Oh, the memories!
I'm having a bit of a retro phase at the moment as I am listening to nothing but Mike Oldfield. His music is truly the soundtrack to my life, from listening to Discovery whilst hurtling down a hill on my bike after delivering papers as a kid, to listening to Ommadawn through my Walkman in school assembly. Listening to Five Miles Out at the moment and it reminds me of sitting in a very cold teenage bedroom wondering why I was being bullied at school...
To Be Free (from Tres Lunas) is my current favourite song. I cannot help but feel uplifted by it every time I hear it.
Sky, a band I was into even earlier than Mike Oldfield, also brings back happy times. The first album I ever owned was Cadmium and it was bought for me for Christmas in 1983. It was the same time I also got my first tape player, a little mono-speakered Hitachi thing. I managed to track down the CD a couple of years ago. I'd not heard it for at least 20 years (the tape had long since broken and binned) and as soon as I heard it, it took me back to the warmth of the family home, the last happy Christmas before my family started to fall apart.
Pink Floyd, The Wall that me and a mate used to listen to two, sometimes three times in a row on a Sunday morning when I used to doss down on his bedroom floor.
At the beginning of the 90s I spent a couple of years unemployed after dropping out of Poly. Eventually, I managed to get an interview, for a job that I really wanted. I didn't have a car at the time (too skint) and so had to take a bus. After a great interview I walked through country lanes to the bus-stop, plugged in, as usual to my personal stereo. It was late winter. The sky was a disgustingly deep shade of blue. There was a promise of Spring in the air and, for the first time in many years, I felt optimistic about life, as if things were really going to start to happen. As I looked up to the sky, overwhelmed by an engulfing sense of hope, Tom Petty's Learning to Fly started. It is a song that I still play now when I am happy and at one with everything... Yes, I know it’s about drugs!
And to bring the post down a little, REM's Losing My Religion will always remind me of a funeral I went to in Birmingham. It was of my mum's partner that had recently died of cancer (he was a lovely bloke). The whole day was awful and I remember seeing how broken my mum was as losing her soulmate. I came back home, realised that life wasn't fair and so stuck this song on repeat. I curled up on the floor and bawled my eyes out for about half an hour.
As love songs seem to be a major theme this week, Hurricane by Neil Young reminds me of my lovely gorgeous ex. I downloaded it literally a day before we met and went out for nearly four years. Then she binned me last year (moved away, offered a job abroad) and, thinking it might do me some good, I listened to it again. It didn’t help. Gravity by Embrace didn’t improve things either... No, really, I’m fine!
(Ghostlight, Mon 1 Feb 2010, 17:08, Reply)