Bargepole asks, is there one special song that as soon as you hear the opening chords brings forth unbidden a flood of memories – what is that tune and just what are those memories……?
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Have you got a spare week?
This is in response to the thread title rather than what it says in the OP. I just think it’s tremendous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoOvbNv-XxU
Arrrrrgggh!! Motherf***er!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoOvbNv-XxU
http://youtu.be/CoOvbNv-XxU
Frightfully sorry. You wait for a link to work and then two come along at once etc…
Talking Heads are better!
http://youtu.be/VJu-IABeCws
Posted the music & forgot the words:
Sitting in my friend Muttley’s bedroom, playing poker while the rain beats against the window; we raid his big brother’s record collection for Yes & Return to Forever albums….
I’m rather afraid it’s this.
I was about to get chucked out of university – I like to claim it was down to sex ‘n’ drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but in reality I just didn’t do any work. I’d just been comprehensively dumped by a girl I was crazy about (I guess she could tell I wasn’t going to be around next year), and she’d hammered the message home by shagging Tony the Cool Person at a party we were all at. So I was spending a lot of time mooching and palely loitering and radiating tragedy, and this bloody song had just come out and was being played all. the. bloody. time…don’t give me your bloody Summer of Love.
The only tune that works like a time machine for me is the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night.
If I play the song knowingly it doesn’t work but if I hear it unexpectedly I am instantly three years old sitting on the floor, dressed in my pyjamas watching a Beatles cartoon. Sometimes the effect is so pronounced it thrusts me into the future, only the future is now and my three year old self is seeing what I am seeing in the present from the distance of 1965. Needless to say it can be disconcerting.
‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky, the whole album. 1995 was a very strange year and rather chemically enhanced so I remember little of it (probably for the best), apart from playing this over and over again. Weird, disturbing album.
Memories… ‘I smoke ’till I’m senseless’. π
Oooh, so many. Virtually every album I love has time/place memories.That’s what music does, innit?
I’m Not In Love and If You Leave Me Now: the slow dances at our first teenage parties.
Rainbow Rising: Bunking off school and the gang coming round to my house.
New Boots And Panties: Going to a party at my English teacher’s house. My first glimpse of Bohemian middle class people.
Darkness On The Edge Of Town: Learning to drive.
Cafe Bleu, Eden, High Land Hard Rain and Punch The Clock: Being ultra-cool in Ray-Bans driving down to Camber Sands in friends’ Triumph Heralds.
Going Underground and At The Edge: Last songs of every uni disco. Mosh, collide, fall over, get picked up, more mosh.
Lilly Of My Valley (I Jah Man Levi): First holiday abroad, Mallorca with a uni mate. Didn’t meet a single Spanish person other than waiters. Snogged a lass from Lancashire.
Electric Dreams by Phil Oakey and Gorgio Moroder: The last disco of uni. Everyone sure they’d stay in touch and be friends. I was quick to lose touch. Life is full pf people, they come and go and I can’t keep track of them.
Astral Weeks: A halcyon summer spent smoking spliff and drinking wine in the garden of Irish friends living near the Tower Of London.
The Wall: playing it from start to finish on the geetar with my geetar-playing Italian friends. I was the best player and I’m crap.
Sounds From The Thievery HiFi: Beach and spliff in Puglia. Smoking, swimming, reading, chatting, laughing, eating, sleeping and smoking.
I could go on, soundtracking pretty much every moment of my life, but I’m even beginning to bore myself now.
Coyote : Joni Mitchell
Wrong country but right vibe. Hitchhiking the road to Kakadu in Northern Territory and more generally a whole 18 months of innocence and freedom swanning around the world and toying with ideas of a new life in the New one. Australia seduced me. As in the song, it was a relationship that was beautiful but could never be.
I find myself longing to be back in Australia, but I am older and wiser, so I know that what I really want is to be in Australia in the 80s and be 26 again. No regrets, coyote.
Automatic For The People.
My dad died in 1992. I visited him in hospital every day and played this album both there and back in the car. The moment I hear the downbeat Drive begin, I’m there back in the car, listening to those songs of loss and death. I find it very comforting.
Ticket to Ride. Possibly the best opening riff/first line combination bar none. Immediately takes me back to walking to school as a 5 year old, hand-in-hand with my mum, singing it and asking how I could get to be a pop star when I grew up. Her reply, “Write to Jimmy Savile”!
Even before the first chords, the crickets are chirping, and then there’s a muttering from a reed, waking and lazily parping itself into melodic existence somewhere in the haze of dawn out in the eternal country, and the crickets chirp on. A languid bass pours out another gloriously warm line of life over a light shimmer of percussion, keyboard chords and polite little guitar figures. A groove quietly gathers itself, picks up the pace a little and strolls off into the distance, swaggering. Some delicate little percussion beats precede a huge keyboard wash which rolls from horizon to horizon in a trice, and a growing rhythmic storm growls and precedes a soaring guitar that is soon followed by the third track, and it’s not until track four that we finally hear the first line of the vocals: “Growing darkness, never leaves me, just in time, time to see the sun… ”
Suddenly I’m 17 again, sitting in the front room with my dad’s headphones on, embarking on another journey through the 51 minutes of bliss that is Caravanserai.
Great idea for a thread. But I’m with Jimmy Blast on this one. Have you got a week? Have I got a week to write them all down.
Why not this beautiful song by Norwegian singer Kari Bremnes?
I spent the summer of 1980 working as a tour guide in Norway. The bus rides were long so I popped into a record shop in Bergen and stocked up with some cassettes. I knew nothing about the local music scene but I wasn’t going to play Max Bygraves all the time. I struck gold here anyway.
The first Nordic country I’d spent any time in and emotionally it was rather a roller coaster ride. Big ups and big downs.
Great song though.
I sent that Bremnes clip to a Norwegian pal and he countered with this lovely song which also got the memories flooding back.
1989; I was 24 years old. I’d been home in England for the summer and was heading out into the world again, this time heading to New Zealand to teach. On a four-day stopover in LA I checked into a hotel in Venice Beach, met some people, hired a car and headed off for the highways. I’d never been to the USA before. This song was all over the radio and every time I hear it now I see that huge sky and the road stretched out before us
mercury shooting through every degree
Oh girl dancing down those dirty and dusty trails
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
KD Lang’s Constant Craving…. we had it on softly in the bedroom, Gill was atop me as she quietly sang along with it…..
Every time folks, every feckin’ time I hear that song…… sheesh.
And another thing… I went to Cala D’or with The Mad Ginger about seven years ago and we went into a bar that Gill and I had used often when we were frequent visitors there in the early 90s. I didn’t mention my previous visits there to TMG when we approached the steps up to the bar enterence, and before I had time to soak up and languish in the visual memories, never mind buy a drink, “Constant Craving” came over the sound system…. it was just too much. A wee tear or six was shed.
Annie I’m Not Your Daddy by Kid Creole & The Coconuts. Makes me think of my local funfair in 1982.
This is the question I always answer when I’m preparing my list of Desert Island Discs. I’m not going to pick my 8 favorite tracks, but the ones that were significant at a particular time of my life and bring it back in a flash.
Without doing the whole list:
Big Country “In a Big Country” just takes me back to being in the back of the Ford Sierra (and I remember the registration plate, even at this distance) when Dad was driving.
Right now, Carter USM “Sheriff Fatman” takes me back to cleaning the Hall of Residence bar, and having a quick half *ahem* as i washed the skiffs.
There are others…Afghan Whigs, Stranglers, Lloyd Cole… It’s a long list
Spirit in the Sky – Norman Greenbaum – was the first time i clapped eyes on my one & only love ( she was dancing to it on the school stage ) . Been married to her for 35 yrs this year…….and still stupidly in love ! I’m one lucky guy…….
Kool & the Gang’s Cherish. A time, a place, a woman.
You are Swiss Toni and I claim my used copy of “Playboy”!
A much younger Bargepole with a special person in a special place at a special time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBdZxZ9gYMw
A few of mine:
– “Alright, Alright, Alright” by Mungo Jerry: six years old and watching TOTP
– Reward” by the Teardrop Explodes: early adolescence, hormones and awkwardness, unattainable girls
– “Catapult” by REM: late adolescence. A troubled time. This song makes me well up involuntarily (nothing specific about the song)
– “Helicopter Of The Holy Ghost” by Microdisney: a lost soul at university in the mid-80s. Freezing to death on CND demos’s.
– Anything off “Blue” by Joni. First love, somewhere in the West Country, early 90s (bit of a late starter…)
– “Going Out” by Supergrass: mid/late 90s Brighton indie gig frenzy
– “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” by Wilco: heading towards middle age. Resisting the urge to buy plaid shirts
– “Broken” by Tift Merritt: the last (rather complicated) few years. “I think I will break, but I mend…”
A much younger Bargepole? Is that a Bargetwig?
As soon as I hear the opening strings from “The Universal” by Blur I am transported to two distinct moments in my life
– 1997 and discovering a love of music for the first time (my brother copied a couple of albums to tape for me. One being The Great Escape)
– 2012 – the final song of Blur’s Parklive event to coincide with the end of the Olympics. Tears may have been shed…
Can’t Get Out Of Bed by The Charlatans. Reminds me of superb Saturday nights at mod club, Blow Up, Camden Town in the mid-nineties.
Fight For Your Right (To Party) by the Beastie Boys always transports me back to my first term at University.
There were four of us sharing a house, and this was just about the only song that all of us loved.
Invariably it’d show up on the morning show playing on someone’s radio alarm clock, and that first massive chord would provoke this pavlovian response where we’d all have our radios on at huge volume before they’d even reached the “Kick it!” a couple of seconds later.
The droning of “The Final Cut” from the dodgy hippy downstairs and non-stop Whitney Houston from Fascist Andy across the hallway have a similar effect, but in a far less positive way. But they’d probably say much the same thing about me and New Order to be fair π
“Trouble” by Coldplay. I’d just been to see a really good mate in Chester around the time of the Sydney Olympics and was stood on the platform at the station. It was Monday morning, a bit grey and muggy and the music fitted the mood perfectly. It was an odd journey back. The carriages on the leg back to Crewe were at least 25 years old. I I sat on my own in one, bombing across the Cheshire plain. The only other thing I can remember of the journey is the chap opposite me eating some really smelly tuna sandwiches (they were all squashed up from sweating in his rucksack on the journey down) as the train pulled into Euston.
It’s funny what makes you remember…
XTC Summer’s Cauldron/Grass:
Summer of 1987 and I was young free and single and exploring the west country. In my mind it was lovely and warm (probably wasn’t) and like Vulpes, the sound of the grasshoppers and the woozy intro always takes me back.
Soft Cell’s Tainted Love brings me right back to a very hot summer’s night in the mid 80s. Me and three girlfriends couldn’t sleep, so we drove out of the city of Uppsala, car stereo blaring out that song and us four singing along with the windows rolled down.
After a long drive into the countryside we got to our destination; a swimming pool in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of wheat etc, no buildings in sight.
We were skinny dipping in the middle of the light Swedish summer night, during this unusual extreme heatwave, laughing and singing.
Waking up the next morning it all felt like a surreal dream – a swimming pool out there between the fields?
Hearing the song brings back some of that surreal, film-like atmosphere, and the extatic joy of youth when everything is still possible!