Just can’t get it out of my head
TOTP2 (BBC4)
AS I wander through the digital wasteland, I invariably find that BBC4 is showing an old episode of Top of the Pops ,or revisiting some other such musical institution stuffed with ancient treasures — and I am afraid.
Rarely do I dwell in this domain, for it is vexatious to the spirit. It is nostalgia in perhaps its rawest state, because unlike RTE’s Reeling In the Years, TOTP2 does not just associate the great music of the time with the events which were in the news. It gives it to you straight, it gives it to you in full.
With Reeling… you might hear a verse or two of the summer hits of 1979, and you are briefly transported back there — it is powerful stuff, but it is measured out in spoonfuls. With an entire TOTP2 it is more like opening the proverbial bottle of whiskey and filling your glass and getting stuck into it.
And it is particularly intoxicating in the case of episodes of TOTP2 from the times when the viewer would have been about 14, which in the case of this viewer would involve spending some time again in the company of I’m Not In Love by 10CC, or That’s the Way (I Like It) by KC and the Sunshine Band, or Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) by Cockney Rebel, or Fame by David Bowie, or Philadelphia Freedom by Elton John, or Feel Like Makin’ Love by Bad Company, or Jive Talkin’ by the Bee Gees…
I’d better stop it right there, that’s too much nostalgia in the one sitting.
Because on the whole it is not a good thing, nostalgia — or at least you can get too much of it, and that selection up there is far too much. It is just too good, and it is just too gone.
It gets you thinking all sorts of things you shouldn’t be thinking, the most obvious of which is that everything was so much better back then, than it is today. That is a foolish way to go, and if you’re not careful it can break your heart.
All nostalgia has this terrible potential, but it is especially excruciating when you’re gaining access to your past through this medium of pop music, because in that area there is abundant evidence to suggest that you are not actually wrong to say that everything was so much better back then, than it is today — I would refer you again to the above selection, in which incidentally I chose not to include How Long by Ace or Pick Up The Pieces by the Average White Band, or You’re The First, The Last, My Everything by Barry White, or Can’t Get It Out Of My Head by ELO... No, I can’t get that one, or any of the other ones, out of my head.
Nor was this from some brief golden age of poptastic magnificence, a recent episode of TOTP2 from the not-very-promising year of 1982 featured hits by Madness, Yazoo, Wham!, Culture Club, Musical Youth, The Associates, and The Jam — yeah, even in the benighted 1980s, you could probably find something there, to evoke a sense of a lost civilisation.
But the really dangerous thing about this old a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu vibe, is not just the quality of the individual 45s, it is the sense that there was a structure here, that worked sublimely well — that for these decades, the music industry had organised its energies so well, with all this enthusiasm for the charts and for TOTP and so forth, it had freed all this talent and all these glorious records to emerge as they were meant to do.
Nor is this just about pop music, because BBC4 keeps doing these specials with names like Soul At The BBC or Reggae At the BBC ,or Singer Songwriters at the BBC, which contain multitudes, but which make you wonder if any such things are still happening “at the BBC”, or if it’s just a museum now — last week there was a show consisting solely of versions of Bob Dylan songs “at the BBC”, by artists as various as Joan Baez, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Hollies, Adele, Julie Felix, Richie Havens, Bryan Ferry.
You really wouldn’t want to go there…