Andrew Kay: Yak Yak Yak
Memories are made of this
M y name is Andrew Kay and I’m a Macaholic. Yes like so many of my friends I have a passion for Apple Macintosh in all its shiny, sleek and frankly sexy guises.
I was dismayed to see that Mike Ward had dissed the Apple Watch, then heartened when he relented and went and bought another one. I waited a while before getting mine, finally bought the inappropriately named Sports model (well there’s nothing sporty about it or about me) – and I love it. Detractors mock, but I am enjoying the things that it does, even the gentle nagging taps telling me to stand up.
I have just upgraded to the iPad Pro too and my word it was love at first byte – the memory, the screen, the keyboard (an extra indulgence) and the Apple Pencil, well I had to have that as I have not touched a mouse in over a decade thanks to those clever people at Wacom who have saved me from “mouse claw”.
The hardware Apple designs makes me smile. So too does the soft stuff and my latest love affair is Apple Music.
As a music lover I have, over the years, spent an extraordinary amount of money of vinyl, CDs and most recently downloads. I don’t resent a penny of it, music has given me so much pleasure. When Apple Music launched I took advantage of the free trial period, why not I thought? I can always cancel it if I don’t like it.
It took a few days for me to get to grips with it, not that it’s complex, I’m just slowing down with age. Now I am loving every minute of it, and why? Well for less than £10 a month I have access to a huge wealth of music of all kinds.
So is it a bargain? Well I think so, I reckon that my spend on music has been more than halved for an average month and in some months more than quartered.
Okay there are some things not there, but I expected that, but there are so many things that I had forgotten about, things I never bought because I was broke and things that I never even knew existed.
Above all Apple music has done two quite marvelous things for me and one has unleashed my inner geek. Yes I’m a music geek. When I settle down to work I turn on the TV and the Apple TV, did I mention I have that as well? Well I use the two to access my music these days and my smart speakers are now connected to that set up for maximum listening pleasure.
Next I decide on what I would like to listen to. If I am writing as I am now, it has to be instrumental, or if there are words then they have to be in a foreign language. Foreign does not clutter the writing bits of my brain. If the work I am doing is visual I can manage lyrics in English. But for the most part I like to settle down and listen to a whole opera or a set of symphonies as I work, I find it relaxing and often inspiring.
I get geeky at this point as I often find when searching that there are several recordings of the same work. Well of course I have to listen to them all, one after the other, to make comparisons. I get even geekier if I look for a particular aria and find a clutch of recordings by different singers. I listen to the same song over and over. This really is geeky – but such fun, try it.
On top of this I listen to music that I once loved and how strange it is to do that and realise how we tag music to memories, how relistening can take you back years and years.
I was in a bit of a Bowie mood the other day, having watched the video for Darkstar, and searched for John I’m Only Dancing. A few bars into the song and I was transported back to a disco (yes I am old enough to remember that they were called that before they became clubs). It was in a venue in Guernsey that by day was a beach cafe and at that time the single was in the charts, as was Hawkwind’s Silver Machine. Of course I had to listen to that too and the memories of that summer holiday with school friends, long lost, came crashing in around me. That summer will forever be those two songs.
Strangely enough the very same day as I listened to these tracks I heard that bass playing Legend Lemmy had died. Lemmy sang lead on Silver Machine and given his lifestyle of excess he’d had, I guess, a fairly good innings.
Once your memory is nudged in this way pieces of music seem to come tagged to memories. Some are good, some less so. It’s Raining Men will always conjure dancing in a pub in Wimbledon Village, You Can Ring My Bell walking down Kings Road in Chelsea on the day I graduated and Bingo Bingo I’m in Love sat on a tiny boat heading into choppy waters off Tenby.
