many people after we’d all pretty much forgotten all about it, despite it having been a 1980’s staple, because it suddenly found itself being banned in Canada for its offensive content. Maybe people were always offended by it, I don’t know, but this was a song that was sung at Live Aid to however many billion people and, at the time, nobody seemed to notice that there was anything to be offended by, although maybe they did but just kept quiet about it. Lately, it seems that even Mark Knopfler himself has taken to skipping that bit when and if he performs it nowadays, so maybe there was a point to the protestations, although I think that we all kind of understood that the words were meant to be a parody of the kinds of things people say, and not a personal philosophy. Whatever the various truths behind that might be, I realised pretty quickly that it had taken me fifteen years to even notice that the version on my “Greatest Hits” compilation (it’s not a long record…) is a ‘radio edit’ and doesn’t even include the offending verse and despite having played that compilation more than a few times over the years, I failed utterly to notice its much shorter running time which, at 4’05’’, is a full 4’16” shorter than the original…

I guess that shows how much attention I pay. I’m obviously no connoisseur (I think my music collection probably speaks volumes on that matter) but I’ve known people to ramble on about the sound quality of CDs and MP3s not being as warm or as deep as from a vinyl LP and then there’s someone like me who doesn’t even notice that more than half a track is missing.

Incidentally, it’s the very same radio edit that was played on a request show on the evening the news story broke when someone rang in insisting that it should be played ‘just to irritate the Canadians’ and the choice to play that version probably rather defeated the point he was no doubt trying to make.

Musical Purgatory

To be honest, “Dire Straits” don’t get played much in this house these days, despite being name-checked in Douglas Adams’ “Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series of novels, falling as they do into that dreadful subcategory of hell which is known as “old man’s music” which, alongside the “cardigan music” of records like the once much-loved “Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits” tends to mean that much of the music I used to enjoy listening to sits in a kind of musical purgatory, eternally damned to be silenced in this neck of the woods at least.

However, the memories of those tunes can never quite be silenced as long as they float around inside my head, or unless I’m home alone of course. Then I can play what I like and, apart from what the neighbours might think (they do give me some funny looks now that I come to think about it…) when they get to hear what I’ve chosen to put on, those tunes from my past can blast out as much as I like and transport me back to long forgotten times and places.

Sadly, last night was the last of the Radio 2 Radcliffe and Maconie shows, and I feel I should mark its passing, and now that “programme that finally spoke to me” has vanished off my personal radar. It sometimes seems that whenever I find something I’m comfortable with, something always comes along to spoil it for me.

Sometimes I do think that I’ll never find my way home…