07 November 08

Musique Non Stop

“Something to Declare”

PROVENCE, MAY 2007. IT’S RAINING hard and has been for the past five days. My wife and I are doing a great deal of sitting around in the car, staring out of the steamed up windows, listening to the “France 07” playlist I lovingly crafted before we left – Air, Sacha Distel, something off the Jean De Florette soundtrack and, it goes without saying, Joe Le Taxi by Vanessa Paradis.

“I can’t listen to this anymore!” my wife finally snaps after the playlist goes full circle for the 20th time that week. “I can’t drive around the French countryside listening to French music. It’s so corny. I feel like we’re in a bad car advert!”

Our iPods may allow us to fashion a special playlist for any occasion but that doesn’t mean we should try to match music to a particular holiday destination. Before you know it you’re sightseeing at the Vatican with Zucchero’s Sensa Una Donna featuring Paul Young pumping through your strolling around the Gaudi Museum whistling Barcelona by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé. The locals will think you’re taking the headphones. Or mick. Time was you’d go on holiday with just a Walkman and whatever album you happened to have lying around on cassette. That cassette, however incongruous it seemed, would get listened to so much that it would forever be entwined with your memories of the place.

Weirdly, the music of Terence Trent D’Arby always puts me in mind of the German Rhineland thanks to a school trip there in 1988. When the London Education Authority funded a trip to communist Russia the following year, we had to be careful what music we took with us. Our teachers warned us that most western youth culture was treated with deep suspicion behind the Iron Curtain. If the propaganda was to be believed, listening to the likes of Trent D’Arby would get you sent to a Gulag quicker than you could sing “sign your name across my heart…”

Of course, being idiotic 14-year-olds we gambled and smuggled in a couple of rogue tapes anyway. You can imagine how our stern Russian tour guide looked when she found us drunk on inexpensive vodka dancing to Saltn- Pepa’s Push It with some local girls in our hostel room. For me, that song will always evoke chilling memories of life during the Cold War. I bet neither Salt nor Pepa had that in mind when they wrote the lyrics.