We’ve been writing a lot about music this month, so here
reading her piece about the strange connections the childish mind makes between music and memory (and John Craven and Cardiff).1976: The potency of cheap music
Strange how potent cheap music can be. Like a whiff of Blue Stratos on the night air, all it takes is a few bars and there we are, forty years ago, dripping extruded ice cream product on the vinyl seats of a Morris Marina while the rain falls on a pebbled beach. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives
Our theme music is Otra vez by friend of the show S F Gallardo, who you can find on Spotify and Bandcamp
Related essays from June 2024 include:
Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story
With three TV channels and no internet, we were raised by Puffins; for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.
1984: I Feel For You
I have a confession: I don’t like ‘I Feel For You’ by Chaka Khan. This feels like a bad place to start, because pretty much everyone else thinks it’s perfect. This includes Tobias, who is not a noted connoisseur of new jack swing; my best school-run-mum friend, who listens to Magic FM; and my children’s father, who likes music you couldn't possibly unde…
Your own personal soundtrack
Getting on the northbound train at King’s Cross, finding a window seat facing the direction of travel and pressing play on the C90 of Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim with — entirely by chance — precisely the right timing, so that the train lurches into motion with the first splayed chord of ‘Caribou’ and speeds up as the song gathers momentum, the terraces of N…
