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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…
But ‘Yesterday’ sent me to ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, and specifically to Emmylou Harris’s sublime cover on her 1975 album Elite Hotel. She and her producer Brian Aherne dared to add the middle instrumental section, which for me is where the song starts to fly. Years ago I told a Beatles-crazed friend of mine that I preferred the Emmylou version to the original. We were on a train, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw me out of the window. But the Beatles’ version is dead to me, and Emmylou’s is still vibrantly healthy, 34 years after its release. This ability to bring alive a dead song is a rare and beautiful thing, and female country singers have recently made a habit of it. Alison Krauss did a gorgeous take on The Foundations’ ‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’ a few years ago, and on her lovely cajun-influenced duet album with Ann Savoy (Adieu False Heart), Linda Ronstadt did the same to ‘Walk Away Renée’. In both cases the song was stripped back and its pop energy surgically removed, allowing something more interesting and substantial to emerge. And for the past fortnight I have been listening non-stop to Shelby Lynne’s wonderfully sultry album of Dusty Springfield songs, Just A Little Lovin’. Mostly sung with just guitar, piano and rhythm section, ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’, ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ and ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ finally breathe again. Could someone do something similar with those early Beatles songs? Would anyone dare try?
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