There is a song by the fantastic Elbow that goes:
So I'm there
Charging around with a juggernaut brow
Overdraft, speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch
Of a song that I know
And the world moves in slow-mo
And it captures beautifully the way that music can spark a memory. Like it did today when I listened for the first time in years to Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout. It took me straight back to the very early nineties when I first got hold of the album, a time when although as Paddy himself sings 'some things hurt more much more than cars and girls', sometimes it doesn't feel like it. The music reminded me how I felt then: not the details but the generality of the time. And it is really quite scary to think that it was nearly eighteen years ago. I still feel very young, but sometimes the figures don't reflect that...
