For reasons not even known by myself, I have been writing a great deal about music lately. You see, I’ve been writing That Difficult Second Book™ for quite a while and if I was to describe it as The Soundtrack Of My Life™ I would certainly be using a tired old cliché used mainly by lazy people with no imagination, people like me in other words. I am well aware that the potential audience for such a work is vanishingly small – after all, who will want to read the memoirs of someone who isn’t even a household name in their own household? – but I plough on regardless.
There is something magical about music. Most funerals include music that was loved by or relevant to the departed and despite my somewhat patchy memory music reminds me of them. The same with weddings, too. And as I carefully researched my project (just a slight exaggeration, there) it dawned on me what an integral part of my life music was and remains.
I won’t spoil the ‘fun’ for anyone daft to buy my book when it’s been self-published – it’s going to be terrible: I strongly recommend you don’t – but the more I thought about people and events, things like holidays, meeting girls (no names, don’t worry) and random folk I have come across there’s usually music.
I say ‘usually’ because it’s not always. While my mum liked music and my dad even more so, neither of their parents, my grandparents, seemed to have any interest in it at all. My paternal grandparents’ house, while untidy and cluttered, didn’t have so much as a radio and the only music I remember hearing at their house were things like the theme from BBC’s Grandstand and ITV’s alternative World of Sport.
Music, to me, is the nearest thing we have to magic. Now I know that a definition for magic can mean ‘supernatural powers’ and in my view, based on actual evidence, no one has those. Yet, there is something indefinably unique about the power of music, in all sorts of ways, whether that reflects happiness, sadness, euphoria, deep depression; basically a million and one emotions and feelings. Only music can do this.
I still remember my main Christmas present for 1964, the LP A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles. When I was given the record, I knew only a couple of the songs but by the end of the day I knew all of them. Obviously, being all of seven years old I had no idea what any of the words meant – and it turned out that most of them were quite brilliant – the album was, as we say these days, all killer, no filler. I can visualise myself on the floor in our front room listening to Things We Said Today, for nearly 62 years one of my favourite songs. And that incredible opening chord for the title track? It’s utterly glorious, the stuff of genius. (Click on the link and learn about it now!)
That magic is still there today. The explosion of excitement I felt in 1972 when hearing the opening riff to T. Rex’s Telegram Sam remains when hearing a brand new song like Sleepwalking by Little Grandad. It’s why I bore for England when I urge people not to shut up shop on their music tastes and collections by assuming that everything was better in the old days. And as I repeat, ad nauseam, we live in the best time ever for music, being able to enjoy all the music that has ever been made.
It helps, of course, being an utter obsessive with a voracious appetite for music of more genres than I ever imagined possible. But I have the feeling that for more normal people, for whom music doesn’t necessarily dominate every waking moment, it is still matters to them at least a bit, if only in that memory bank.
Back in 1976, John Miles sang his ghastly song Music, where he explained that music was his first love and would likely be his last. And while I detest the song, I agree with the sentiment. As the worst band in the history of music, Queen, once sang, it’s a kind of magic. And, as I keep saying, it really is.
