What will your song be?

Neil Mccormick reports on a charity’s bid to set up a vast online musical memory collection in aid of childen living in orphanages

What song holds the most precious memory from your childhood? There’s a question sure to get everyone tripping through their past. My earliest musical memories are of my mother at the piano (where she frequently pronounced herself “tone deaf ”) and my father teaching himself acoustic guitar, singing songs around the hearth and on long journeys in the back of the car. It was the era of the Beatles and the Stones, but it’s not the cool records of the Sixties that come back to me in sentimental waves. It’s the whole family singing Chitty Chitty

Bang Bang, Lily the Pink and Summer Holiday; my one-legged grandfather belting out all six verses of Irish folk song Lanigan’s Ball, stepping up a key at the end of every chorus until it looked as if his head was about to explode. Georgie Fame’s The Ballad

of Bonnie and Clyde was my set piece, a murderous gangster ballad that I would deliver with relish, enacting the machine-gun massacre at the end.

Whether it was a lullaby, a pop song or a playground chant, if you think back, you’re sure to find your own song there still, rising to the tip of your tongue. Because music impacts us all, in our very different childhood circumstances, on the deepest possible levels. Songs are all around us, rippling through our existence, perhaps the most ubiquitous art form in the history of the world.

Music has always been with us. It predates written language by untold millennia. We may think of ourselves

as a hi-tech society with music on tap, but remote hunter-gatherer tribes spent as many hours engaging with music as modern man, singing at campfires, chanting while they worked, playing instruments as they enacted rituals of their cultures. Songs have a capacity to resound through our most private selves, emerging to unite us. We sing from somewhere inside our souls, and we sing together.

In some essential way, music makes us human. And this is what Hope and Homes for Children’s End The Silence campaign is all about. There are an estimated eight million children in orphanages. But in many cases, when a baby in an orphanage cries, nobody comforts them. They learn not to cry, or

make a noise. Nor do they have music to soothe them. In this silent existence, they internalise their pain, which causes lifelong mental and physical damage. As adults, children who grew up in orphanages are 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution, 40 times more likely to get criminal records and 500 times more likely to commit suicide than children who have grown up in families.

Hope and Homes for Children aims to create the world’s largest online musical memory collection, and raise £1.5 million by Christmas, allowing them to transform the lives of 120,000 children across Rwanda and Uganda who are confined to orphanages. Some of the biggest stars today are helping launch the campaign by revealing their own most precious musical memories. For Elton John, it was Doris Day’s

The Deadwood Stage, bringing comfort after a trip to the dentist. For Emeli Sandé, it was Mariah Carey’s Hero, helping a young black girl, growing up in a white community, become proud of her differences. It’s not hard to see the connection between Ed Sheeran whiling away long family car journeys listening to Van Morrison singing

Carrickfergus and Mark Ronson’s memories of bouncing up and down to Grandmaster Flash on his parents’ bed. It’s about music’s capacity to provide comfort and succour, to envelop us in familial warmth. As Ronson puts it, “it’s impossible for me to imagine what a world would be like without music. It’s impossible to imagine what any of our childhoods would be like. That’s why no child should have to endure life in an orphanage deprived of love, and without music and family. That’s the essence of what we need to actually get by.”

So what song would you choose? End The Silence would like you to share your memories, along with a donation, for a very good cause. The UK government is committed to doubling every pound donated before Dec 27. For me, the question throws me back to being a small boy listening to my father singing

Sunrise Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. A song of experience, ageing and melancholy that, I think, gave me some strange intimation of the hugeness of the life ahead of me, while binding me in the enduring love of my family. If I close my eyes, I can still hear him singing it.

Go to endthesilence.com to see each artist’s song choice and to leave your own musical memory

It’s about music’s capacity to provide comfort and succour, to envelop us in familial warmth