Let’s go back to your childhood… childhood… childhood…
Mar.01, 2006, filed under Miscellany
Maybe it’s the whole moving back to Scotland schtick. Maybe it’s because there has been a spate of it turning up as background music on adverts and TV programmes. I dunno. Anyway. I’ve just downloaded a pile of Alan Parsons Project.
Oh my gods. Sorry. I’m just listening to some samples at the Alan Parsons CD sales section and it’s like being whisked back in time.
When I was younger I used to ensconce myself on the sofa at the back of the living room, next to the record player, and sit there listening to weird music through the headphones and reading or writing fiction while the rest of the family watched TV. I don’t know why. I was a very strange child. For whatever reason I did this, it means that I therefore can’t read Frank Herbert’s Dune series without hearing the tones of Spiral and Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis (sadly not available on CD unless you go for the boxed set, which includes the rather execrable Heaven and Hell). The Toto soundtrack for the David Lynch film was just all wrong in a way I couldn’t possibly begin to describe.
My stories all had a background ambience set by the music I was listening to, and I chose the music on the basis of the ideas I was interested in at the time because certain sounds invoked certain imagery and sensations and…
Dammit, we’re back to topography and Munky is going to laugh at me. I guess it must be the synaesthesia again.
Anyway. I suppose that this is why I still prefer to give my stories a soundtrack even now, albeit usually I’m the only one who knows what it is. The Chronicles are the current exception in that I specify the soundtrack for each episode. Hewlett & Martin used to do that for Tank Girl, which I was always secretly pleased about.
A lot of my memories have a soundtrack. Certain albums will bring back memories of driving over to Cockenzie to work on Evarne, just as surely as the smell of sawdust mixed with paint thinner will. If I hear Roxy Music‘s Avalon I might as well be playing the tabletop Space Invaders with my younger brother in the Easdale Inn while drinking watery coke. A lot of the memories seem to have occurred at night. There was a lot of travelling in my childhood, and a lot of being half-asleep in the car while Mum or Dad drove and played various albums on the car stereo.
Other than Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Both of these are exclusively evocative of weekend barbecues after Dad had been diving.
The Alan Parsons Project is another set of boat-type albums. I think Mum and Dad were going through a bit of an APP phase at the time we were working on both Evarne and Blue Kingfisher in the boatyard at Easdale. It’s difficult to be exactly sure, but I suppose this would have been about the time of Chernobyl. I remember working at Easdale at a time when we had to hide inside the car every time it rained because of the radioactive grey ash falling from the sky. Yeah. Sounds about right. Chernobyl was 1986 and the APP is horrendously 80s in a way that even big hair and boys wearing make-up can’t match. It’s the bastard child of 70s prog rock and the new wave electronic faux spirituality that brought us such delights as Electric Dreams and War Games.
Sorry? You thought that War Games was just a hacker movie? You hadn’t spotted the whole thing about the ultimate futility of mutual nuclear proliferation and the macrocosm of global war being played out in the microcosm of tic-tac-toe? Shame on you. That was what the 80s were all about!
You know, I still have the battery-operated stereo we used to use to listen to this stuff. It’s in the bathroom on the cistern of the lavatory. I’ve still got the TV we owned at the time as well. It’s in the kitchen being used as a shelf for my Oakleys and Frood‘s Rudy Projects (yeah – they used to be my Rudy Projects. I upgraded).
To quote Camp Koala: “Some things never change. Anyone for a garibaldi?”
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
