We'd Just Like To Ask You A Few Questions...

 

Roger, who likes questionnaires, answered one that used to be given to guests on a French TV show. Obviously, I've never heard of the show or its host, Bernard Pivot but since he's a) French and b) interviews people like Michel Foucault, I think we can assume he's some kind of  <shudder> intellectual.

Best steer well clear of him, then.

I do like a questionnaire myself, though. It's always nice to be asked questions, especially about yourself. I've always been puzzled by the reactions of suspects in crime dramas who, when they're being interviewed by the police, get upset about having to answer questions they've already answered. It sounds like an ideal opportunity to really get into some deep detail about the trivia of your own existence to me. People pay therapists a fortune for that kind of service and here are the police, offering it for free. What's to complain about? 

Well, being sent to prison if you give away too much, I guess. There is that...

But I digress. As usual. Getting back to Roger and Bernard, I didn't find the questions particularly interesting. A bit lexicological for a start. Almost a third of them are about words. I like a word as much as the next blogger but it seems an odd place to set focus. 

Luckily, Bongo Twisty (Great name!) also dodged the French Intellectual bullet and dug back a little way into Roger's blog to find a much more amenable survey. Roger took it from The Guardian, a newspaper I haven't read since upper management decided the company wasn't going to pay for newspapers any more and if we wanted to read The Guardian or The Independent in the staff room at lunchtime we could damn well buy them ourselves.

So, naturally, no one did and newspapers haven't been seen there since. That was a bit of a shame because I learned a few things from The Guardian over the years. Not news, obviously. I didn't read any of that. No, about movies and music and pop culture generally. The Guardian has always been fairly good on that sort of thing, albeit by the time you get to read about a trend in their culture sections it's almost certainly about to go out of fashion. 

Still, they did introduce me to Lana del Rey, for which I shall ever be grateful. It's one of those "I was there" moments that you never forget. I was in the staff room, reading the paper, when the phrase "Video Games" caught my eye. In the music section, which was a bit odd. I made a mental note, went home, fired up YouTube, watched the video and the rest you know. Well, you do if you're a regular here.

That was in latish 2012, when you could still buy the Lizzie Grant album on Amazon. I ummed and ahhed about it and left it a week because spending £10 is always a big decision and when I decided to risk it, it was too late. When people say "If you could go back in time and change one thing about your life...", that would be close to the top of my list.

Anyway, I was not aware, no longer being a reader, that The Guardian has a thing called the Honest Playlist. As Roger describes it, "There are a dozen or so stock questions that they use to grill their guest, although they don’t always use the same ones." You could, if you wanted, go through some of the back catalog and pick a few but I'm too lazy for that so I'm just going to answer the ones Roger chose.

I really like the way Bongo Twisty laid out their post with the videos embedded but since I just did a music post I might not do it that way this time. Or I might. Let's find out together.

The first song I remember hearing.

Well, that's a difficult place to start, isn't it? It just demands a digression about the deep unreliability of memory. But that would be more Bernard Pivot's kind of thing...

I'll take a stab at it being something by Los Trios Paraguayos. Possibly Guantanamera. My mother had an EP by them that she'd play on the Dansette, when I would have been five or six. Curiously, now I come to think about it, there's no sign of that EP or indeed any vinyl in her house, which I've been through with some interest now she's died. I guess she must have gotten rid of all the vinyl at some point. She had quite a lot, including several of my Uriah Heep albums, which she asked for when I was about to sell them, back in the punk years. Not that I want them back...

The first single I bought.

Now, that's an easy one. It was The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by Joan Baez. That would have been in 1971, when I was thirteen. A much more difficult question to answer would be why was that the first single I bought. I have no idea. I mean, I know I liked it but I liked a lot of songs on the radio by then. What was so special about that one that I felt I had to own it? I find hard to imagine. It is a good record, though.

The first song I fell in love with.

Another easy one. Heroin by the Velvet Underground. It was absolutely not even close to being the first song I really, really liked or even loved but it was almost certainly the first I fell in love with. By the time I discovered the Velvets, I'd been "into" music, as we said back then, for at least a couple of years. I can date my introduction to Heroin with some accuracy because, once again, I remember the specific trigger.

Lou Reed had just broken through to the mainstream with Walk On The Wild Side, which I loved (But didn't fall in love with, crucially.) and I owned the album it came from, Transformer. I was listening to the Johnny Walker show one Radio One one afternoon (It would have had to have been in the school holidays because he was either on at lunchtime or mid-afternoon.) and he played two songs by the Velvet Underground. One was, I think, Waiting For The Man and I have no clue what the other was. No, actually, I'm pretty sure it was Sweet Jane. Whatever it might have been, you can bet it sounded utterly bizarre coming out of a transistor radio in the middle of the day back in 1972.

Off the back of that, I bought the first VU album I could find, which happened to be the double compilation album often referred to as the "Coke Bottle Album" at the time and which Wikipedia claims, somewhat unconvincingly, had been released in the UK in 1971 "to capitalise on the interest from Warhol's "Pork"."

I played that album to fucking death over the next couple of years but the one song I would not play more than very, very occasionally was Heroin. It was just too good to listen to more often than maybe once or twice a year. I still think it might be the best song I've ever heard but it's hard to be sure because now I never listen to it, just in case it isn't.

The song I inexplicably know every lyric to.

Lyrics are very, very strange. They're incredibly important because without them, songs aren't about anything. I take them very seriously and always have. These days, it seems everyone does. Both professional music critics and random fans on social media all seem universally to focus on the words in preference to the music, when discussing any song of any genre. Providing it does, in fact, have words.

And yet I can barely remember the lyrics to pretty much any song I've ever heard, even if I've been listening to it on hard rotation for weeks. I know certain phrases and maybe... only maybe... the chorus and that's it, even though I frequently have the words up on screen these days to read (And sing.) along. 

In the olden days I used to sit with the gatefold sleeve of an album open on my lap rolling a joint reading the lyrics with devotion. I even used to buy Disco 45 and Smash Hits, magazines where the lyrics to the current hits were handily printed out for you to admire and learn by heart.

But can I remember all the words to anything? Nope. Except for one, single song. Roxy Music's In Every Dream Home A Heartache. If you don't know it, it's the heart-rending story of a boy and his blow-up sex doll. Why I can remember all the words to it is, indeed, truly inexplicable, but I can. Or I could for a long time. I used to sing it to myself in my head to send me to sleep, like some people count sheep.

The best song to play at a party.

The best song I ever played at a party wasn't really a song and it wasn't my party, either. The song was one side of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and the party was at my childhood sweetheart's house, when we were both about eighteen. It was after midnight and there were some stragglers who didn't want to leave. They left pretty sharpish after I put that on, I can tell you. It wasn't my album, either. It was hers. You can see why we were suited. 

Another option would be George McCrae's Rock Your Baby. A few years earlier, my best friend and I thought it would be a wheeze to organize a disco at school and invite a bunch of girls from another school to come over. Amazingly, we got permission for this doomed enterprise and on the evening in question we learned that teenage girls, on the whole, do not much like hard rock. And even if they do, they certainly don't want to dance to it. I mean, who would?

They do, however, or they did then, like George McCrae. I was doing the DJing and for some reason I happened to have it in my box of records alongside Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the like. I pretty much played that one record over and over for an hour until the party broke up. Then I threw it across the room into a wall and it broke in half. Which was a shame because I like George McCrae too. I must have or I wouldn't have the record, now, would I?

The song that changed my life.

Hmm. Has any song ever actually changed someone's life? There'd have to be some very particular circumstances going on for that to happen, wouldn't there? I certainly can't think of any song where the words and their meaning had that kind of impact on me. There have been a few times, as with Heroin or Video Games, that the sound of a song has changed how I've thought about music. Never Understand by the Jesus and MaryChain would be another. No Pussyfooting by Fripp and Eno. I'm Stranded by The Saints. (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) by the Beastie Boys. Tokyo Calling by Atarashi Gakko. Venice Bitch by Lana del Rey... I could go on and on.  

But that's opening the mind up to new sonic possibilities rather than changing the way you live your life. I can't think of any song that's ever made me re-evaluate my life choices.

The song that makes me cry

Letter to Hermione by David Bowie and Hey, Rusty! by Lloyd Cole. I'm not sure about actually tearing up but they're the two saddest songs I know and they make me feel very weird if I listen to them at the wrong time. It's making me feel a bit weird now, just thinking about them, to be honest...

The song I can no longer listen to.

Hmm. Are there any? I already covered not listening to songs because they're too good to spoil and not listening to songs because they make me too sad. I think the question is getting at songs you did listen to with pleasure, once, but can't any more, for some reason, something that can happen to any song if you hear it too often. There are a lot of songs I liked once that, if I hear them again by chance, I can't remember why I ever liked them to begin with but even that goes in phases. Twenty years ago I could barely stand to hear 90% of the punk songs I loved so much in the late '70s but that alienation passed and now I like a lot of them again.

It would be so tempting to say something by Morrissey but I still like the songs. It's just him I can't stand. I guess Bengali In Platforms would be hard going now but I haven't heard in a couple of decades, thankfully. And you can go find your own link if you really feel you have to hear it again.

The song I secretly like, but tell everybody I hate.

Hah! Like there'd only be one! I used to do this all the time. It'd be nice to say I've grown out of it, like Roger claims he has, but really I've just replaced it by leaning into the dissonance and glorifying it. 

There are still places it feels very difficult to go, though. I've made my peace with Fleetwood Mac. I can admit, even to myself, that I did always quite like Rhiannon, for example. It's so much easier now that they're considered some kind of rock legends, rather than the embarrassing dinosaurs of a previous generation they were almost universally considered to be, when I was in my twenties. I can even listen to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins with a modicum of pleasure now and that's not something I thought I'd ever say.

Admitting to liking anything by Dire Straits, on the other hand, seems tantamount to asking your children to put you in a care home because you can't be trusted to look after yourself any more. And yet I do vaguely like Sultans of Swing, which I first heard on John Peel, when no-one knew who they were. And Private Investigations has something going for it although I'd be hard-pressed to say what.

The song I want played at my funeral.

Well, isn't that a cheerful note to end on? The truthful answer is I absolutely could not care less. I won't be there to hear it so whoever gets the short straw can play the Birdie Song for all I care. I was recently in that position, arranging my mother's funeral. She hadn't ever mentioned it and she left no instructions but the form of the service required something and I had to pick. I went with Pretty Flamingo  by Manfred Mann because I remember she used to stop and listen to it if it came on the radio when I was a child. I'm pretty sure if I'd have asked her last year, she'd barely have remembered it but it went down very well on the day and that's all that really matters.

I'd say pick something pleasant that people can hum along to and that won't have any unpleasant connotations. Don't make anyone more upset than they have to be. No grandstanding from the grave.

And definitely no Morrissey!