A summer’s day in 1976, a drive in north Antrim... and why Wichita Lineman takes me back there

OUT walking early yesterday, on a blue-skied August morning, I was strolling up from the harbour on the path that skirts the seashore. The sea itself was calm and glistening in the sunshine, the hulk of Bray Head rising as a backdrop in one direction and the coastline fading into the distance in the other where it meanders south towards Wicklow town and beyond.

Pausing for a moment and taking it all in, I couldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. The vista itself defined the place, and the evidence of recent development around the harbour defined the time. Greystones. August 2017. And yet, suddenly, I wasn’t there at all. Instead, I was in my parents’ car – borrowed for the day when I was home on university holidays – and driving, on another August day, through the beautiful landscape of north Antrim. Glens territory. I wasn’t alone.

My boyfriend, visiting from England, was in the passenger seat, and in the back, for some reason that I cannot recall, was my young cousin, Declan, aged about 13 at the time.

‘Put on some music,’ he ordered from the rear. ‘Something good.’

Purity

I reached for one of the big cartridges (remember those?) in my parents’ collection and opted for one I had a certain fondness for myself. Within seconds of the music starting, Declan’s voice cut like a knife through the melodic sound that was just beginning to fill the car.

‘Eject,’ was all he said, pointing me in the direction of one of the buttons on the cartridge player.

He’d already had enough of Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. And yet every single time I have heard that song since that afternoon in 1976, I smile at the memory of the drive that day, and I think of Declan, long gone from these shores to a life in New York’s Long Island.

From the opening notes of the song, before Campbell’s voice even kicks in, I am transported immediately to that past time and place.

Just as I was yesterday morning when, following the announcement of the singer’s death, Wichita Lineman rang out over the radio, coming at me through my headphones as I stood by the sea. Some 41 years on, back I went again.

Music has that extraordinary power, the ability to deliver our very own ‘madeleine moments’. For like Proust and his remembrances of times past, captured for him by dipping a madeleine biscuit into hot tea, songs speak to us of time and place.

It’s one thing to look at an old photograph – yes, all the standard memory ingredients are there in the people and the place. You can laugh at the clothes and remember why you were there, right then, with those people, on that particular day. But so caught up are you in that identification game that the emotion of the memory, the purity of it, is often missing.

Songs provide that purity. There’s nothing to distract, no visual roadblocks. Just melody and memory. Particularly when they arrive out of the blue.

With a photograph you take the decision to pick it up and look at it. With a song on the radio, or playing out from someone’s car as you pass, or as background music in a restaurant, it’s the randomness of it that makes it so evocative.

There I was recently, dining out with a friend, and suddenly the ethereal voice of Sinéad O’Connor singing She Moved Through The Fair filled the room. I was undone.

Haunting

It was the music I walked in to, accompanied by my son, on the day in December 2000 when I married my husband, Gerry. Back then that haunting melody was played for us by a string quartet. In Mount Jerome, on a summer’s day 15 years later, it was exquisitely sung by Ciara Sidine at Gerry’s funeral.

And in that restaurant, for just a moment, it brought everything back – the happiness, the hope, the love, the loss. And I could instantly picture myself on the two days in question. There I am in dark green wedding velvet, Gerry in his oh-so-cool Cuan Hanly suit.

Click the memory camera again and all is changed to funeral black.

Obviously, I love She Moved Through The Fair but the thing about the memories evoked by music is that you don’t even have to like the song.

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, when Elton John hooked up with Kiki Dee, is certainly not Elton’s finest moment. Yet the minute I hear it, I’m right back in Liverpool.

Again it’s 1976. It’s the summer ball in the Roscoe & Gladstone halls of residence where I lived in that first year in university. I’m wearing a (borrowed) long cream fitted dress with pale green panels with my Moses sandals hidden underneath, and I’m dancing until dawn, determined to make it through to the 6.30am breakfast of boiled eggs and grapefruit segments, served up at every R&G summer ball for everyone who managed to stay the all-night course.

When Leonard Cohen died last November, RTÉ Radio’s Sunday Miscellany re-ran a piece that I had done for them a few years earlier, a piece where I charted how Cohen’s songs had provided a soundtrack to my life, marking many personal milestones.

Memory

And the thing about such soundtracks is that they endure. No other song can ever dislodge the original memory. So Ain’t No Cure For Love still makes me think of the birth of my son in 1989. Alexandra Leaving still takes me back to a time of family illness and fear of loss. I could go on. And on.

Some song memories, of course, are just plain funny – or silly.

All these decades later, I can see my friend Patricia inside the phone box at the caravan park at Benone, near Magilligan Strand. Someone had broken the glass on the phone box and there’s Patricia, singing at me out through the hole. And the song?

I Can See Clearly Now. Johnny Nash. 1972. I heard it on the radio a couple of months ago and I laughed out loud at the memory of us as teen innocents abroad.

As I write this, Glen Campbell’s voice is going around in my head. A medley of sorts. The wonderful By The Time I Get To Phoenix, and Galveston, and Rhinestone Cowboy. All great songs, but none that provide, for me, that ‘madeleine moment’. Not like Wichita Lineman. So I’m going right now to fish around in my CD collection and dig it out. And then I’m going put it on repeat, sit back, close my eyes and let it wash right over me. Glens of Antrim, my cousin Declan, the long, hot summer of 1976.

Glen Campbell – musical maestro, sensational singer, guitar genius… and memory maker. Still singin’ in the wire, and even after all these years, still right there on the line.