The Flying Pickets’ Only You unlocks such visceral emotions for Jude Rogers that it can stop her in her tracks. In this extract from her new book, she asks what science lies behind the power of music to make the past vividly present
The Flying Pickets’ version of Only You also affects me more than Yazoo’s because of who the Flying Pickets were: a collection of jobbing, singing actors from South Wales. The way they looked was consoling to me: they were unglamorous, dark-haired, short and squat. They were also making music in the middle of the miners’ strike.
I contact Janata and arrange an interview. During our conversation, he speculates that music most commonly takes people back to general periods of their life, rather than notable events. “Often a song has been a soundtrack for them during a particular summer, or a period hanging out with a specific group of friends, or a time spent with significant others. This is why the teenage years, for many people, are quite common triggers for these memories.
, Yong explains the parts of the brain that have to work together to recreate our memories. First comes the hippocampus, the tiny, seahorse-shaped part near the top of the brain stem. A case study in 1953 showed how vital the hippocampus was: neuroscientist William Beecher Scoville removed it from an epileptic patient, Henry Molaison, who then lost many of his old memories and was unable to create new ones.
Memory isn’t just an act of retrieval, but a process of constant reconnection and reconstruction, Yong continued.is therefore liable to be reshaped and re-formed, even if we try to resist reshaping and re-forming it. There is a cruel irony in this activity, of course. While we fight for memory to be unyielding and true, we are constantly reframing it in the contexts in which we are living at that moment – a revelation I found deeply unsettling.
Loveday also thinks music can play a big role in our unconscious memories. I talk about how old I was when my dad died. She brings up her other dad – her real dad, she says – who died when she was six. When she used to think about him, Mike Oldfield’soften played in her mind, a piece of music that made her feel emotional, even though she couldn’t link it to a specific memory.
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