THE SoM

There’s been very little in my life that I feel the need to thank Simon Mayo for, but recently he did play a track on his show which I happened to hear as I was driving around one evening.

I was so impressed that I tried very hard to listen out for the name of the band after the track finished and make some kind of attempt to actually remember it, which I duly did because, unlike a lot of music radio presenters, he did seem to remember that, for some listeners at least, it’s all about the music and not the mad DJ chit-chat that burbles on in between.

Now, because I’m notoriously atrociously bad at remembering names, by the next morning I’d forgotten the name of the band but, for once, had enough interest to actually go to the website and seek out the previous night’s playlist (which belied my notion about the “chit-chat” ratio, by the way, by only listing 13 records for the two hour show... Sigh...) and, lo and behold, I was able to find out what it was that the “Sisters of Mercy” called themselves.

I haven’t been quite so excited by a tune in years. Not since, in fact, I first heard “Take on the World” back in 1977 which started my “on-off” love affair with Heavy Metal and which still occasionally resurfaces every once in a while when I’m in need of some kind of blood-thumping distraction from a particularly awful day.

So, having been impressed enough by that one tune playing on my radio, I bought myself a set of cheap albums off the internet as a way of introducing myself to their works, and then got terribly excited by them as I started listening to them in the car one Friday and, again, I found myself feeling incredibly impressed by a band which I’d only just discovered, despite them having been around for two decades or more…

If they haven’t already been flushed down the toilet of history, I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time now that I’ve finally become aware of them. I’m a barometer for what’s “in” or “out” of style you know. If I’ve started listening to them then, by definition, they’ve got to be “out…”

Granted, by Monday, the excitement of discovering them had waned a little, perhaps due to a godawful weekend, and so I still haven’t yet quite got through to the end of those discs I bought, but what I heard, especially from that first one which I played, I really did like a lot…

Music however, still manages to surprise me. The way people can come up with an almost infinite amount of variations based on those same 8 notes by changing the order, or the tempo, or the instruments… This finally struck me as I listened to one or other of their intros as that CD tripped over onto the inevitable next track and it started off with a simple repeated note which reminded me – ever so slightly – of something else that I’d heard at another time in another life.

But, when you consider the amount of new songs and tracks that are being churned out every single day and add those to the hundreds of millions of tunes which are already out there in the world, you really begin to wonder how it is that we keep on managing to come up with new variations upon them. New tunes and new lyrics transmogrify into brand new “classics” which sound like they’ve been around forever, and still more and more of them just keep on coming.

Of course it’s much the same with letters. “SoM” could stand for “Sisters of Mercy”, or, when you see that particular triptych of letters, it could just as equally mean “Sound of Music” in your mind. It might bring to mind The Somme, or even SimOn Mayo, or maybe just “School of Motoring”. Those three simple letters have already triggered so many connections since the top of this very page and I’m sure that I could find many more if I took the time to do so.

Human beings…!

Aren’t they sometimes the most brilliant of creatures…?

When they’re being creative they truly can be the greatest of beings and deserve to be considered so. It’s just such a pity that so many of us waste our time doing so very little, or spend so much of our time trying to smash apart the things that other people have spent so much time, effort and energy into putting together.