Even though I have lived in Andalucia in the south of Spain for over nine years, I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the fact. It’s 11.30am on a Tuesday morning and I’m having a coffee in a typical bar in Granada.
‘Forbidden Colours’ by David Sylvian and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto has just come up on my Spotify playlist and suddenly I’m transported to spring 1983 watching the video for this song on GMTV (popular English breakfast TV programme at the time). The song was taken from the then newly released film ‘Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence’ starring David Bowie among others.
I remember watching it at 7.55am when they showed music videos just before the TV news on the hour and just before I left home to catch the bus to school in High Wycombe, a small town between Oxford and London. Like many teenage life moments, I wasn’t really sure what was happening at the time, I just knew that I had discovered something that made me feel strange and happy.
In retrospect, it was that beautiful sense of cultural enrichment that you get when you encounter something that moves you or even transforms you for whatever reason. It could have been a book, film or painting, but for me, already a bit of a pop music obsessive by the time I was a teenager, it was the first time that I was aware of my soul being fulfilled.
It’s been a while since I was 13 and I am still a huge fan of both Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian (even working for the latter in the late 80s when I was 19 but that’s another story). Like many people who are a bit obsessed with music, I’ve experienced other musical moments which have had a huge impact on me, but none have had such a long lasting impact. It’s still such a touchstone for me forty years later.
It had felt like some kind of transformation and that’s quite a big thing to have happened before you go to school when you’re 13 years old!
Maybe it’s the cultural clash of this Japanese-influenced song, its melancholy ambience, the memories that it holds and its significance in my life mixed in with the everydayness of Granada and Andaluz breakfast culture that is throwing me, but also making me smile.
It almost feels like a snapshot of who I am at this point in time, or maybe even always, with a few of my favourite things happening together at the same time and it is this kind of cultural mix that I have always loved and which has energised me throughout my life.
Who would have thought that 40 years after first listening to this song before school in 1983, I would be listening to it (on my phone of all things), while having coffee and a tostada in a bar in Granada where I lived?
Life can indeed be strange.
So, what about you?
After listening to which song for the first time did you know that you would never be the same again?
Away From The Noise 