In the UK, within the past few days, one of the BBC’s longest-running radio hosts, Ken Bruce, hosted his final mid-morning show on Radio 2. I have listened regularly to this show since the days I was at home with my very young children, often trying to gain full marks on Popmaster whilst both of them were having their mid-morning nap (but always managing to get at least “a year out”). Before this, his voice was very much a part of my morning school run (after he inherited the Breakfast Show from Sir Terry) as Dad would have Radio 2 on in the car, on the occasional visits he was delivering lectures later in the day and could take my brother and I to school.
Although Radio 2 was my default radio station when I was in my 30s and early 40s, I have found it less and less appealing more recently. What I call “my era” seemed to be less represented – whether that be in radio show hosts with whom I have either heard on the airwaves for many years, or those much the same age as myself, or in the music played. I don’t like “modern stuff” and haven’t followed the Top 40 since I was in my 20s and thus I have tended to drift either to Radio 3 or to my Spotify playlists, forsaking radio altogether. [I used also to listen to Radio 4 in the mornings but nowadays I cannot be bothered with politicians within earshot first thing in the morning, and ‘Woman’s Hour’ is just not the same any more]. While classical music is my chief listen nowadays, I grew up listening to Blondie, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and Captain Beaky and his Band on my prized first Sony transistor radio.
So, with the departure of Ken Bruce from Radio 2, I decided to tune in to the digital station which will be his new employer in just under one month’s time: Greatest Hits Radio. I wasn’t enamoured with the name but I thought I would give it a shot, after all – you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, right? I generally can’t abide commercials and so I opted for the 30 day free access to the no-ads version. Within seconds, songs of my childhood and youth filled the room – some tunes which I hadn’t heard for decades but whose tones took me right back to school trips/ my bedroom in the house I grew up in / long summer holidays / social events / holidays. Granted, if I listen to pop/rock music it tends to be from the 1970 – 1999 era, when – in my opinion – music was MUCH better than it is now. But still, to be instantly transported back in time proved, for me, to be a lovely, comforting, happy thing. Back to the times when both of my parents were alive, as were my Gran and Grandad. Back to the free days of childhood when summers seemed to stretch out of reach and Christmases still held some magic. Back to the days of passing my driving test and trying to boost my street-cred by having current rock tunes blowing full-blast out of my little Mini’s tape deck. Back to the more challenging days of cancer treatment (which, for me, made up most of my 20s) when tunes from the Spice Girls mingled with my chemotherapy regimes and recovering in the sunshine of my parents’ back garden. Back to our wedding day – always evoked by ‘Men in Black’, oddly – just days after the death of Princess Diana and Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ remake. Hearing Simon Mayo’s show – including the famous Confessions – on GHR now, takes me back to our Sixth Form common room where we all used to tune in every day to hear the day’s plea for forgiveness before going to Prayers. Really lovely memories. It’s great to see these shows continuing more or less as they were in my teenage years, albeit on a different station. In an ever-changing world, it’s nice to think of some things staying the same.
In a 2021 article in Psychology Today, Dr Shahram Heshmat links this ability to recall pieces of music from the dusts of time with activity in the implicit memory, which he says is involved in a form of ‘classical conditioning’. Here emotions, events and songs combine together often evoking some form of response when the person is exposed to a piece of music previously heard a long time ago. This is true in my case: when I was receiving radiotherapy back in the summer of 1992, Betty Boo’s ‘Let Me Take You There’ was a big tune in the charts. It seemed to be playing everywhere, every day. Now, I can’t hear that tune without re-experiencing the nausea that I felt as a result of the radiotherapy. As I post the link to the video above, and I catch the first few notes of the introduction, I’m already feeling seedy. Thing is, I liked that tune before I started treatment!
Heshmat also quotes findings from a study which found that most memories that are evoked by music are from when the individual was between 10 and 30 years old, a concept that psychologists call the “reminiscence bump”. According to Heshmat, this is because during these years, we experience many things for the first time, and life appears more exciting. To quote Heshmat, “Music preference is formed around the middle teenage years”.
Before I started my nursing degree, I took a gap year working in a psychogeriatric hospital ward. It housed 30 adults with varying degrees of Alzheimer’s and dementia, some of whom didn’t even know where they were. Most of these adults needed everything done for them and, as is the nature of dementia, some were physically aggressive. It was quite an eye-opener into the world outside school. One of my favourite things to do was to put old records into the record player and watch the transformation of these old souls. All of them knew every word of all the songs from ‘The Sound of Music’ album and some even started dancing. The same went for other albums by singers who would have been popular in their youth. Just putting on the records seemed to renew these people and often we could get a glimpse of each patient as a young person. Sometimes, these patients would then start talking about the memories associated with the different tunes – short vignettes of lucidity in their otherwise confused lives. The power of a tune.
So, as I type, Greatest Hits Radio is playing over my speaker. We’ve got some Deacon Blue ‘Real Gone Kid’ on just now – which takes me right now back to 17 year old me on our school trip to the tennis championships at Wimbledon (my best friend and I were HUGE Deacon Blue fans and spent most of the train journey from Edinburgh to London listening to their albums on our Walkmans non-stop). 51-year-old me values these lovely memories so much. I think I’ll keep on listening to this station so that I can enjoy my aural autobiography playing out in my mind and memory.
June's Jottings 