Loving and dying

Marcus Berkmann

Wednesday, 3rd June 2009

Even music isn’t immortal.

Even music isn’t immortal. For each of us, a little bit dies every day. I was in the pub with my friend Bob when on the jukebox came ‘Please Please Me’. You couldn’t ignore it: this pub operates its jukebox at full Spinal Tap volume to deter the uncommitted. ‘I love this song,’ Bob said — or, rather, screamed at the very extent of his lung capacity. And I thought, I don’t any more. In fact, almost all early Beatles, the music I grew up with, is dead to me now. I can hear nothing in it I haven’t heard before, and what I have heard before no longer incites any response. In fact, a pub that makes no concession to noise laws or the structural limits of the human ear is probably the best place to test this thesis. Music that is simply dying for you — not dead yet, but certainly not very well — can still get the heart pumping again if you turn up the volume. But when that doesn’t work any more, it’s time to switch off the life support machine and get the black suit dry-cleaned. The parrot is dead.

Much discussion then ensued (in a different, quieter pub) on the music that had died for each of us. The only condition: you had to have genuinely loved it once. For my friend Chris it was all of Elvis, bar one or two songs. For a couple of us, it was the great Motown classics that even elderly relatives love dancing to at weddings. The following day I heard ‘Yesterday’ on Radio Two, whose daytime shows still sometimes feel like pop mortuaries. Nothing at all. I didn’t hate it; it just wasn’t there any more. It’s the strangest feeling, although to some extent it explains the endless need to go out and find new music. We use it up and wear it out. Imagine what it must be like to write some of these songs and play them on stage night after night after night, until all flavour has vanished forever. And how you would begin to despise your fans, who still love these songs...

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