The Promise

I listen to music as I write. I've managed to get Alexa to set up a "My Favourite Songs" playlist, which I listen to, shuffled, over and over again as, heaven forfend, I should hear anything new. Most of my choices are super-cool, as you might expect. I sift through the detritus of the last fifty years of American and European pop music. There's very little reggae, hip hop, country, jazz or classical here: those are different playlists and, like beans and eggs on a Full English Breakfast plate, they can never be allowed to touch. 

I'm not going tell you what's on my favourite songs playlist - your mileage may vary and so it should. I love that everyone's interaction with music is different and songs that mean nothing to me are caked in significance for other people. Music is personal and comes at you with sudden, emotive force at moments you can't predict. And pop music, with its strange currency, its shifting meanings and its saturation, colours your life, flooding your brain like endorphins. People, places, lost days, last days, all jumbled together. This magic noise is a palimpsest of unscrubbable memories. "Strange how potent cheap music is" said Noel Coward in Private Lives, not quite meaning it as a diss.

Pop music is great. It does so many things and it is to the finer parts of my life what professional footballers are to the advertising industry - everything. Pop music can mean anything and do anything. I've even tried to write my own in the past. Some of it wasn't too bad.  

That said, I can often work with music playing in the background. These are my fave songs - I've got "Whatevershebringswesing" by Kevin Ayers on as I write this - I know them off my heart. They are comfy as slippers. They are friends. 

Except "The Promise" by Girls Aloud. I can't work while that's on. It's TOO MUCH. The tambourine. The staccato breathlessness. The big fuck off bass. The Motown pastiche from outer space. The fact that is sounds like the Blankety Blank theme. The "yay-ahs" and "baby, dontcha knows". The fact that they all get a solo and they all REALLY go for it. Sarah's "HERE I AM" cri de couer. The robotic relentlessness. "BABE". The most aggressive, necessary key-change in the history of popular music. The gibberish lyrics that come at you like Symbolist poetry. The teeth sucking synth at the end. One final tossed off "BABE". 

I'm washed up on the beach afterwards. I've been lashed by a tumult and I've lost my shoes. I'm clinging to flotsam by my fingernails. WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED? Its like going through a spin cycle. Girls Aloud were a pretty good pop band and I liked a few of their songs, but they were no Sugababes, for instance, or T Rex. But this...thing! I have so many feelings now. 

The song doesn't have any particular significance for me. It wasn't the backdrop to a beautiful or painful day. I don't remember where I first heard it. It is the machinery of the song itself: its strange breathlessness, the clipped, mechanical choruses and the measured human verses that stretch out like a yawning cat, supple and sexy. It is a spell of a song. Its a magic trick. 

I limit the amount of time I spend listening "The Promise". I can listen to Nico's Marble Index or The Creator Has A Master Plan, or Yerself Is Steam or Drunk Tank by Tindersticks or Britney's Toxic and not turn a hair. But "The Promise" devastates me. 

I've just listened to it again. I'm lying on a chaise longue with a moist towelette over my eyes. Pray for me.