I bet there are songs that stand out in your mind. Music that is indelibly stamped at a specific time in your life that throws you right back there. No matter how many times you hear it subsequently, it still evokes that specific time. How does that happen? Really, really strong memories, in my experience, tend to be quite few and far between. The moments that you can’t divorce from that one time are less common than regular, less impactful ones.
If we exclude those more ‘intimate’ memories, what’s left? Well in my case they tend to be seemingly random moments from my life. For example ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ by Lita Ford, a pop-metal minor hit always takes me back to Newcastle in summer of 1988, coming down an escalator in Top Shop and it being played by ‘Radio Top Shop’. It just sounded so epic that even now when I hear it, it’s a Proustian moment.
Another is playing a tape of Gary Moore’s Wild Frontier album really loud, driving down the A1 in our first car, a Fiat Panda and being caught up in a jam at Dishforth roundabout as usual. That roundabout was always a pinch point until they got rid of it in the mid 90s.
Then there was the time we sat in the town square in Hexham, listening in amazement to Joe Satriani's Flying In A Blue Dream.
I also recall driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and rounding a bend in the road into the Mojave desert and Zappa’s Peaches En Regalia coming on the radio. It sounded so epic.
Similarly, driving through Malibu with Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl on. Both were moments when everything seemed to cohere and come together in perfect harmony.
Then going back to the late 60s I vividly recall going to bed in the summer when it was still light, I was 6 or 7 and Dionne Warwick singing Do You Know The Way To San Jose, was on the radio. It was hot and I can still see the sun streaming in through the curtains.
Finally, Ommadawn by Mike Oldfield: I recall being transfixed by it at Xmas, when I was 14. The parents thought it was strange but I knew even then it was important to me.
Just a few incidents from the last six decades.
