One of the most intriguing parts of my efforts at DJing has been not the discovery of obscurities, remixes, or recuts that accompany my trawls through record shops both real and virtual. It has been instead those moments in which a song creeps up on you, half suggests itself to you from a memory – and all the accompanying emotions this unexpected time travel entails.
I have been dropped back to being an 8-year old boy allowed to wander into the music department in the long-demolished Co-op in Portsmouth, marvelling at the posters of Dire Straits. I have been an 18-year old being driven back from a party with the Waterboys on the stereo. I have been taken back to student nights over ten years ago, when £20 was enough for a night out. And I have been back at karaoke nights in Kilburn pubs with beautiful ceilings and unusual colleagues. I am once again at a wedding reception in Ireland.
The Russian philosopher/literary critic/nutcase Rozanov always took great delight in catching people unawares. He would conciously avoid announcing his arrival at friends’ houses in order to see them as they truly were, to see which books they were reading before they had a chance to prepare for his arrival.
The unannounced guest often reveals more about us than we may care to admit, and this is how I am coming to treat these songs. Guilty pleasures, yes. But pleasures nonetheless, musically (in certain ways), more so in terms of the reminiscences they allow me. Enough nostalgia for one day, I think.
