Songs, like smells, have the ability to instantly take us to places and times that played a formative, or in some cases, memorably incidental, role in our lives.
It can take only a bar or two and suddenly the memories are flooding back, immersing us once again in that particular moment, all the people, the food, the activities and a whole host of other touchstones so vividly real we could reach out and touch them.
These five songs are just a small selection of the tracks that instantly conjure up treasured moments in time for me, some way, way back, others relatively recent, that together make up the tapestry of my heavily-soundtracked life.
“Yellow” by Coldplay
“Yellow”, the first in a long line of what of what would become an avalanche of hits for British supergroup Coldplay, was released in Australia in January 2001, eventually reaching #5 on the nation’s ARIA charts.
Roughly six months before that however, I had happened across a 15 second snippet of the song on one of CNN’s world music report where they’d talked about Coldplay’s nomination for a Mercury Award for the album Parachutes from which “Yellow” was the second single after “Shiver”, and fallen absolutely head over heels in love.
Hearing this beautiful, heartfelt song of unrequited love set off an almost fruitless chase across the record stores of Sydney – this was in the time of no downloads, basic internet and non-existent e-commerce – in the search for Parachutes. Australia at that point hadn’t heard of the band and wasn’t really interested so no one was really stocking the album … save for department store David Jones in Miranda (Sydney) which didn’t exactly have the comprehensive stock of CDs but somehow had Parachutes.
It began my second great musical love affair after ABBA, and while I am no longer quite in love with Coldplay as I once was, their music has featured very heavily in the soundtrack of my life, and I have this one mesmerisngly beautiful song to thank for it.
“Chiquitita” by ABBA
Almost everything about the beginning of my decades-long love affair with ABBA in the ’70s is as fresh now as the day it happened, which tends to be the way with memories about formative parts of your life.
In the case of “Chiquitita”, which ABBA released in January 1979 as the first single from their much-delayed and thus hugely-anticipated Voulez-Vous album, the memories are especially clear.
ABBA had volunteered to donate the royalties from the song in perpetuity to UNICEF, premiering the song at the Music for UNICEF Concert, along with artists like Olivia Newton-John and the Bee Gees, which was telecast in Australia on the Saturday after the actual performance on 9 January 1979.
This hauntingly beautiful, emotionally-resonant track was the first indication of what ABBA’s new music would sound like – as it turns out, not exactly emblematic of what was a heavily disco-oriented album – and I was determined to be home for it, begging mum and dad to leave our church’s social day in time for me to watch it live. (There was no other choice in the days before VCRs, streaming and catch-up services.)
I can still picture the day – the food we ate, the cricket we played (I’m no sports fan so I could be scarred from being forced to play a game I barely tolerated, if that) and the people there, but mainly because getting through that day meant I got to spend the night with ABBA; not just for the 3 minutes of exquisite pop perfection that “Chiquitita” represented but also the sing-a-long at the end of the concert where all the artists joined in a rousing rendition of an early ABBA song “He Is Your Brother”.
“Love Letter to Japan” – The Bird and the Bee
Ah, falling in love.
When it happens like it did for me in early 2009, it seems to sear everything you did, felt, experienced, ate and saw into your memories with a clarity not reserved for many other things.
Meeting the love of my life, and yes I am still with him and going strong nine years later, was a defining point in my life, and I can still remember standing on the edge of Hyde Park in the centre of Sydney waiting for Steve to turn up so we could walk down to watch a film at the Open Air Cinema, which is always one of the highlights of summer for me.
Oddly I can’t recall the film we saw but I remember listening to this exquisitely rich, upbeat bright-n-breezy song from Los Angeles-based indie pop duo, The Bird and the Bee (Greg Kurstin, Inara George) as I stood on the footpath with the wind blowing on a relatively barmy Sydney summer day.
What really rooted this song to my memory of my day was its lyrical content which talked in whimsically earnest tones about doing whatever it takes to be near the one you love; I was head over heels for the most wonderful man in the world and so the song resonated deeply with me and even now, all these years later, it is still very much my go-to song of desire for my beautiful guy.
“Euphoria” by Loreen
I am, and have been for many years, a Eurovision Song Contest obsessive.
Started way back in 1956 as a way of drawing a fractured Europe back together with the healing power of music, the Contest can be kitsch and cheesy but increasingly it is a window into a world of music that spans the gamut of European musical tastes and trends.
My friend Kerry adores the contest, as does my partner Steve (who prefers the more tragic, weirdly bizarre acts of which there are a sadly declining number) and so every year we hold a big party at my place for 30-40 people where we eat European food, drink lots of wine, watch every last millisecond of the show – after Kerry and I have watched and reviewed all the songs in the lead-up – and glory in the glitter-coated majesty of Eurovision.
2012 (held in Baku, Azerbaijan) was one of those years that sticks in my mind primarily because (a) Sweden won and (b) they won with a song whose performance owed a debt of gratitude to Kate Bush (visually at least) and was one of those gripping, yes euphoric pop tracks that seizes the imagination and thrills the soul from the opening bars.
I knew it would win from the moment I heard it, with the only other song that’s come close for me being “Rise Like a Phoenix” by Conchita Wurst (Austria) which won the contest in 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“Knock on Wood” by Amii Stewart
Like many a teenager before me, but probably not as many since in this age of instant streaming and downloads, I spent many a Saturday cloistered in my bedroom listening to the Top 40 countdown and taping all the songs I loved from “Mickey” by Toni Basil to “Video Killer the Radio Star” by The Buggles, “Chuck E’s in Love” by Ricki-Lee Jones to “Born to be Alive” by Patrick Hernandez and many, many others, onto an ever-growing number of cassettes.
Sure I ended up with the radio station’s forward or back-announcing on almost all the songs, but while that peeved me at times (OK a lot of the time; I was, and remain to this day, a non-philosophically chilled person), if it meant I could listen to the songs whenever I wanted – of course if I really liked a song and wanted to listen to it over and over, I had to rewind over and over again; no instant iPod replay back then – then it was a small price to pay.
Especially as I didn’t have money to buy too many singles and LPs, with the money I did have, pretty much exclusively directed to ABBA.
One song that captured my attention was Amii Stewart’s cover of “Knock on Wood” – the song was originally written by Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper in 1966 and first recorded by Floyd – a vibrantly alive piece of piercingly alluring disco that came complete with a dazzlingly psychedelic clip that to this day is one of my favourite pieces of visual imagery.
I used to stand up in my room, grab the requisite hairbrush and pretend I was on the stage singing this thrilling song at the top of my lungs, lost in an escapist fantasy with a soundtrack that to this day gets my pulse racing and my mind wandering to what it would be like to perform a song as brilliantly memorable as this one. (Funny story – years later I was at a hairdressers, told the 18 year-old cutting my hair that I remembered when the song has been on the charts in 1979 – it was on the salon’s in-store playlist – only to have her look at me like I was a caveman fresh from the Stone Age. Hilarious.)