Jane here, following on from our recent discussions of
favourite movies. As I said last week, my favourite is a musical, South
Pacific, with its wonderful variety of songs, and that set me wondering whether
I could pinpoint one song that is my favourite of all time.
Answer: Impossible. I can’t pick just one, it’d be too hard.
I might manage to choose a small selection. Over here, the BBC have a weekly
programme called “Desert Island Discs,” in which celebrities are asked to
choose which eight records they’d take with them if they were marooned all alone on an
island in the middle of nowhere. It’s an old-fashioned idea – the programme’s
been running for more than 60 years – but it works well for most celebs,
except those who are very shy or else very vain. Most of them, in talking about
their musical choices, reveal quite a bit about themselves and their lives. Odd
to think, in these days of iPods, that when the programme started in the 1940s
records would have been quite literally discs, played on a wind-up gramophone
or newfangled radiogram. (Don’t ask how they would have got electricity on
their desert island!
Well I’m not a celebrity (yet!) but I can still choose
my Desert Island songs. After all, I want to be prepared when they ask me to appear, don't I? I think there would be one from South Pacific, and it's a toss-up between "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of my Hair" and "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy."
And I know there would have to be at least one Beatles number,
perhaps more than one. “She Loves You” is one I couldn’t leave out, and “A Hard
Day’s Night” would run it a close second. Then there’s “Things we Said Today”
and “Penny Lane”…
We’ve been swept by a wave, a regular tsunami, of Beatles
nostalgia this summer, because we’ve just passed the 40th anniversary of the
making of their Abbey Road LP. I’ve enjoyed all of it, the good, the bad, and
the sentimental. I love the Beatles’ music, not just because it’s tuneful and
inventive, but it takes me back to London in the 1960s, one of the happiest
times of my life.
And we’ve had another nostalgia spree just lately, because
Dame Vera Lynn, aged 92, has just topped the charts with an album of her very
best hits – 60-some years after she sang them in World War 2, and was known as the
Forces’ Sweetheart. Again, we’ve an anniversary to thank, plus the quality of
the songs and of Dame Vera’s performance. I don’t think I’d take any of her
records onto the mythical desert island – I’m the wrong generation – but you can’t help having your heart-strings
tugged whenever you hear her singing “We’ll Meet Again” or “The White Cliffs of
Dover”. To quote Noel Coward: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
I’ll go on mulling over my top few songs, and meanwhile, I
wonder how many of the pop-songs of today we’ll be playing and singing in forty
years, let alone sixty?
