30 Day Music Challenge: Day 18

‘A song you wish you heard on the radio.’

‘Midwinter spring is its own season’ is how TS Eliot put it. And that’s what sums it up for me, thinking about this question.

I wrote yesterday about radio magic - that thing that happens when you hear just the right song on the radio at just the right time, and it makes you realise that the radio is connecting you to the rest of the world with an unbreakable, but almost invisible thread.

That’s kind of what I’m thinking about again tonight, and also somehow the opposite of what I’m thinking about.

TS Eliot, in that line from ‘Four Quartets’, is writing about a different kind of magic. That magical faux spring that happens sometimes in February, January even, when you get beautiful mild, sunny weather when you expect to be freezing. It’s happening at the moment, and everybody’s talking about it. It’s only Easter, albeit the latest Easter for many years, but suddenly it feels like summer. This keeps happening, to the extent that I’m starting to believe that the seasons have shifted, somehow, in a way they haven’t warned us about on ‘Countryfile’: that April, May and June are now summertime, not June, July and August. Either way, the weeks of sunshine and blue skies have brought with them a bloom of those fine Northern Irish staples: shorts, socks and sandals, lily white legs, Polo polo shirts with life-size polo-pony logos, faces sunburned raw.

And you know what? Just like in every season, they’re playing all the right songs for the date, the weather, the season on the radio, and there’s nothing that I feel less like hearing. ‘Fantastic Day’ by Nick Heyward, for example. I’ve heard that already. At least once. It’s always the same thing, done differently, and it gets me every time. Every season. That obligatory seasonalisation of the radio. The endless Christmas playlists as soon as the schools go back after the Halloween half term. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on New Year’s Eve - even that annual concert of Strauss waltzes and polkas and so on on New Year’s Day. The Beach Boys in July. Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’ in September. And it goes further than that, doesn’t it? Admit it. You’ve heard ‘Manic Monday’ by The Bangles or ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ by the Boomtown Rats on your Monday morning commute. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ on … that’s right. A Tuesday, followed by all the terrible inevitability by ‘Wednesday Morning, 3am’ (Simon & Garfunkel), ‘Thursday’s Child’ (David Bowie) and then ‘Friday I’m in Love’ by the Cure to round off the working week. Somehow you don’t mind as much at the weekend, but even so, there they are, and they still grate: ‘Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting’ by Elton John, or the atrocities of Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ or, head thumping a bit now, is it? Then you need ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning’ (Faith No More), ‘Sunday Girl’ (Blondie) or, if it really is a bad day for you, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by U2.

Irritating, isn’t it?

It’s not that I wish it could be Christmas every day. I don’t even like Christmas that much. I prefer the in-between seasons… early spring… early summer… early autumn…the seasons that are a mixture of things. I’m not advocating leaving the Christmas tree up too late or putting it up as soon as the first one sneaks out of storage in a department store somewhere. I just get so, so sick of all that cheesy season-appropriate music, and how it’s absolutely everywhere on your radio dial or in the shops or in the cafes or everywhere you go. Once, several years ago, I was in a bookshop one cold, rainy July morning when I nearly dropped with shock on hearing ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ popping up unexpectedly on whatever compilation CD they were playing. I even wrote about it at the time, here: http://tweeterofwit.blogspot.com/2009/08/summer-memory.html . And yet when we’re stuck in the middle of winter, especially a winter like the two we’ve just had, what with ice and snow and freezing winds, what could be nicer than the escapism of some of those summer songs… even though the Boys of Summer are so long gone that it’s as if they’d never been there at all.

So instead of selecting ‘A Song I’d like to hear on the Radio’, tonight I’m wishing for a whole new attitude in radio playlist scheduling. Losing the cheesy cliches of the topical. Monday songs on a Monday. Summer songs in the Summer. You know the rest, because admit it: reading this, you’ve heard it all a million times, every time you’ve turned on the radio on a specific day or month or season.

Today - early - there was just one of those little moments of radio magic. Many paragraphs back, I wrote about how it’s still only April but it feels like Summer. Early today, I heard a song I hadn’t heard for years. A song I used to like but, what with growing up and all, and the inevitable obsolescence of my collection of cassettes, which I’d forgotten all about. It was - and I’m not even going to be embarrassed about admitting this, because it has such a great synth part - ‘There’s More To Love (Than Boy Meets Girl)’ by The Communards. As soon as I heard the introduction, tired and headachey this morning, the hairs on the back of my neck were tingling and I was back in that examinations hall, so many years ago, doing my A levels. Specifically, doing my first A level English Literature paper. Writing my two Shakespeare essays. Especially the second, the one on ‘As You Like It’, with the song (which I’d heard on the radio that morning, in my bedroom, as I often did that year) on a loop in my head as I scribbled frantically and semi-legibly. Cast back so sharply into that exam hall, I can also hear the rhythmic sniffs of the boy who sat in front of me… the Head Boy in my year, now a rather brilliant lawyer, who suffered dreadfully from hayfever and who punctuated (forgivably) every exam paper with sniffs every 3.5 seconds. He and I had at least two subjects in common, so I remember it clearly. And hayfever is the affliction of the summer - exam season - and there I was, in April, almost more in focus in that exam hall, scribbling and hearing the sniffing mingling with the Communards-earworm, than I was back then, that June too many years ago…

I could never have said that that was a song I wanted to hear on the radio, if asked: but there it was. A song I will forever associate with early summer, played in a lasting mid-spring summer, unexpectedly and out of season… mixing memory and regret, nostalgia and relief, beyond a forecast or a playlist, creating a season and a magic of its own.

And that’s what I hope that radio will continue to do for me. For everyone.