Isobel Dixon
Following our ‘Music and Memory’ event, part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back, we have been asking writers to choose five songs or pieces of music which are important to them, and which bring back particularly salient memories.
Isobel Dixon
1. Ella Fitzgerald: ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’
There’s that defiant sense of possession that vivid memories give you, despite actual separation – ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’, as Fred Astaire first sang to Ginger Rogers in George and Ira Gershwin’s Shall We Dance.
Sung since by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennett, Shirley Bassey, Diana Krall and countless others (even in a Rupert Everett and Robbie Williams duet), it’s Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong that I love the best (that ‘Will you repeat that again, dearie, please?’ interjection), with Billie Holiday coming up close.
2. Willie Nelson: ‘Always on My Mind’
From Elvis Presley in the early seventies, to the Pet Shop Boys’ version on the tenth anniversary of the King’s death (the peppy tune I first came to know and love), through many more elevator pan-pipe manglings and beyond . . . But now it’s old desert lizard Willie Nelson’s rendition that has my heart. That parched and wind-whipped voice, the resonant perfection of his delivery.
3. Neil Young: ‘Ambulance Blues’
Maybe those dry, parched voices do the thirst of memory best. Low-key evergreen genius Neil Young hits every chord of longing for ‘the old folky days’ in his unforgettable ‘Ambulance Blues’ from On the Beach.
With unhurried strumming, mouth-organ wail and Rusty Kershaw’s fiddle, he conjures up strains of lost music, images of liars and losers – waitresses crying in the rain, the ‘burn-outs’ on the Navajo Trail and a man – possibly Richard Nixon – seemingly incapable of telling the truth. But in the end, only a true friend tells it like it really is.
4. Pink Floyd: ‘Comfortably Numb’
‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more,’ writes Wordsworth in his Ode and fleeting intimations. The birth that ‘is but a sleep and a forgetting’ is a sense that glimmers through Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Infallible spine-tingler, the song’s thrill belies the title.
5. Randy Newman: ‘I Miss You’
And more rough-and-rusty-voiced longing from Randy Newman: the beautiful simplicity of ‘I Miss You’ is worth a thousand sad love songs.
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Photograph courtesy the Fraser MacPherson estate c/o Guy MacPherson