h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I read something on YouTube by someone who said that Syd Barrett's songs make him remember memories he never had. I've found that. I've also heard it said that some songs make you nostalgic about eras when you weren't even born. What songs make you experience this 'flashback' effect and what 'memories' or nostalgic feelings do the songs evoke?

For me:

Itchycoo Park (Small faces). Whenever I hear this song I imagine myself dancing with a group of carefree hippies around a park in London. Someone is blowing bubbles. It's a sunny day and we don't have a care in the world.

All right now (Free). For this one I'm at a festival in the baking mid-summer sun. (I've never been to a festival in my life!)

Albatross (Fleetwood Mac). I'm on a beach and it is unbelievably hot. When I look to the distance the heat is so intense that it makes everything distant shimmer in the heat haze.

Because I mostly like to listen to music in my car, certain songs tend more to remind me of different roads.

Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) by the Offspring is the A38, just south of Derby.
Rawhide as sung by the Blues Brothers is the Gloucester to Ross-On-Wye stretch of the A40.
Tubular Bells is the M25 near Gatwick (because I once listened to all of it while stationary there).
Alcohol by the Barenaked Ladies is the M4 eastbound from Swansea.
Babylon by David Gray is a layby just off the M5 near South Birmingham.

...and so on.

B

Some songs from the 80s have that effect on my, I can't really explain why, I was only born in 1986
Everybody wants to rule the world by Tears for Fears, for example.

Oh to be living the 70's


Okay anything by Frank Sinatra reminds me of my dearly departed Grandad and Christmas

80's music reminds me of my youth, leggings, bad hair days

And I don't listen to Frank Sinatra at any time, it just brings on Christmas feelings.

My parents didn't have a telly when I was a kid so my mum had the radio on constantly. I think that is why I seem to recognise songs I really shouldn't. Perhaps I absorbed them subconsciously from when I was only a few months old.

The Byrds cover 'Mr Tambourine Man' takes me back to a time before I was born, but I put that down to watching The Wonder Years in the 80s, when I was the age that it feels the song is taking me back to, if you know what I mean.

Anything by Matt Bianco reminds me of working in a particular restaurant in Norwich in the summer of 1988. I think music has a quality about it - it brings back memories of where I was when I first heard or first really paid attention to a particular sound.

The Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't fear the Reaper" passed by un-noticed during its first release in 1976; but in 1984, for some reason I switched on and thought "this is actually quite good" and bought the LP. So my mental association is with living in Suffolk in the summer of '84. Although one or two tracks, for some reason, evoke a derelict industrial wasteland where I used to play as a kid... the walls of a knocked-down factory, like broken teeth, knee-high sickly grass, pools and puddles of oily stagnant water, and notices saying "Keep Out - Chemical Hazard".... maybe this is the right band for a post-industrial slummy urbanwasteland?

You have all picked modern music, yet for me I have chosen 'Saraband' by Haydn, which gives me a feel of Carnival, Spain, South America, freedom and holiday, yet I've never been to any of those destinations.

As for 'Modern' it would be 'Sailing by Rod Stewart, which makes me feel like 'Jonathan Livingstone Seagull' by Richard Bach, the I've read more times than LOTR, and given away more times. A must read. Of course, I've never been a Seagull!!!

'Lazy Sunday afternoon' by the Small Faces: introduction Music for Annie Nightingale on Radio 2 (?) on Sunday afternoons when I would be mowing the lawn or cleaning out the pets, or doing some other chore, but dreaming of being on Ramsgate Beach, Kent, with my girlfriend (whoever it was at the time, or wishing it was) with a four pack of Guinness in the surf, watching the seagulls sloughing through the air! Never thought about her drink. Cup of from the cafe. I was only 14 at the time!!!

If you're a child of the 70s you might like this video, Life On Mars:

"How did we get from thinking that all you needed was love, to having anarchy in the UK in just 6 years?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0tluB8ZBt0

That was brilliant.

Loads, actually.

Some of the better ones are;

Kraftwerks Trans-Europe Express, which always reminds me of the first time I rode on the Docklands Light Railway.

Bob Marley always make me think of the smell of paint and the bright sunshine, as i re-decorated my bedroom to his albums one summer.

Gold by Spandau Ballet. My first memory of what Ben Elton would later describe as a fun-sized Mars bar song. My, that was a long time ago...

Jimmy Buffett - Margaritaville will forever remind me of Vegas, both the strip where 'Maragaritaville is situated and Downtown, where we saw the Speak Brothers do a very splendid of the self-same song.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that Gold reminds me of the 1984 LA Olympics.

Elton John - "I guess that's why they call it the blues".
UB40 - "Red red wine"

HMS Sultan, October 1983. The NAAFI with the big video screen. 60-odd young matelots aged 16 - 17, away from home for the first time in their lives. 60-odd young laddies listening and watching with rapt attention as both videos played one after the other on the screen. 60-odd laddies blinking away the tears of homesickness.

The queues for the telephones were particularly long that night.

Gold

Dont you mean true, blues?

"Come up and see me" by Steve Harley(?) reminds me of some cool nights with the people I shared a house with overlooking Clapham Common. (I've never been to Clapham).

The opening of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd reminds me of skydiving (I've never been skydiving).

Uncertain Smile by The The reminds me of waking up on Saturday mornings with a girlfriend I had when I lived in Birmingham. The weird thing is, I can practically see her face, and the room we were in, despite never having lived in Birmingham and never actually seen her face because I've never met, much less been out with, any woman who looks like her.

SoRB

Now either you're reliving past lives, or you've had some pretty good drugs in the past.

Lay your bets now please, ladies and gentlemen.

B

Very strange. Madness always trigger something. Just heard Our House on the radio and ... It feels like I need to remember something which has just escaped the conscious area of the brain But there is nothing to remember

Your toes. Remember your toes.

If you want to have a laugh, check out the website http://www.madness.co.uk/