So many of our most precious memories are anchored in particular songs. But does the easy availability of every track spell the end of that? Jude Rogers and her young son compare music notes
The second we get in the car, my son strikes up his familiar tune. “I want my playlist, Mum!” Put your belt on, young man. “Pleeease?” Some politeness for a change. Belt. Now.
I get a second’s sweet peace as I hear the clunk-click. Then the noise: “Mum! I need my playlist right now!”
And so it begins. The playlist of my nearly-nine-year-old’s favourite pop songs, usually on shuffle, starts to shake through the car. I give in to his nagging often, but I know why I do. I remember the joy of becoming a music fan, discovering new sounds, worlds and ideas through verses and choruses, through the giddy rushes of rhythms and melodies.
I also know that my experiences were very different to his. At his age, I had to hang around the radio for hours or wait until Top of the Pops every Thursday, hoping that a song I loved would appear. These days, my son just asks Alexa.
By my early teens, if I wanted to own an album, the process was a little more convoluted: save £9.99 of pocket money, beg my mum to drive me to Woolworths five miles away, pray that they had it, and if they did, play it until its tape was run ragged or the vinyl was jumping with scratches. Now kids find any album online, in seconds, for free – or find a million tasters on TikTok in a fraction of the time. I worry that music is no longer rare and precious, but something we take for granted.
I hear my son rabbiting to his Echo Dot, bought by his grandmother for Christmas, in his bedroom. He skips quickly through songs and deletes them from his playlist without thought, as he might when music is so freely available and accessible. He’s started listening to a relaxing playlist to go to sleep and I worry about how moods are being targeted in music by a company’s algorithms. But I know he loves this music, albeit in a very different way to me. I wonder why I spend so much time worrying whether his experiences are as profound as mine and why it feels like it matters?
I know why it matters. I was five when my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in January 1984. My new book begins with the last moment that I saw him. I was at our front door saying goodbye, being reminded by Dad that he had set me a task: I had to find out what No 1 was in the Top 40 charts.
This would be revealed to the world while Dad was in hospital waiting for a hip operation to ease his ankylosing spondylitis. I never got to tell him the answer as he died two days later from a complication in the early stages of the operation. He was only 33. Pipes of Peace by Paul McCartney made it to the top, a song that still sings loudly and beautifully to me today.
After Dad’s death, my life felt guided, shaped and supported by songs and the people that sang them. I became fixated with flamboyant father figures like George Michael and Adam Ant, wrapping myself up in lyrics that told me “Girl, all I want right now is you” (Wham!’s Freedom), or “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of” (Adam and the Ants’ Prince Charming). In early adolescence, I fell in love with positive pop stars like Kylie Minogue and alternative maternal role models like Neneh Cherry, rapping Buffalo Stance while seven months pregnant on Top of the Pops. In my teenage years, groups like REM, Joy Division and Hole gave me gateways to other cultures, communities and attitudes far outside my native Swansea, and other people with whom I could bond.
I’ve always been fascinated by how music affects us and I delved into neuroscience in my book to discover how our brains and bodies are hardwired to respond so powerfully. According to a 2013 University of Helsinki study, humans are capable of memory-building from the womb (a group of babies were tested just before birth, then at four months, to see if they recognised a specific version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star played to them in utero – and they did).
