Cheap music, the potency of
There was a time when, for various reasons, I stopped keeping up with popular music (and I've never really got back into it).
However, this didn't, of course, mean that I never heard it: what it meant was that I tended to hear things as background music in shops, pubs, restaurants and the gym, by the time they were probably no longer new and fresh but had made it onto compilation tapes.
But anyway, as a result I sometimes heard things I might not otherwise have particularly noticed in specific circumstances and now associate certain songs with the heartlift of those specific moments.
So, I heard a song which I later discovered to be Nana Mouskouri's 'Turn on the Sun' in some clothes shop in Sutton (yes, my dearios, this was when I was living in suburban Surrey and an excursion to Sutton High Street was quite the treat) while I was trying to find something to wear at my sister's wedding, just at the point where the 'finding a flat and sorting out the mortgage issues' stage of moving out of the Slow Motion Trainwreck Relationship was all coming together. That really did turn on the sun for me.
Around 1989 (well into my PhD but before I'd completed it) or so there was one day on which 3 validating things happened: I had an extremely gratifying enquiry from a v distinguished body about transferring a small exhibition I'd done at work (this didn't in the event come to anything, I think the practicalities would have been too complicated, but I was yay purring at the being noticed for this); and I got two, count them, two, requests to give papers on my research (one was from someone by way of being a mate, but even so). And in the gym that night, while I was doing bench-presses, the theme from Flashdance, 'What A Feeling' came on, and it fit my mood exactly.
This trot down memory lane brought to you by having recently downloaded a very cheap + discounted compilation from Amazon of music from that general era, much of which has no resonance at all, and some of which can still get me up to boogie.
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