Tim Adams

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.

Tim Adams

1. Tom Waits: ‘Time’

You could submit just about any of Waits’s songs to one of those provincial museums that exhibit old farm equipment and surgical instruments and stuffed owls and they would fit in just fine. Among his influences Waits has sometimes mentioned the artist Joseph Cornell and his wonderful memory boxes full of ticky tacky. Many of Waits’s lyrics have exactly that quality of found objects, placed unexpectedly side by side, and sealed up like tomb relics. ‘Time’ with its disturbed and slightly surreal pattern of specific images is a perfect example. The telling lines are these: ‘And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train/ You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away/ and the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget/ that history puts a saint in every dream…’ The song sometimes seem to me to describe exactly the way the mind trawls its past, though I’d be struggling to explain precisely why.

2. Alex and Rory McEwen: ‘The Bonny Earl O’ Moray’

My friend Mick Imlah, the poet, sang almost as brilliantly as he wrote. One night nearly twenty years ago I was in a bar in London with Mick after hours and Bob Dylan came and sat in the corner with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, in whose studio he had been recording. As the night wore on, after some prompting, Mick was persuaded to sing and he silenced the bar with a spellbinding version of this ancient lament for the murder of the “braw gallant” earl. When Mick finished, the silence was broken by scattered applause; in my memory at least, Dylan raised a hand to his fedora in acknowledgement. When Mick died at the beginning of last year, aged 52, after a truly awful time with motor neurone disease that he endured with enormous spirit and good humour, the song was sung at his memorial service at Magdalen chapel in Oxford. Later, thinking about Mick, and remembering that evening, I looked into some of the history of the song. The singing duo, Alex and Rory McEwen, sons of the under-secretary for state for Scotland, had popularised ‘The Bonny Earl O’Moray’ in America when they travelled there and sang in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. On one occasion, legend suggests, they were accompanied by their young friend, the folk singer Bob Dylan, playing harmonica under the stage name Blind Boy Grunt.

3. The Ramones: ‘Teenage Lobotomy’

There was a time when I discovered that the best way to remember things was with the accompaniment of very loud music. I did most of my exam revision as a teenager listening to The Ramones at top volume. If I’d stopped to think about it, I guess the reason was that each two minute intensive burst of noise was all about the absence of memory, created from a heroic desire to inhabit the present moment. My parents would sometimes characterise the music as mindless, (as in ‘how can you listen to that mindless noise when you are supposed to be concentrating?’) and of course that was exactly its attraction. As Teenage Lobotomy explains: ‘I just have to tell ‘em/ that I got no cerebellum.’

4. Elvis Costello: ‘Alison’

There is no shortage of songs about lost love, but nobody does it quite as sharply, or as believably as Costello. Songs are the places we stash our collective memory, and there is something incredibly rooted about this one – it’s exactly of its time, late 1970s, and of its place, urban Britain. Contained within it, it sometimes seems to me, are all the betrayals and infatuations and simple sadnesses of a generation of young men more introspective than their fathers. It also captures that ever-present desire to protect memory from the complications of how things turn out: ‘I think somebody better put out the big light/ because I can’t stand to see you this way…’

5. Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs: ‘Woolly Bully’

When Granta invited me to submit this list, this was the first song that came into my head. For a few years, I worked for the magazine, as deputy to the editor, Bill Buford. In those days, the magazine had something of a surplus of testosterone, mostly in the formidable shape of the bearded Buford and the extraordinary Bob Tashman, (now sadly departed) an inspired, and slightly crazed import from the New York Review of Books. Tensions around deadline time ran high, particularly among would-be alpha males in the spring, and release was sought in curious ways. Often our editorial meetings were preceded by impromptu push-up challenges or ferocious arm wrestling bouts. After these sessions, with the blood pumping, Bob and Bill would bond over a raucous a capella duet of the Sam the Sham hit. It reminded them, I guessed, of happier days in collegiate America, when men were men, and they weren’t surrounded by uptight Brits, reading proofs.

Photograph © Anna Wittenberg 2008