I Dreamt a Song Last Night

I can still remember some of the lyrics. I was improvising with a rock star while interviewing him outside the ruins of my old university building in West Ham. We were both riding those big black bikes you find in Amsterdam. What does that symbolise, I wonder? Any psychoanalysts visiting?

Here are the words I can still recall:

There was a road,

And along that road,

There was a field,

And through that field,

Ran a river of blood,

It flowed,

Deep and wide,

No one knew where

Along that road,

Along that road

Scott Walker Made Me Cry

To say that music can have a powerful, often irrational, emotional effect is not an original observation.

After all, it’s the principle behind every single male’s ‘Shag CD’ (or Pooching Playlist for the technically savvy); the hope that a bit of Luther Vandross and Lionel Richie will act like an aural Rohypnol when they’ve got a woman back to their fetid man-pad. However, when music does conjure up a big emotion from deep inside my brain it always catches me unawares.

This morning I was on the 08.14 from Welwyn Garden City, listening to my iPod on shuffle. In between Alexandra Palace and Finsbury Park ‘If You Go Away’ by Scott Walker began to play. For some reason the melancholy tune and Jacques Brelle’s poetic lyrics made me pause and cry.

I must have looked slightly bonkers and have no idea what emotional connection had been made in my head. All I can say is that, for a moment, I was watching London rush by and living that song.