A marshmallow completely failed to live up to its promise yesterday. It’s a good while since I tasted a marshmallow and I was convinced it was going to be gorgeous. Inevitable, I suppose, one’s changing tastes, but somehow it always comes as a surprise when I find I don’t like things any more. Recently, certain books that I loved when I was younger: books that I once set my compasses by, I find repellent. There was a time in my life when everything Camus wrote came over as the voice of God speaking the divine language, such a mature way of looking at the world. Now it all strikes me as moody, childish, provincial and very short on laughs. Whole cities, I’ve tired of. Berlin, for example: how tedious. Entire nations, too: Iceland, where briefly I was happiest, I don’t think I could ever return to with a light heart. Even people I have been close to, I realise I drift away from geographically and emotionally.
Not tunes, though. Tunes are a constant. Through all the shifting sands of a life unfolding, music is incredibly resilient. Every record I’ve ever loved, I still love, but particularly the music I loved when I was a teenager. I’ve even noticed that music I didn’t like at all when I was that age has me welling up now. I found myself joyfully accompanying Aha at the top of my voice in the car a while back. And I hated Aha.
I still have nearly all the records I’ve ever owned, but a big record collection is no longer the priceless asset it once was. Not now I’ve signed up to ‘Spotify’. Spotify is fast replacing iTunes as the music industry insiders’ music site of choice. It’s similar to iTunes in that it gives you instant access to more or less everything ever recorded, but if you listen to a lot of music it’s better value than iTunes because, instead of paying 79p for each track you want to listen to, you pay a monthly subscription for unlimited streaming or you can have everything free, with adverts. It’s all quite bewildering, really.
The artists who feature most heavily in my record collection are Ray Conniff and James Last. There are dozens of records by both of them. They all belonged to my grandfather. I never listened to them, not since he died. I’ve always been quite embarrassed about them, but unable to throw them away, even when I lived in a tiny flat, surrounded otherwise by only cool stuff.
No one knows what’s going to happen next in the music business. No one ever does, I suppose — that’s the trick. Only one thing is certain, I’ve realised. Nothing stays out of fashion forever. Big bands have disappeared from the charts but I’ve been talking about making a record with an orchestra and it’s had me thinking about doing music on a large scale and those easy-listening classics suddenly sprang to mind — huge productions, they were.
I put on Ray Conniff’s ‘Harmony’, which I haven’t listened to since I was a child. We had it in the car on eight-track cartridge, in its day a technological development every bit as exciting as Spotify. Even the cover of the LP was evocative. I hadn’t seen it for years. It’s a particularly cheesey piece but the music was utterly overwhelming, everything I was looking for in the marshmallow: soft, sumptuous, saccharine heaven. I was in tears by the end of the first chorus. A huge and highly polished band ripping it to shreds, but it was the voices that were the killer. Better drilled than a Chinese acrobatic troupe. It made me want to sing more than anything has for I can’t remember how long.
My parents were staying this weekend and I sat in the Studio with my dad and passed him the cover. He fell silent, gazing at it, turning it over. I cued up the track, mighty loud and, as the second verse kicked in, he turned to me wiping his eyes and shaking his head. There is something utterly fabulous about Ray Conniff. Not least that he was selling music, lots of it, to middle-aged people, a whole demographic who don’t really buy new music in quantity any more. It’s cheesey, but then the Seventies were cheesey. Abba are cheesey. It’s strange that they have been bjorn again, probably bigger than they ever were, now, but looking at Ray Conniff’s hits on YouTube, no one is interested. He’s extinct like a fabulously massive dinosaur. If you like Abba, you’ll probably love Ray Conniff. Give it five years and, who knows, maybe I’ll be able to stomach James Last.
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