The sweet sounds of summertime
FOLLOWING the death of one of our musical greats, this season will be remembered by many music lovers as the summer of Michael Jackson.
As we return to his back catalogue it reminds us that, for all his weirdness, he gave us some great music. It will be a time to wallow in the treasures of the past.
But this is what music often means to us in the summer. The sun's out, the nights are long, and we experience bitter-sweet pangs of nostalgia for summers past.
A survey for Sagatiba, the Brazilian spirit, reports that the Bryan Adams hit Summer of 69 is the nation's favourite summer record.
This is followed by In the Summertime by Mungo Jerry, and Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves.
The Beach Boys feature twice in the top ten.
Such surveys tend to throw up obvious choices, whereas we all have our own songs that will always be the sound of the summer.
For me, it's not the party songs that evoke summer so much as the more melancholy ones I perhaps heard for the first time during a particularly formative summer.
There's a great song by Jonathan Richman called The Summer Feeling, which evokes various summery scenes and rounds off each verse: "And that summer feeling will haunt you one day in your life."
It's a song that recognises that summer feelings are bitter as well as sweet; they're loaded with a dubious yearning for summers past.
And so while an upbeat anthem, You Get What You Give by the New Radicals will forever sum up the summer of 1998 for me, it can never match the power of anything off The Smiths' album The Queen is Dead.
Especially I know It's Over, which I first discovered in the long, post-GCSE summer.
"Oh mother," Morrissey sings, "I can feel the soil falling over my head. And as I climb into an empty bed … oh well, enough said …"
Okay, so it lacks the sunniness of California Girls, but it reminds me a time when the warm weeks stretched out before me as if they'd last forever.
Wallowing in Morrissey's misery was as much a part of that summer as post-exam parties and my first Glastonbury.
The summer song has a particular resonance for the British because our summers are cruelly short. They haunt the memory like summer-long romances from your youth.
Those who fancy a good wallow in melancholia could do worse than dig out The Doors' Summer's Almost Gone.
Recorded in the autumn of their career, it swoons like a morbid drunk, reminding us that Jim Morrison's talent never shone brighter than when he was willing the good times - or indeed life itself - to come to an end.
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Weather for Cleckheaton
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
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Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
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