Audio Journal : 27/04/2011

Mrs S confiscated my iPod on the night before we set off for our week-long holiday in Portugal. Therefore there's 'officially' no blog this week since I haven't really listened to anything. Unless you count the chilled-out Parisian house music played by the pool, which, whilst very trendy and absorbing, isn't something I'm terribly equipped to write at length about, though it does make me want to drink cocktails.

We have been listening to The Beatles' 'red' and 'blue' albums in our hire car. Once again, prolonged exposure to the Fab Four reminds me that a) with only a solitary exception of the tracks included ('Back In The USSR'), I don't like the Paul McCartney songs at all and have been making judicious use of the buttons on the steering wheel to move past his tracks; b) the singles the band released are generally irritating thanks to familiarity (even Mrs S, an avowed, long-standing Beatles fan from her teenage years, agrees); and c) 'Yellow Submarine' is a brilliant song for kids.

I knew this already, well before I heard my girls asking for it repeatedly and then singing rapturously along in the back of the hire car. I knew this because I was taught it as a children's song in primary school (this was about 1982; much later I began to suspect that my teachers were all LSD-dropping, pot-smoking ex-hippies made good; we didn't, as far as I can recall, ever learn any Grateful Dead songs). What is it that John Hannah says to Gwyneth Paltrow in Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors? Something about us learning Beatles songs in the womb? Well, in my case, not quite; I was about six, or thereabouts. My parents had a solitary Beatles EP (Magical Mystery Tour), which is probably more responsible than anything else for turning me on to fetishising collecting records, and for making me think that The Beatles were plain weird thanks to the oddball gatefold sleeve. (I used to collect postcards and keep them in that sleeve; my nerdish tendencies began early.)

'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' is another song that I was taught at school, in about 1986 (Christ, what were my teachers on?). We created a mural for the back of that teacher's classroom, with each of us given a phrase in the song to create an image. I had two - 'newspaper taxis' and 'marmalade skies' - and created an oblong car with then-current headlines scribbled on it, as well as orange cloud with thick lines dotted around it; we were a strictly Robinsons, orange peel-in family. It was a literal depcition of a song that made no sense at all to me and my fellow ten-year-old classmates. And why would it?

By way of padding, here are some things I've written for Documentary Evidence lately: a review of Junip's Fields (http://bit.ly/hYN9dr) and an interview with Espen J. Jörgensen on his collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner as SOUNDESCAPES (http://bit.ly/g9s2cx).