Music memories

First published in Column 8 on the 5^th June 1991

Recently we acquired a record player after having been some years without one. (The last was picked to pieces when the boys were small and investigative and had to see how everything worked.)

Hearing records not played for years brought back some strange memories. There’s something special about the music we first heard when we were very young and our world was somewhat unexplored.

I put on Imagine and I’m back in an upstairs London flat in a row of terrace houses in Tooting Bec, in front of a pale brown radio my English uncle gave me.

I play James Taylor and think of long evenings sitting in front of a gas fire sucking up its two shillings, listening to Taylor’s half-melancholy tapes, with my soon-to-be wife snuggled up beside me. And if it wasn’t James Taylor, it was gloomy Leonard Cohen, or Harry Nilsson draining every last ounce of romance from songs on the one record of his we owned.

I pick up a Moody Blues album and remember a terrible residential child care placement I had in the middle of Cheshire, where two other displaced persons and myself used to listen to the group’s sci-fi sounds after all the awful maladjusted kids had been put to bed.

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, was on the first LP I ever owned. Hearing it was like going back to childhood and discovering that the world is so much bigger than you’d ever imagined. (Walt Disney tried to ruin the Sixth for me by using it in Fantasia, but Beethoven and I survived.)

When I heard Mahler’s Fourth Symphony it was as though Mahler himself and his sleigh bells and all the angelic choirboys had burst blazing into my Dunedin living room.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Noel Coward is credited with remarking that there is a potency in cheap music, and it’s strange how something that really has no particular depth can affect you again and again.

When I was young, I spent a couple of weeks in some larger North Island town – possibly it was Hamilton. Two things I remember vividly – learning to swim on my back, and everywhere I went hearing the song sung by Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night.

The moment that used to get me every time was when, about two thirds of the way through, the music suddenly shifted up a notch. It was like remembering when you first fell in love. (At that naïve stage, I hadn’t.)

The composer Michael Tippet said in a newspaper interview that all sorts of music stopped him in his tracks. He and I would be in agreement about Strangers in the Night, I think, in spite of the simple device it uses to wind the listener up.

Pavarotti has the same effect when he sings the aria from Turandot over the ad for all those anguished footballers. Puccini might be turning in his grave, but emotionally, for the rest of the world, the combining of the film of those footballers and the achingly romantic music is a stroke of genius.

Music can move people at their point of least resistance. At a party years ago, late at night, when the drink had turned everyone soporific, the radio played Paul Simon singing Bridge Over Trouble Water. One man, a respectable policeman by day, was crawling around the floor on his hands and knees, shaking his head, tears in his eyes, and mumbling, ‘It’s the greatest piece of music ever written.’

And in some ways he was right.

Pavarotti in St Petersburg

‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ – the line comes from Noel Coward’s play, Private Lives.

There’s a rather poor recording of the World Football Cup ad here.