Picture by Taras Kalapun
So far I haven't talked about music which is a strange omission and one I'm going to put right now. I listen to a lot of music and like a lot of people it is the background rhythm to a lot of my life.
I began to think of the music I would listen to, to help me feel happy or to just to express that feeling of overflowing with happiness. A sort of desert island discs of euphoria. I think at present my list might look like this:
- "I love to Boogie" by Marc Bolan
- "Something Stupid" by Frank Sinatra
- "Maple Leaf Rag" by Humphrey Littleton
- "Ca plane pour moi" Plastic Bertrand
- "Firestarter" by Prodigy
- "Dolly Suite" by Faure
- "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed
- "Silver Morning" by Brian Eno
Yeh, I know, I've chosen 8 instead of 7 but that's my prerogative. Certain of those tunes might change over time but its a good basic toe tapping selection. Now, I'm not saying those should be your choices. I'm sure you'll have plenty of alternatives that do the trick for you.
Then I hit the nostalgia button again, and thought back over the all tunes that I associate with times of particular happiness over the years. I'll just pick out a handful.
- When I was a child I used to get really bad stomache aches that would last most of the night and make me very sick. I used to tune my tiny orange and black radio into the only radio station that then broadcast through the night, which was radio 2, to try and distract myself a bit from the pain. Ok, so far you would be forgiven for wondering why on earth this could be associated with happiness. I would usually begin to feel better in the small hours of the morning and I could start to relax. There I would be at 3am, imagining I was the only person awake in the whole country and listening to the hokey music of radio 2. I can remember listening to "Jambalaya" by the Carpenters one night not long after I'd decided I was starting to get better and now it just symbolises for me that 'calm after the storm' moment.
- "Seasons in the Sun" listened to over and over again down a phone line! I can remember discovering "dial-a-disk" and the wonder of being able to call up your favourite song just by dialling a number (yes, over the telephone). It was a very old and inconvenient version of the ipod, only I think you only had the choice of about 3 songs (or was it just whatever was number 1? Hmm, can't recall that one).
- Sitting in the back of a car with some other teenagers, being driven to some or other Christian weekend, and hearing Pink Floyd for the first time and being blown away. This was a first class example of a moment when a song really spoke to me. The guy who owned the car had some big speakers which were the pride of his life and he decided we all needed to hear how great they were, so he chose Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Now you need to bear in mind that at the time I was painfully shy and it took something for me to open my mouth, especially to someone as obviously cool as this guy. But I needed to know what I had just heard so I had to ask him. The song was "Nobody Home" (not a happy song, a wretchedly depressing song in fact) and I was poked in the ribs by the line "I've got a strong urge to fly but I've got nowhere to fly to".
So there you have it, nostalgia, teenage angst and foot stomping. What more could you ask for?
