Loving and dying

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.