If Music be the Food of Love.....

“You got joy for singing burning in your soul” – Huckleberry Grove, Ocean Colour Scene.

There’s been a big development in my life lately.  I have regained some of my youth and become a cool person.  Or at least I believe I have.  For I have finally, at long last, activated a music streaming account on my phone.  I’m delighted with myself.  I love that I don’t have to download albums, and I have a playlist for the car, made up entirely of songs I shout along to on the N7. 

I just had free Spotify for ages.  And then my sister came home for her holidays.  We were having a couple of glasses of wine one night when we ended up singing along to this playlist.  Except that every couple of minutes it started shouting adverts at us and ruining our fun.

Then both my sisters decided that since they were enjoying the music, they would share my list.  I had no idea that this was even possible, but basked in the glory of my choices, that they wanted my list for themselves. 

My list wasn’t shareable.  My sisters turned to me and asked me why I was paying a decent sized phone bill every month and not using all the facilities.  Apparently, I needed Spotify Premium.  Then they asked me whether I was still carrying a hundred CDs around in my car.  No, I confessed.  Sad to say the cd player in my car was the first sign of its advancing age.  I thought the CDs were tending to jump in the car stereo.  It turned out the stereo was actually scratching the life out of every one of them.

It then quickly came to light that my iPod is almost ten years old.  So old, in fact, that it’s a bit like a brick.  I decided, when I bought it, that I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  I told myself that I’d look after this iPod like it was a child, that I’d never break it or lose it, so I might as well get the best one.  I got the one that stored 160 GB of music. 

I’ve only ever owned a couple of hundred albums in my life.  So maybe three thousand songs, including all the ones that I am old enough to think of as B sides, that I never listened to.

This iPod could hold at least forty thousand songs.  I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking of. It’s not as if I have wildly eclectic musical tastes.  I have never once thought I’d love to hear some nice throat singing, or maybe a good country and western album.  I’ve liked many of the same bands since I was a teenager.  For certain, there’s some newer songs I like too (though very few newer than about five years ago, I’m sorry to say.  How old am I???)

Anyway, the point is that the iPod is now so incredibly old that you can’t even upload songs to it anymore.  Or at least I can’t.  Maybe even Apple has forgotten they ever existed.

So, my sisters asked me, am I happy to live a life without music? I objected immediately.  I have music in my life.  Didn’t I have a very dodgy Spotify account?  And sure, haven’t I my own voice?  I assured them that I sing my days away and have often been asked to desist immediately by my colleagues at work. 

They looked horrified.

“So your entire connection with music is listening to more adverts than music on Spotify and singing to yourself?”

My sisters have music playing constantly in their homes and cars.  This has engendered a love of music in their children, I’ve found, and my nieces and nephews knowing more about the music of my generation than I do.

I felt a hundred years old.

“You’re right.  What the feck is wrong with me?”

Into the phone shop, the following day, hoping to meet the girl I met the last time I was in there, who obliged me by telling me all the details of her personal life while I was conducting my business.  No sign of her of course.  Instead I spoke to a surly looking pup who looked at me askance when I asked him how to get Spotify Premium.

“Do you know your own phone number?”

He obviously thought I was a complete moron.  I tossed my head and sniffed that of course I did, and tried to look as if I was only getting sorted out now because I’d been so busy touring with some amazing band.

He checked my account, and our relationship deteriorated further when it came to light that the service is included in my bill, but I’d never used it before.  Judgement hung heavy in the air.

I got it all sorted out very quickly, in the end.  And then I lost a few days of my life, as I stared, mesmerised, at all the albums I could get, absolutely free.

It became clear very early that I was reliving my entire life through the music.  And, as in all things, His Nibs was hauled, kicking and screaming, into the project.

“What song was playing the first time we slow danced together?”

“What song was played immediately after that, here’s a hint, we both loved it, so we kept dancing, instead of running off into a corner to molest each other?”

“What song did you used to love so much that we got that poor girl to work out the notes and play it on the flute at our wedding”?

“What was the song I loved and kept playing that time we went to France?”

He didn’t know any of the answers of course.  And I didn’t tell him.  Instead, I’d play the relevant song on Spotify, and expect him to stand there grinning at me like an eejit for the duration of the song. He was miserable.  And I kept trying to make him dance around the kitchen with me.  I’m not a good dancer. 

Eventually, I walked into the kitchen one Sunday, my phone in my hand, and he yelped at me

“Don’t ask me any more questions about music, love, please.  I just don’t know.  I can’t remember what day of the week it is, never mind what song you sang on a holiday fifteen years ago.  Please, please, just leave me alone.”

So I started on my sisters.  Same game “Do you remember our favourite song when we were getting ready to go out in the early nineties?”

The great thing about siblings is that they have no fear.  They don’t worry that you’ll leave them if they aren’t nice to you.  We’ll always be sisters, it doesn’t matter how annoying I am or how much they tell me to belt up for myself.  They put me straight fairly quickly, with the information that not everybody has been in a musical coma for years, and to feck off.

But my exuberance could not be blunted.  I’ve been through my entire life in music, from my teenage years, through to about 2012, squealing with joy when I find another song I thought I’d forgotten forever.

After a couple of days I walked boldly into one of those shops that only sell technological yokes, and straight up to the counter

“A bluetooth speaker please.”

“Right.  What kind?”

“The kind that will let me play music on my phone all over the house.”

The shop assistants were two very young men.  They looked at each other and twitched their hipster beards.

“Do you want a big one or a small one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want it loud enough to have at a party?”

“Christ no.  I don’t have parties.  Look at me.”  I couldn’t help noticing the look of relief crossing the short one’s face.

“Just a normal one.”

One of the young fellas went off and came back with a speaker at least as big as the ones that came with my last stereo.  Not what I wanted at all.  So I told him so.

“That one won’t do.  Sure it’ll take up the whole front seat.”

Poor Daniel, according to his nametag, was baffled.

“The front seat?”

“The front seat of my car.  I want to play music in the car and in the house.”

“Doesn’t your car have a USB port?”

“Hardly, it’s nearly as old as I am.”

He sighed audibly now.

“How much do you think this speaker is going to cost?”

“I don’t know.  Not a fiver, like the ones in Penney’s.  One that won’t crackle all the time.  I imagined about thirty euro?”

It’s called a KS cube.  It’s bright blue, and is about two inches square.  I’m delighted with it.

I’m hoping that I’ll soon get over my new obsession.  I might finally be able to take my headphones out for long enough for my ears to cool down.  Or maybe I’ll stop turning on the little speaker and playing some of my shameful musical secrets in rooms where His Nibs is trying to watch television.  For yes, I have now become familiar enough with the whole business to have learnt how to create a private list for myself.  Some of the songs on it would make your hair stand on end.  It's fantastic.