Music is Memory

Friday is about music. So links and playlists. Today, a little memory about how music — is memory…

Something about the very last day of primary school sits with me still. I remember being packed up and ready to leave — summer was grinning and Christmas was soon to call. And the walk home felt more freeing than any had before. I was finished here. And would be new to start elsewhere. In that moment, I was nowhere — and it sure felt fantastic. And as I made it up the street to my house, mum was blasting the brand new album by Icehouse, Man of Colours. We could hear it down the street. Other kids still on the walk at that point, said ‘your mum sure likes to play music so everyone can hear it’. I dropped my bag at the door, and jumped into the pool, fully clothed. It was wild to be in this moment. And it’s played over in my head for close to 40 years now. Not in a bad way at all, but not even in a good way. Just in a way. And that is okay. I just freeze. And it’s all over. Until the song gets played again. And again.

Above is a piece I wrote recently. Ostensibly about the Icehouse album, Man of Colours. Though it’s as much about me, about memory, about the time and the place. I called it a poem, though it’s really just a short piece of prose. Or could be. To me, it’s a poem:

There are some key albums from the 1980s that feel so huge to me. The first Traveling Wilburys album, Prince’s Batman soundtrack, even Mick Jagger’s first two solo albums, though no one anywhere is putting them on any list suggesting either wealth or taste. There are so many more besides. Alison Moyet’s Alf, the self-titled Bananarama (the one with Robert De Niro’s Waiting…and Cruel Summer). Paul Young’s No Parlez, George Benson’s Give Me The Night, Hall & Oates’ H2O, The Hardline According To Terence Trent D’Arby, Robert Cray’s Bad Influence and Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I could have written something similar about any of those albums, and a dozen more. But, trust me, it is a finite list. There are so many albums from that era I love, and many more I loved but cannot care so much for now, but there’s a dozen or so that feel so much bigger than just the music.

This is the music we grow up with, right? And it hits us in such a way. It is the music of car-trips, and the music of family gatherings, and the music of older siblings, and the music of parents in their young-family daze, and the music of future memories — you don’t know it at the time of course, because how could you, but it is the music that is going to keep hitting you hard.

Tears For Fears’ Songs From The Big Chair just turned 40. And I could have written a very similar poem about that. My mum used to blast Shout, turning the volume up louder for that than the rest of the album. Everybody Wants To Rule The World feels like the most perfect pop song, more immaculate and meaningful than the ones I was raised on from the generation before — We Gotta Get Out of This Place, or Strawberry Fields or Bridge Over Troubled Water, or whatever. Or, at the very least, it has a seat now at the same table.

The other big one for mum to blast on the huge Pye speakers connected to the Series 9 turntable was Introducing The Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby. (He’s now called Sananda Maitreya, so the record gets a slight retitle too, but that’s another story).

Not A Terence Trent D'Arby Interview

That album, to this day, and I have the record and the cassette tape, can’t be heard without the sound of the vacuum cleaner in the background. I hear it, my mind supplies it, as If You All Get To Heaven crackles into place, then booms.

I say other big one, but there was always music absolutely blasting from the speakers, the whole neighbourhood could hear it. And I sometimes think about the taste we gave our street! (Joking, but also not). And how tolerant the neighbourhood was of me crudely drumming along to albums by The Beatles and Cream and CCR and then INXS and Icehouse and whatever else.

Earlier this week, for my creative writing class, we had to take part in an exercise called Remembered Space — we drew from memory the floor plan of the first house we can remember living in, sketched in furniture and objects. And then wrote a list of memories and moments that immediately came to mind. We then wrote, for no more than 25 minutes, present tense, first person, with no real focus on shaping anything as such, just a memory-dump. A day later we returned to this and fashioned it into some sort of piece: Short story, memoir, a seed for a novel even. But we had to create 2-3 pages of work around that map.

It is amazing what you remember. And how that memory is triggered by the recreation of the space. My piece mentioned movies (Alligator, Bright Lights Big City) more than it mentioned music. But the whole time I was writing it I was thinking of George Benson’s Give Me The Night blasting during late night pool parties, and the way the whole family would sit on the floor sometimes to be right around the stereo to listen to the latest cassette tape. We did that with the Wilburys — and I wrote about that in my first book of poems, The Death of Music Journalism. We also used to listen to Tour of Duty together in that way. The first soundtrack album in that series.

But mum was the one that blasted the music the most.

Now, when I’m visiting home, and it’s been this way for the last 30 years — literally, as I write this it has been that long — she is more likely to say “turn that noise off” whenever I play anything. I might have thrown Aphex Twin at them, and Digable Planets, and The Roots, and, all sorts. And I can see how Aphex Twin could be written off as noise — anyone can see (or hear) that. But Simon & Garfunkel, noise? Steely Dan, noise? The inconvenience of it, the intrusion of it, the frustration of having someone come in and play something over the top of life, mood killing even if it was trying to be mood enhancing.

I try very hard to not describe my son’s music as noise — though these days we are more likely to all be listening to things under headphones in our life. And blasting music as a family only in the car. We go equal-footing there on car trips, with playlists on random, each person in the car with the same amount of songs in the prize-pool. Around town, or shorter drives, we often just hand the phone to Oscar and let him blast his Travis Scott, his Kendrick Lamar, his SZA, his Denzel Curry. We don’t mind some of that, and of course we like it a lot when he is happy to hear our choices — or doesn’t mind at all that I’m playing Aphex or Tears for Fears. (It could always be either!)

My memory of Icehouse, and Man of Colours in particular, is strong. I wrote that piece at the top apropos of nothing. Just memory. Just the mood. Just a strong flashback to my final day of primary school. But I could have explored that further for the class exercise.

This is petty. This is silly. But one time, not so long ago, I played Icehouse’s Man of Colours at my parents’ house. A few people around, not too many. My dad always asks me to “put on some music, Si”. I usually don’t want to, but understand it is “my job” when there. We all have jobs when we return home. Mine is to DJ. I scrolled to Icehouse. And Man of Colours. Those 80s chorused guitars.

JING-JING-JING
and then:
“I’ve got a pocket/Full of holes….”

It lasted that long.

And then, MUM:
“Turn off that NOISE!”

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And it’s Friday, so, yeah, here’s your playlist:

Well, it’s my playlist too. But as always I’m sharing it with you. This one starts slow and has a particular mood, before it shifts. I hope there’s something on here or in this that you might like. And happy weekend, thanks for reading.