Girlbooker's Tea and Toast

Now that I have a fancy new corporate job, I’m regularly walking between train and office, and I often listen to a couple of songs along the way. Last week it was The Jackson 5, and I was struck by what an odd experience it is to listen to a young Michael Jackson singing. As an audience, we know so much about the future of that voice’s owner, none of which is known to him. We know about his past as well, more than most people would have known contemporaneously. That voice is a fly trapped in amber, frozen between the weight of knowledge on either side of its timeline. And amber feels like an apt analogy for the sound of that voice too. The texture, the grain, the way it gently rumbles and cracks through sweet lightness. It’s warm and a little rough, with an oh-so-poignant catch to it that belies its youth. Is it the incongruity of the poignancy and the youth what draws us to that voice? I wonder whether people in 1967 could hear that poignancy and whether they recognised it as suc...

Ever get a really annoying song stuck in your head? I'm not going to mention any specifics here, or you'd be cursing me all day, but let's just say a happy, bouncy quartet of children's performers in brightly coloured T shirts and black pants have a LOT to answer for where my mental space is concerned. The term "earworm" has got to be fairly new because it shows up with a red squiggle every time I write it. It comes from a German word which means "musical itch" but I personally really like the idea of a little wiggly worm creeping into your ear and burrowing down. They often come about when we are bored, stressed or really tired, which would explain why my husband used to hum that damn WHAM song about twenty times a day in the hazy days of baby-induced sleep deprivation. And because our brains are wired to remember patterns, the structures of a song - melody, rhythm and lyrics, - can easily get stuck in there and set themselves on to endless repeat...