Words & Music – Two

“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
Private Lives, Noel Coward

Sometimes mangled as “Strange how potent…” or “Never underestimate the potency…”, it is the ordinariness that is the heart of the statement. When Amanda Prynne leans over that balcony with her former husband, the insistently-familiar tune from a far-off orchestra conspires to stir extraordinary memories and feelings in them both. To anyone else, the hotel band playing sentimental airs in the restaurant or lobby would have been ordinary or accepted; it is the associations that the lovers have with the tune that constitutes the extra. This is its power.

When I was young and dreadful, and my character was cruel, I spent several months in silent separation from a woman who was then, as now, a former girlfriend: the silence, it was hoped, would make friends of both of us. I tried my best not to picture her or mull over my mistakes, but I was struck two times, Proust-like, by, now, bitterly happy recollections. The first was in a restaurant, that late December, when the Beach Boys’ Little Saint Nick played, not unexpectedly, I must admit, from the wall-mounted speakers. The second came when, this time unexpectedly, I heard Mr. Morrison’s Orangefield from a radio or internet stream.

The telling difference, though, is that I had never heard Orangefield in the particular lady’s presence. I had, then, only been in Orangefield once myself, but, then, with a victorious school quiz team. On hearing Little Saint Nick, my mind focused rigidly on the only occasion I remember previously hearing it, an Advent evening, dressing a Christtide tree with her and her parents, in her familial home. I recalled it with crystal acuity and my stomach was filled, instantly, with guilt and regret and my mouth with a little bit of vomit.

Orangefield’s host-album, Avalon Sunset, had played an important part in my childhood, simply by being played throughout it. And, yet, on hearing the song for the first time since then, it did not bring me back to excursions with The Mother or Belfast’s single Our Price store in 1989. Rather, it was of intervening years that I was reminded or, at least, of one autumnal picnic: the only time in all my recollection that fitted the description “A throne of Ulster day.” One song sung to me of loss, the other of what was lost.

This is, perhaps, the potency of cheap music, that it lingers, like a bad perfume (Fig. 1). All its meanings and associations rest heavily on the moments when it was heard and, as a smell might draw you back, so too does hearing it again bring you back there: the radio hit of that summer, the tie-in single of that sporting event. Everything for which it stands or, at least, everything for which you, as a listener, make it stand is tightly bound together; it may not strike you always, but, when it does, it does so strongly.

While much of Mr. Morrison’s work is about looking backwards (and a Jackie Wilson Said or Domino is quite specifically about hearing that one song), the effect is not the same. There is a second sort of music, the meanings of which (if there are any) are malleable, that, rather than dredging up memories, can be applied to memories. Skirting ambiguities instead of making definite statements, it diffuses through all parts of one’s life (Fig. 2). Like a lighter scent, it carries and one is not struck by it, but catches hints of it sporadically. It does not draw you back; it is present.

Orangefield is not cheap music –whatever Greil Marcus might write. To me, it was light and free; how else was it carried on the airwaves. Mr. Morrison’s demeanour may seek to make it dour, but he is only an artist off somewhere and his authorial intent does not reach as far as his music. His grim face aims to make the tell-tale lyric heavy and sad: “I loved you then in Orangefield, as I love you now in Orangefield.” The weight is balanced then and now, but it is the present that is the qualifier and the clincher: if he does not love you now, he can look back on that time without the load of that same feeling. Emotionally, he only loves you then in as much as he loves you now. If he has moved on – if he is light and free – the past need not be potent or a portent: it is only the past.

When I met my Beloved, the woman with whom I will live the rest of my life, I dreamed, one night, of marrying her and the song to be played at the wedding was Orangefield. There is music, as I say, that diffuses through one’s life, not dragging you back, but moving forward with you or, in this case just ahead, as if to announce that there will be yet more “Throne of Ulster days” (although, given the climate change over the past few years…). The old ones are not lost, but the new ones are more pressing; the tune is manumission from nostalgia, just as Mr. Morrison’s haggard face is warning against entrapment. Back then, I did not know how close my Beloved lived to Orangefield, and closer still to Cyprus Avenue. It hardly matters; the lesson of Orangefield is not about returning there time and time again – although, now I cannot help but do so – it is about moving on from there. In the dream though, the song could not be played – there were technical difficulties – and, instead, she walked down the aisle to Mr. Cassidy’s setting of the Vide Cor Meum from Dante (another man rotted from nostalgia). Meanwhile, across town that same night – and this is true – she dreamed of me as well.

Of course, that is not to say simply that some music is ‘timeless’ and some is ‘of its time’; I’m sure that Little Saint Nick will play at Christmas parties long after my last one. Rather that the force of certain songs comes from their temporality and everything they have to offer is packed together, like digits making a fist, in one strike. If Mr. Coward calls such music cheap, he, perhaps, means that it is a cheap trick, one that is easier to pull off than the dirty trick of affecting people. But, having a song infiltrate someone’s life at the right time and place takes luck and timing; both of which are as rare as craftpersonship.

Cheap music may be any music that places a value upon itself and, certainly, music composed to a blatant commercial end will tend to a certain type of potency. Written, perhaps, for a Christmas themed record, to cash in on a current trend or to keep someone famous, having been famous the week before, its meaning is singular, its associations concrete and it is the extra that creeps into the ordinariness of one’s life. It can definitely be powerful and, by all qualitative judgments, good, but that power is most likely to be based on the associations built around it and its power to last on how strong those associations remain.

The potency of cheap music doesn’t come cheaply at all; it pays the price of waiting. Nostalgia requires that its totems and familiars stay mostly in the past. Their weight comes from being remembered and being remembered comes at the risk of being forgotten.