Menswear as Madeleine

The other day a friend asked me to make her a compilation CD of mid-nineties Britpop. I set to work immediately, cueing up Parklife as track one – it was the manifesto for everything that was to follow, thus earning pole position. Another track by Blur was added, along with an obligatory pair each from Oasis and Pulp. This was all done in a dutiful, workmanlike fashion. I didn’t even bother listening to the songs as I went along. Then the fun started. In issuing her request, my friend had specified that the compilation be substantially “cheesy??? in nature. What to do? That’s right, I reached for a Shed Seven track.

It’s remarkable how it’s not the famous, allegedly epoch-defining music that has the power to bring you back to times past. If a song is truly a classic, any memories it once had attached to it are usually wiped clean by years of listening. When you hear it, you hear only the music, not the summer it was released, or the night you first danced to it. But the song by a minor band that peaked at no. 16 is one you likely haven’t heard in years. When you hear it again it retains the quotidian associations of its time – the particular light of that time of the summer; the mood of the neighbourhood you lived in; the distinct aroma of the deodorant you used. You never thought to yourself “this song will come to mean X, Y or Z to me???. Such significance was reserved for the stuff you considered great. But it never seems to work out that way. It’s the records that you never even owned that, unnoticed, attach themselves to all that you will take with you from the time. In 1992 and 1993, I was listening to almost nothing but Nirvana, but the sound that will most surely evoke my Leaving Cert year is one I hated – the thump of some tacky European dance music.

Thus it was as I completed my compilation. The big hits brought forth no reaction, save to occasionally note that the songs were better, or worse, than I’d thought at the time (usually better – I was a music snob as a student and never quite gave any band their due). But the trash, the hangers-on, the bands thrown together and signed by record-companies keen to get on a bandwagon, these ones evoked things I hadn’t thought about in a decade. It’s probably not often that Menswear are cited as an agent of Proustian memory , but each one of these members of the supporting cast of the Britpop years snapped me back to a place and time. The Female of the Species by Space – the canteen in UCG; Slight Return by The Bluetones – the dancefloor of the late, unlamented GPO nightclub; Love is the Law by the Seahorses – a seafront cottage apartment in Salthill. Each one of these memories was startlingly vivid because, like the songs that conjured them up, they had not been revisited in the intervening years. Perhaps it’s an argument for constantly searching for new music. If you keep listening to that Arcade Fire album, in ten years time there’ll be nothing left to snap you back to 2008 but Hey There Delilah. And no year of anyone’s life deserves that.