We had our first sunny days of 2013 over the last week. In fact, the first one was last Monday, as I sat here discussing Wrock (in my defence, it was too cold to spend long outside!) I always love sunny days. I don’t know whether it’s some strange form of Seasonal Affective Disorder or the by-product of spending my early childhood on the south coast of England, but I feel different when the sun shines. Those are days when I’m more likely to find whatever I’m reading or listening to emotionally-affecting. As a result of this, the careful creation of summer playlists is always a must…
On top of that – as some of you may have worked out by now – I have been occasionally known to read well-written, non-pornographic Harry Potter fanfic (yes, this is relevant). I once came across a short story called “The Wedding” about Harry and Ginny’s wedding day on a site I trust (as in, it doesn’t do porn and only accepted the canon relationships… even before they were canon!). Despite this, I put off reading this fic for days, as I was afraid that something awful was going to happen and it would be really depressing. Of course, when I read it it was a light-hearted piece of fluff, and I sat down to analyse my irrational initial reaction to it. My conclusion was that I had recently read a highly depressing story on the same sight that shared significant similarities with “The Wedding” (it was written before Half-Blood Prince was published, was set after Harry’s seventh year in Hogwarts – i.e.; after all of Hallows bar the epilogue – and was about the relationship between Harry and Ginny), but more importantly I had been repeatedly listening to The Quiet Things That No-One Ever Knows by Brand New, which would probably temporarily ruin anyone’s view of marriage!
For me, as I think this illustrates, music tends to come with very strong emotional connections, often to a time or a place. When on uni work experience I was based in a crummy, musty-smelling room at the top of an old building with seven other students, and one song that was played frequently was It’s Not Your Fault by New Found Glory. The next semester, I was listening to it in college and suddenly could have sworn that I could smell the musty, dry scent of the room, which must be some sort of reverse Proustian thing! (No, wilemena, that’s not a sex position!)
Perhaps there are songs that have a similar effect on some of you? What are they? In the meantime, here are some of my personal favourite songs for a sunny day sitting out on the grass with friends. Sit back and relax, everything’s right with the world… Oh, and the quote in the title comes from Melanin!
Now, sorry to blow the mood, but I’m finishing with an example of why my username is angryirishpunk. Here’s a story from the Telegraph (I know, I know…) about the Glasgow Ancients, one of the most prestigious debating intervarsities in the UK, which was held at the same time as the UL Open (at which I spent this weekend adjudicating and helping with the logistics).
1. What Shane said.
2. Whiskey in the Jar – Thin Lizzy: I’m in the back bar of the Royal Oak in Clifton. The juke box is excellent, something ridiculous like 3 plays for 5p. It’s small and basic, pews and nicotine stains, and on the wall is a picture of tombstones on the edge of a cliff, pointing skyward like yellowing teeth. The front bar is little more than a snug, and sells rough cider. If you go down the stairs in the narrow hallway you come to a tatty little concrete yard where you can sit outside. It’s c.1972 and I’m 13 or 14 but no one bothers.
3. Radar Love – Golden Earring: On a coach in Italy with ‘flu and none of my classmates will let me have a drink from their water bottle because I’m germy. I’m 15 and miserable but this cheered me up. A bit.
No madeleines.
Well, for someone who wrote a book with Sodom in the title, I could be forgiven for presuming The Reverse Proust is a sexual position, eh?
my ex perfected ‘the Reverse Oust’ – worked out okay in the end …
she kept the ‘ouse – I kept the record collect (we were both happy)
*boom tish*
When I read that first line I was ready to google ‘the reverse oust’ to see if it actually was one. Ha!
Good for The Telegraph for printing a story which definitely shows the sexists in a poor light… even if it might be because it enabled them to print pictures of attractive young women. Stupid men, stupid, stupid men.
I find my favourite music has followed me around, I’ve played it a lot and that dilutes any association with place and time. Nick Hornby wrote that about Bruce’s “Thunder Road” and it holds true for my most-played songs. However, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Pictures At An Exhibition LP takes me straight back to my best friend’s house, next door to ours, age 10, probably playing a game of monopoly with 10 dice which went on for a week.
I just did the sex quiz in your magazine:
Emiliana Torrini -Unemployed in Summertime
this track is so funny to me – because Eddie Argos who wrote the song used to serve my beer in our local – I say ‘our’ local – I used to go away to work for 7 months of the year living on farms sorting out orchards over winter – then sofa surf the south coast (of England) for the other 5 months – doing the odd job of setting up bands gigs and falling out of ‘super’ clubs like Slinky at daybreak to recover on the beach – I could detail the places and people in Art Brut songs quite well.
Art Brut – Summer Job
Sex quiz? I do love Art Brut, of all their songs ‘Emily Kane’ would probably be my favourite…
“I just did the sex quiz in your magazine” is my fav line from unemployed in the summertime.
back to Art Brut
if you haven’t listened to the album Art brut vrs Satan it’s highly recommended – the whole album was recorded with pixies singer Frank Black at the controls – the bass is just fantastic throughout – really simple like the best Kim Deal ones… it’s all dumb indie – but SO perfect. (if you can cope with his vocal style – I can)
Emily Kane is a cracking song – they did a small warm up gig near my mates house very near where Eddie grew up for the Satan album – and jokingly mentioned that the exclusion order was probably being breached (while he was on stage) when they played Emily Kane.
Something about the way my brain is wired ensures that most music that I have a strong connection to (either good or bad) inextricably ends up bound strongly to a place and time or even a particular memory, and I could list dozens, but a couple off the top of my head:
1) Quantum Jump – The Lone Ranger: Ridiculous record I know, but if I close my eyes whilst listening to it, I am transported back to the age of about 3 or 4 years old, watching it spin on the record player in our wood veneered radiogram, laughing hysterically at the silly chanting bit at the start – I swear I can smell the bacon and potatoes cooking in the kitchen.
2) Bach – Brandenburg Concerto No 4: When I first started digging classical music when I was about 7 or 8, I was raiding my Brother’s record collection, and this piece was one that really struck me as something utterly beautiful – I couldn’t understand the sounds, how they were made or how they could fit together so beautifully, it was unlike anything I had ever heard, but I would play this over and over again. I remember it was a really hot summer – playing this I can immediately feel the summer heat in my childhood bedroom and smell the mown grass from the playing fields at the back of the house.
3) Terrorvision – Oblivion: I fucking hate this record, I mean really really detest it, but this was played without fail every week in my rock club of choice when I was a teenager – put it on, and I can immediately smell the cheap beer, the sweat and mustiness, I swear I even feel like I am wearing DMs that are sticking to the carpet. Weird, that although that club played so many amazing records, this one tends to be one that I think of first…
4) Scott Walker – Angelica: I developed an obsession with Scott Walker’s first album in my first year at University and this song particularly takes me back to the emotional nudges of leaving home for the first time and the feelings that stirs. I shared a room and it can take me right back to it, the freezing cold wind blowing in through the crappy window, the awful itchy blankets – I can even smell the damn deodorant I was using!
5) Jackie Wilson – Higher and Higher: A song that Mrs Bandit and I used to dance to at a Soul Night we would often frequent that has since become pretty much “our song” to the extent that we had everyone sing it at our wedding! Bound up in lots of happy memories, it’s like musical prozac to me.
And that’s all off the top of my head! I think to be honest, you are not really a proper music lover if it doesn’t have that sort of affect on you and link up and define so many bits of your life. For me, it goes beyond even the music – sometimes I can pick up a record and look at it and remember exactly where I was when I bought it, who I was with, what I was doing and feeling at the time…music to me transcends so many things and is the perfect thing to use as a framework and definer of life events, and I think that is because more than any other art form, it plugs immediately into your emotions and your mind and takes on a life of it’s own in your mind. Nothing else can do that….
EEPS! So noted, BB. I’ll try to keep my enthusiastic love for it (and the memories it brings back for me in check when you’re around.
Appalled to read about that Glasgow debating society, it’s the lack of grace or wit that appalls as much as the out and out sexism- to my shame I remember at School we had a feminism debate and I captained the “anti-team”, and we took a deliberately provocative sexist stance to “play to the audience”, but we at least made it clear we were being tongue in cheek and actually tried to dress it up relatively cleverly (think those Harry Enfield – Stop!Women! Know you limits! sketches – well see it here:
We basically ripped that off and failed to do it very well. I’m not proud but at least we tried – the Glasgow lot just sound like a bunch of boorish, beery morons. Yelling personal abuse is to debating as wafting a meat cleaver is to surgery.
I’ve had to speak on motions I really don’t agree with, and there’s often a temptation to go balls-to-the-wall and have a laugh with it. I think that as long as your audience knows you don’t mean it then it’s acceptable, certainly within debating circles. The other option, which I often have fun with, is to do something like on a motion saying people shouldn’t support Pride, say that Pride is insufficiently leftist. Me and one of the lads recently successfully proposed that the ghost of John Charles McQuaid should be the next Pope as all the other candidates are too liberal. Once it’s all clearly in good fun and all the participants are willing to go along with it, then that’s fine
Music is really important to me emotionally and songs are really associated with places, times and people , and music can re-create emotional states in me quite easily, both happiness, sadness, anger, love . .. . . music can create an emotion in me.
Tokyo by YUI really takes me back to the time I left home and moved to Tokyo and really recalls the heart breaking homesickness I felt at the time. I often cry when I listen to it as it brings back those emotional memories. I have shared links to it a thousand times so I am sure if were interested that by now you would have heard it before.
But there is another YUI song that really recalls that time of leaving home and starting in University and that is Its Happy Line. Listening to it now I am really surprised that a 17 year old girl could write such an emotionally complex song as it conveys hope, fear, love, loneliness and bravery, determination even though you are not confident and a whole range of conflicting emotions in such an apparently simple way, but then YUI is really one of the worlds best and most talented female song writers. She is one of the few people that can actually say something worth listening to in a four minute song ! ! ! This track takes me back to the first days of university, meeting new people, feeling shy but trying not be, missing home and wanting to run away but forcing myself not to and telling myself tomorrow will be better. ( It was )
YUI – Its Happy Line
There are so many songs that recall summer for me, and I know exactly what you mean about the sunshine ! ! ! HY are from Okinawa and this track is about the summer and waking up and smelling the sea breeze through the open window, seeing the see past the palm trees and wanting to spend the day with your lover. It brings back so many happy memories of summers at home and it when I hear it I really can smell the sea and hear the waves ! ! !
HY – AM 11:00
A very interesting post and thoughtful post Punky ! ! ! Thank you ! ! !
I am blessed/cursed with a very “visual” memory which means that when I do recall something I often get “full” recall complete with sounds, feelings ( and smells , unfortunately). So quite a lot of stuff has “meaning” to me, most of it rather mundane.
There are certain songs that “put me” right back in the Marquee in 1977, for example, I can “see” myself, the bands, the ceiling dripping sweat, I can “feel” the creeping horror of the first sip of warm , overpriced lager , knowing that it means I am going to have to brave the bogs later ( the horror, the horror !).
This one, in particular, takes me back there, to the days when I had hair and didn’t smell like or look like an ambulant compost heap ( probably smelled worse, actually, come to think of it !).
Most of my musical memories are tied up with men, booze, cigs and/or dope.
First musical smemory that’s popped up: 13 years old, Adam & the Ants – ‘Stand And Deliver’, a lad called Banksie (no not that one) on a coach coming back from a school trip to Alton Towers. Me wanting to impress him so when he asked if I could blow smoke thru my nose I took my first drag on an Embassy Number 1 (blimey! How did we get away with that?!). He fucked off and emigrated to South Africa shortly after that (not so much as a snog out of him) and I was left with a lifetime bad habit. And bad breath. Men!
Some general thoughts:
While I have on occasion enjoyed Roddy Doyle’s more anarchically humorous works, he’s an establishment writer. Anne Booker-Prize-Winner Enright is VERY middle-class and within Ireland there really are only two living writers who are more establishment than her (Heaney and Boland). That wouldn’t be an issue for me were it not for the fact that I find her writing stodgy, verbose and repetitive.
As for me? I’m middle-class with a traceable heritage back to the old, pre-plantations, Irish nobility (like most Irish people regardless of their class…). It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And I’m not writing a politics blog, because I don’t think that has any place on the ‘Spill, but suffice it to say that I’m a lefty feminist in a country that doesn’t actually have anything approaching a left-wing party (Sinn Féin claim to be both nationalist and socialist, I’ll leave the German history jokes to someone else, the Socialist Workers’ Party and the United Left Alliance are inarticulate, politically-ignorant rent-a-mobs and Labour are barely left of centre). As for Bobby Sands as a punk, well the guy was a member of a nationalist terrorist organisation. Yes, he was a rebel with a strongly-held cause, but nationalism is the antithesis of leftist punk.
I think this will change, certainly the reaction to the Glasgow incident within Irish universities shows that for the first time a generation of Irish youth are 90% in favour of the progressive path (the least said about the highly-offensive other 10% the better!). And anyone with any grasp of history will know that social change – even when driven by what a Marxist would call the prolitariat, is led by the educated, so there’s nothing incompatible about being a punk and being a ‘university whizzkid’.
Oh, and since the UK is light-years ahead of Ireland in terms of culture and cultural diversity (and in particular has a much better punk scene), sometimes I think I’d love to be a West Brit! Or even better, an actual Brit!
Very well said, I don’t think you need to justify yourself though in the face of clearly unreasonable and entirely ad hominem criticism, tempting though it is.
Cheers Beltway
you do know that was our resident Syndrome?
I had guessed as much!
Thought so, but I just couldn’t resist posting that! Expect a shower of shite aimed in my direction now ha ha.
Heehee
There are a lot of songs that enable me to remember whole events, sights sounds and smells.
Probably the first musical memory was Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which always takes me back to the first house I remember and the smell of laundry hung over a clothes horse in front of the fire and the smell of beef stew coming from the kitchen. It’s damp and draughty and dark and grey outside. Through the back window I can see the sycamore tree has no leaves yet. It is poorly lit inside. An industrial Singer sewing machine under the back window dominates one side of the room and a sideboard with photographs on top dominates the other. Above the sideboard I can see an autographed team photo of the Busby Babes from just before Munich. There’s a vase on the sideboard with flowers in it upon which dim light shines from a small side window with frosted glass. The dinner table in the centre of the room has the top folded down so it doesn’t take up any more space, but on it is my father’s paint splattered Robert’s radio. That song comes on. The world stops.
Lovely post, just heard the opening bars in my head at the end there…
Thanks, DaddyPig. If only all the songs that take me back were as good. Sometimes I’d like to think of Lake Windermere with having Raffaella Carrà’s “Do it Again” in my head.
Tee hee… (Assuming you meant without…)