I’m renowned among those who know me for my eclectic taste in music that’s driven by my absolute lack of any musical knowledge whatsoever.
Growing up my music education consisted of one Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) song – Fathers and Sons – a selection of old folk/ children’s songs that my dad could play on the guitar 1, Michael Jackson’s Bad album and Big Fun, a favourite of my brother’s and the reason I was gobsmacked to learn Blame It On The Boogie was originally a Jackson Five song when I was in my 20s.2
In the early 2000s I made friends with a wonderful Scot with CF and we spent many nights chatting via text and IM 3. He also discovered that I had a dreadful taste in music and so he burned me a CD4 to help me discover more artists.
In having a clearout at home recently, I found the CD case again (he called his compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’, a shared passion of ours) but the CD appears to have been long lost. This morning I invested some time in re-creating the album’s track list on Spotify.
If I’ve learned anything about music since my friends and, most notably, my wife started educating me properly in my late-teens and early-20s, it’s the ability for it to transport you to a time and place instantly.
As I write this, I’m listening to the playlist and remembering the days when life was so different.
The last two years – essentially the whole of 2018 and 2019 – have been horrendous, and at times it has felt that any light at the end of the tunnel we saw was nothing but a train headed in our direction. But listening back to this reminds me just how far I’ve come in the intervening years.
It’s been a tough journey, with much grief and sadness along the way. But I’m alive and I’m able to do things I couldn’t have dreamed of when I first listened to this CD.
Anders, who authored this album, has managed to not only take me back but also to bring me forward to give me deep gratitude for the life I have, despite challenges I may be going through at the moment and those that lie ahead.
This post is for Anders, though he’ll never read it. He died not too long after I was given my second chance at life, but this playlist is always in my heart.
Fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice, fortune depends on the tone of your voice.
Songs of Love, Divine Comedy – from the compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’
- Dad used to play songs to my brother and me while we were in the bath to keep us entertained. The memory is one of my fondest from childhood.
- This is a 100% genuine story; it wasn’t until I saw Jackson Five performing it on TV in a Michael Jackson retrospective that I realised it wasn’t a Big Fun original. And yes, I’m still ashamed.
- Microsoft Messenger (or MSN) mostly, which seems so quaint now.
- Because pre-iTunes