MUSICAL MEMORIES

MUSICAL MEMORIES

Me, around the age of eight, before they invented pop music and life.

The older we get the more we seem to want to search into a past we might have remembered, but haven't quite. At least, that's true of me and I dared say it's probably true of quite a lot of other people, too. We need reminding, and that's what odd memories and mementoes do.

Take music, for instance. It quite often happens in my life that they play a record on the radio that I haven't heard for decades, going back to the late fifties in a few instances, and suddenly, as if it was a hit only yesterday, I can remember just about every word of it. Yet fifty years have probably passed since I last heard it and there it is in my mind, fresh and yet resonant of a different time. And I can't remember ninety percent of yesterday!

I remember when the Beatles first appeared with all their success and screaming girls and mop-heads. I remember how their forthcoming first record was heralded in advance in the New Musical Express (yes, I read that when I was in my teens and younger twenties), little advertisements on several pages that informed one and all that the the Beatles are coming!

Here they are as they were, so to speak. Thee adult generations accused them having disgracefully long hair - but look at it!

And they came and the screaming began. Girls really did wet themselves in their excitement. And they screamed themselves hoarse. I was young and single, and didn't I resent all that adulation? Of course I did! Four young fellows from Liverpool and all that crazy love for them: and I guess in quite a few instances it was love.

Why couldn't I be loved like that? What was wrong with a tone-deaf young Rugby (I lived in Rugby back then) bloke with no sense of rhythm? I wasn't a Beatle, but so what? I could have been. Once when I was travelling with a friend to college, hair a bit on the long side and studenty in a scruffy kind of way, we parked my sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular and popped into a restaurant (in Newark, of all places, where decades later I was going to meet my wonderful wife face-to-face for the first time) and two of the waitresses came up to us and asked for autographs because weren't we a pop group?

I had, for a blinkered second, a taste of fame before I owned up that no, we weren't a pop group but students on our way to college – and the autograph books disappeared, and so did the waitresses. But for the fraction of a moment whilst I was deciding not to be a prat and tell the truth I felt the warmth of false fame washing over me, and a little bit of me wanted it. Yet I'm tone deaf, have no sense of rhythm so I could never have been in a pop group back then when one pre-requisite was talent. Things seem to have changed somewhat since then!

A Ford Popular - not mine from back then because it's long since I scrapped it, but similar.

Yet when I hear one of the earlier Beatles tracks I'm transported back to those days with a tiny fragment of my mind and find myself wishing things could be like they had been back then. Suddenly I no longer resent those Beatles because two of them are dead and I'm alive, and my life has been rewarded by the company of my angel-wife.

And other records, those I might have supposed I'd forgotten long since, they sometimes get played and even though I suddenly discover they're far from forgotten, they bring back a flavour of yesteryear, and it's wonderful.

When I was driving away from my college for the last time the song Those were the Days by Mary Hopkin was riding high in the pop charts, and it meant so much in a choking sort of way, because those had been the days. And every time I've heard it since then I've been swamped by the immediacy of the nostalgia I felt back in my red-blood days. It's only in the last few years that I've had time, I suppose, to look at life from the perspective of Mary Hopkin's kind of days, and say these are the days....

Mary Hopkin, those were the days when she was the angel of my memories.

But the music's from a lost past. I'm typing this and listening to a CD of the Queen tribute band Mercury, and enjoying it, and that music's a great deal more immediate than that of my New Musical Express days. But though it still isn't Buddy Holly or Lonnie Donegan or Joe Brown or any of the heroes of mine that painted each day with the richness of a young life I was living, I love it.

I'm now going to sound like my parents' generation, but when I listen to what my brain tells me is turgid crap that the youngsters listen to today I wonder if their old age will be layered by memories of their musical past, the crotch-grabbing incoherent leering rappers that leave me stone cold when I see them on the television. Probably, of course, but I can't for the life of me understand how.

© Peter Rogerson 01.05.11