Music Wedding Present and Adam and the Ants
Music fires up neural networks way beyond the auditory areas.
What do you think I am – a jukebox?” asked Wedding Present frontman David Gedge. Well, actually, that’s exactly what most of us at the band’s July 4 gig at Auckland’s Kings Arms wanted. We wanted him to dig into the more than 200 tracks he’s written since 1985 and fire up our synapses with memories of youthful excess, guitar-driven angst and, in more than a few cases, full heads of hair.
Gedge’s grumblings aside – he’s a dry, northern Englishman – the set combined a few of the new with enough of the old to keep everyone happy. And it featured their first-ever New Zealand performance of their 1991 cover of the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience’s Mothers, which added an extra frisson to the rush of endorphins you feel when you mix memory with storming, soaring guitar riffs.
What is that kick you get from listening to old music? Why have the last three concert tickets I’ve bought been for the Wedding Present ( Kennedy, first bootlegged off a school mate c1989); the Undertones ( Teenage Kicks recorded off the radio for a compilation tape c1987) and Adam and the Ants (first-ever album purchase, Kings of the Wild Frontier c1981)? And why is it that I don’t care my rock-star heroes now look more like time-ravaged premiership football managers, but I do care that each of those artists turns into a “jukebox” for my evening’s entertainment?
Psychologists love this sort of thing. Last year, the boffins broke down the formula for earworms – those catchy tunes that bore into your brain and won’t leave – and decided that we’re preprogrammed to enjoy the familiar ( Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star works in the same way as Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger, apparently) and the unexpected (the researchers singled out the Knack’s My Sharona and Glenn Miller’s In the Mood ).
In 2011, Finnish researchers showed how listening to music doesn’t just spark up the brain’s auditory areas – musical pulses fire networks usually preoccupied with motor skills; rhythms and tones target emotions; and timbre works on the part of the brain usually associated with creativity. It’s probably no wonder, then, that hit by such a barrage of impulses, a young, developing brain might be deeply affected. So much so that, years later, the same combination of beats, tones and timbres would trigger similar whole-brain recollections. It’s also no wonder that music therapy is used to help brain-injured and Alzheimer’s patients find a path back to the past.
But, alongside the brain chemistry, I like to think those hairs standing up on my neck as the tribal drum beats and war dance whoops of Adam and the Ants’ Dog Eat Dog blast out of my speakers are as much a form of time travel.
So though Mr Ant might have wanted his Antmusic to “unplug the jukebox and do us all a favour”, now, 36 years later, I hope he can find the socket once more.
Adam and the Ants play Auckland’s Powerstation on October 9 and Wellington’s Opera House on October 10.