The Songs That Chose Us...

Strange, the songs we remember… whether we want to or not.

I’ve written before about songs that embed themselves in the memory, becoming inextricably linked with a specific time and place. This, for me, is an entirely different phenomenon from hearing a song and liking it.

I well remember something my brother told me years ago about a memorable night on which he went with my dad to a concert given by the Buddy Rich Big Band in Birmingham city centre. You’d imagine that, on such an occasion, one might have had a number like the Rich Band’s Straight, No Chaser or Mexicali Rose going round on an internal loop. But no. For my brother, the song that came to signify that night in memory was a contemporary piece of chart pop – Dancing in the City, by Marshall Hain. Doubtless, the resonance of the word ‘city’ in the title, along with the song’s lyrical mentions of ‘alleys’ and ‘tonight’ had a lot to do with this, but it typifies the phenomenon that I’m talking about. Sometime, the songs we remember choose us, rather than the other way around…

I can cite dozens of examples. Many of them are so early that they belong to an era before I’d acquired the power of discrimination; of being able to decide which songs I liked on the basis of preferring certain sounds and melodies above others. Thinking about this has led me to ponder on what it is that imprints certain pieces of music on the memory; how it is that hearing a specific song can be the nearest thing to time travel we can experience.

Is it that we’re born with a predisposition towards certain melodic and harmonic patterns and begin to recognise them from the soundworld in which we grow up? Do certain songs somehow exert a hypnotic influence from constant repetition? Whatever it is that happens, it seems that certain pieces of music act on the memory in a Pavlovian or Proustian manner, so that the mere act of hearing them conjurs up a snapshot of a particular moment in time and space with which the song is inextricably linked. And they’re not always good songs. I wrote recently about Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, a track which possesses this quality but which I despise.

One factor which seems to have a bearing on all this is repetition. Songs which we encounter year after year have, for me, far less of this Proustian quality than those which appear for a short time and are scarcely heard of again. Transience seems to be one of the keys to the phenomenon. Some of the songs which, for me, have the most vivid associations in memory were barely in the charts for a week or more, following which they were seldom, or never played again.

One such song is Vince Hill’s The Importance of Your Love, a single which scarcely troubled the top forty compilers on its release in the summer of 1968. It peaked at number 32 on 16^th July, but is for me forever associated with the summer holidays of that year, particularly the last week or so when the prospect of returning to school began to loom large. This illustrates the difference between chart position and airplay. The Importance of Your Love was evidently played a lot on the radio, despite its poor showing in the charts, and this is how it impressed itself onto my memory. The tune, by French chansonnier Gilbert Becaud, now seems steeped in essence of mid to late summer – hearing it now I can see the huge, straggling elder bush in the garden that used to flower and bear fruit at this time of year, or hear the chimes of the Tonibell ice cream van as it trundled around the neighbourhood. The same song also curiously brings to mind a memory of a rare visit from some relations who travelled over from Aston on the bus one day towards the end of the summer holidays that year…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv2IoIoDuZw

There’s something slightly stranger going on here, though. Gilbert Becaud’s melody is not entirely original. The Importance of Your Love had started life as L’Important C’est La Rose (A Rose is the Most Important Thing), and had been a huge hit in France during 1967; but in composing it, Becaud had accidentally used a seven-note melodic progression that can also be found in The Toys’ 1966 hit A Lover’s Concerto. This, for me, was the most memorable phrase in the song, its ‘signature’ if you like, that set it apart from all other records. I’d never heard the Toys’ song at the time of Vince Hill’s release, only encountering it in later years – but when I finally heard it... it had the same effect as the Vince Hill single. That melodic phrase took me right back to the late summer of 1968. Which is strange, to say the least. Does this, then, mean that the mnemonic effect of any song is embedded in its melody?

Melody is certainly a factor, but I’m also aware of the power of the individual performance and even the production of a single. Reparata and the Delrons’ Captain of Your Ship was a minor hit around Easter of 1968, and this time it’s the whole single I remember, especially its nautical sound effects. This particular song has the curious effect of conjuring up a morning-time scene on a day in the school holidays – a bright and breezy sort of day at that, and there was washing on the line, suggesting a Monday. Easter 1968 fell on April 16^th, which coincides exactly with the song’s highest week on the chart, at No. 13. We had Radio 2 on in our house, which meant the ‘J.Y. Prog’ at 10.00am – and it was definitely Jimmy Young I remember spinning Reparata’s disc. I can’t remember if this was the first time I’d heard the song, but I suspect it was. In later years, I barely heard the song again, its absence only serving to reinforce the connection to that one specific day in 1968.

Absence also accounts for my recollection of The Mamas and the Papas’ Monday Monday, a song fixed firmly in 1966 for me: I can still picture our old valve radiogram with the song drfting from the speaker grille, and our mum commenting on how funny it was for a song to have a title like that. After its brief tenure in the charts, it would be another ten years before I heard it again.

As the Vince Hill example illustrates, a song doesn’t have to be a major hit to imprint itself on one’s consciousness. Returning to 1968 we find Marty Wilde’s non-hit Abergavenny failing to make an impression on the charts, for all its insistent, repetitive brass band melody. Despite being a big hit across Europe, Abergavenny didn’t even make the top 40 in the UK, but it wasn’t for want of trying: the single was flogged to death on daytime radio during the weeks of its release, which happily (or not) coincicded with our family going on holiday to... Llandudno. Not Abergavenny, but near enough. I didn’t see a ‘red dove running free’ but I had I done so, I’d have returned it care of Marty Wilde...

I never saw Marty Wilde perform Abergavenny on TV: my only encounter with it was on the radio. I didn’t even know who Marty Wilde was. In later years, I forgot everything about the song apart from the title and the maddeningly repetitive verse/chorus, but in my mind’s eye it was being sung by... Marty Feldman!

I’ve written previously about the way in which various pop culture items join forces in the memory to prompt a rush of recollections: thus, from the simple stimulus of Cilla Black’s Step Inside Love, I still get an instant hit of Captain Scarlet bubblegum cards, Tonibell ‘miniballs’ (ice cream in a plastic sphere) and White Horses on TV. 1968 again. What is it with that year? Sometimes, it takes no more than a single play of a song to fix a particular moment in time, particularly if the song is somehow appropriate. I’d remembered the Gunther Kallman Chorus single Daydream on the basis of a single radio play which was terminated mid way through by a thunderstorm. Thunder, albeit in the distance, also accounts for a similar memory, which I believe dates from the same year, 1970…

It was nearly the end of the school holidays, and the weather had turned foul. Most of the country was affected by extremely heavy, thundery rain, with intense storms occurring in places, and generating coverage on the evening news. The weather meant an enforced stay indoors, and my brother and myself had created ‘dens’ by draping blankets across the armchairs in the living room. Outside, the scene across the gardens was one of near twilight, despite it being a summer afternoon, as the rain fell like stair rods. I was aware that other districts were experiencing thunderstorms, but aside from an occasional distant growl, there seemed no prospect of a storm here in Sutton Coldfield. Into this atmosphere, from the muttering radio, drifted a song, one line of which was entirely appropriate to the moment. The song was Peter Paul and Mary’s Day is Done, and the single line in the lyric ran: ‘Is it the thunder in the distance you fear?’ I never heard that song again – it was a random radio play of an LP track, rather than a chart single, and for many years I had no idea what it was called. Only with the advent of the internet was I able to track it down by searching for that specific lyric. The rest of the song had faded in the memory, but that one line of words and melody lingered on… 

Sometimes, the nostalgic effect of such songs took a while to sink in, whereas with others, it seemed to happen almost immediately. Vince Hill’s single genuinely felt as if it was part of the atmosphere of the time when I heard it on the radio back in ’68... a strange contender for the zeitgeist, but there you go. At other times, it seems as if, on glancing into the immediate past, we recognise certain aspects of our surroundings, of which music is only one example, which seem to evoke an ineluctable quality, an atmosphere, for want of a better word.

I’m not even sure if this phenomenon still happens for me. Not listening much to contemporary music on daytime radio means that the chances of a specific track becoming locked down in time are far fewer than they once were. A relatively ‘recent’ example came in the form of Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker, whose solo single Down in the Bottom, culled from his only solo album 11 Tracks of Whack still provides a mainline to the balmy, early spring of 1995. And that’s over twenty years ago…

I’ll close on a playlist of a few more selected few songs that, for me, will always have strong associations with past time… hearing any one of them I can reach back into the past and reconstruct a surprisingly complete picture of what I was doing, thinking, watching on television, toys, comics, school holidays, the weather… everything. Like I said, it's time travel.

See you yesterday!

Carly Simon/ You’re So Vain – March 1973

Gilbert O’Sullivan – Oo Wakka Doo Wakka Day – Early summer 1972

Scott Walker – Lights of Cincinatti – Summer 1969

Cher – Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves – dark evenings in autumn 1971

Manfred Mann – Ragamuffin Man – Early summer 1969

Sparks – This Town Aint Big Enough For Both Of Us – Spring 1974

Cockney Rebel – Judy Teen – Summer 1974