This man comes into the shop to buy the Fireball XL5 theme tune for his wife’s birthday (and I’ve got one, an original, and it’s his for a tenner). And he’s maybe two or three years younger than me, but he’s well-spoken, and he’s wearing a suit, and he’s dangling his car keys and for some reason these three things make me feel maybe two decades younger than him, twenty or so to his fortysomething. And I suddenly have this burning desire to find out what he thinks of me. I don’t give in to it, of course (‘There’s your change, there’s your record, now come on, be honest, you think I’m a waster, don’t you’), but I think about it for ages afterwards, what I must look like to him.
I mean, he’s married, which is a scary thing, and he’s got the sort of car keys that you jangle confidently, so he’s obviously got, like a BMW or a Batmobile or something flash, and he does work which requires a suit, and to my untutored eye it looks like an expensive suit. I’m a bit smarter than usual today – I’ve got my newish black denims on, as opposed to my ancient blue ones, and I’m wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt thing that I actually went to the trouble of ironing – but even so I’m patently not a grown-up man in a grown-up job. Do I want to be like him? Not really, I don’t think. But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I’m unhappy, or whether I’m unhappy because I like it. It would help me to know whether this guy has ever taken it seriously, whether he has ever sat surrounded by thousands and thousands of songs about … about… (say it, man, say it)… well, about love. I would guess that he hasn’t. I would also guess Douglas Hurd hasn’t, and the guy at the Bank of England hasn’t; nor has David Owen or Nicholas Witchell or Kate Adie or loads of other famous people that I should be able to name, probably, but can’t, because they never played for Booker T and the MGs. These people look as though they wouldn’t have had the time to listen to the first side of Al Green’s Greatest Hits, let alone all his other stuff (ten albums on the Hi label alone, although only nine of them were produced by Willie Mitchell); they’re too busy fixing base rates and trying to bring peace to what was formerly Yugoslavia to listen to Sha La La (Make Me Happy).
So they might have the jump on me when it comes to accepted notions of seriousness (although as everyone knows, Al Green Explores Your Mind is as serious as life gets), but I ought to have the edge on them when it comes to matters of the heart. ‘Kate,’ I should be able to say, ‘it’s all very well dashing off to war zones. But what are you going to do about the only thing that really matters? You know what I’m talking about, baby.’ And then I could give her all the emotional advice I gleaned from the College of Musical Knowledge. It hasn’t worked out like that, though. I don’t know anything about Kate Adie’s love life, but it can’t be in a worse state than mine, can it? I’ve spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts and has it helped me any?
So maybe what I said before, about how listening to too many records mess your life up… maybe there’s something in it after all.
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Now discuss with your partners and fill in the evidence for your group’s approach to the extract in this forum.
- Psycho-analytic group
- Marxist group
- Feminist group
When all groups have finished, you can not only consider the other groups’ answers but can also compare the class’s answers with one set of possible answers.
If it were done, when 'tis done 