Oh! Susannah
What have you done to me? (Musical nostalgia)
One week ago,
posted this picture, which blew my mind and sent me into a nostalgic tailspin.
I squandered two hours of precious writing time reminiscing with trips down memory lane. Or at least, a trip down two hours of YouTube videos.
I had no idea Michael J Fox and Susannah Hoffs were an item.
Who cares, you might be asking.
I do, thanks for asking.
Susannah Hoffs, former lead singer of the Bangles, was one of my first childhood crushes, along with Belinda Carlisle. They were a big part of my musical 80s.
I, along with every pre-pubescent boy who saw this at the time, could have sworn Susannah was looking into my eyes as she sang Manic Monday – this is her at her very best. I sing this song to my daughter every Monday (a great way to make her feel better about going to school) and I probably sing Eternal Flame more than anything else in the shower.
This is not a post about childhood crushes. Not yet – that will come later.
It’s a post about musical nostalgia
And because of those two hours I lost a week ago (thanks Eric!), and because I’m busy with NaNoWriMo and am on a short break away with my daughter in Germany (visiting family), and because seeing Susannah Hoffs again put me into a maudlin mood, I’m going to share an edited excerpt from A Classroom in Kyiv (available at no good bookshops) that captures some of the magic of music from years past.
I didn’t truly experience a proper musical awakening until the start of the 90s, and this chapter was inspired by that era.
FATHER: Sweetheart, turn that dreadful music down! You call that crap ‘music’?
DAUGHTER: Jesus, dad, it’s not crap, this is what all my friends are listening to. This song is really popular!
F: You know, when I was your age…
D: Oh no, dad, not another one of your old man whinges again…
F: Pipe down and listen up. In my day, there was none of this mp3 stuff, no YouTube or Spotify playlists. No, in my day we had something called a cassette tape…
D: I’m not a total idiot, dad. I know about these – I’ve seen that huge collection you have in the basement, shoeboxes full of them. Do you still listen to those?
F: Not so often, but they’re irreplaceable, one of a kind. Most were from ex-girlfriends. When I was at school or university, making a mix tape for a special someone was one of the most romantic things you could do. It took time and effort. It was an art, and it was from the heart. Wow, listen to me, I’m a poet!
D: [rolling her eyes] Seriously? Where did you get the music from?
F: From other tapes, or from CDs when they came along, or from the radio. I would spend my Sunday afternoons listening to the UK top 40 and recording the songs I liked. And I used to listen to the Evening Session on BBC Radio 1 with Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley, and the Peel Sessions with John Peel and record songs from there. And it was amazing the amount of new music you’d discover just listening to these programmes for hours.
D: You used to just sit and listen to these shows for hours? Oh my god, how boring!
F: Not at all, it was great! We’d discover so many unexpected gems. I remember hearing Spiritualized’s “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating in Space” for the first time back in 1997 and being blown away by how good it was, and I never would have discovered that if I hadn’t been listening to the Evening Session. The way he sings those lyrics – “All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away” – is so epic and still brings tears to my eyes…and tell me, how many albums do you have?
D: Don't get so emotional dad. Anyway, albums? You mean, playlists, right?
F: Ha ha, come on, albums still exist.
D: Yeah, sure, but I don’t listen to all of them, just one or two cool songs that Spotify recommends, or my friends tell me about.
F: Back in the day, my friends and I would wait and wait for the release dates of new albums, and we’d queue up at Tower Records or HMV so we could get the album right away and then go home and listen to it from start to finish, and then again and again. There was no downloading back then, that’s for sure.
D: What a pain in the ass!
F: Watch your language young lady, but yeah, it was a bit of a pain in the backside, especially if you lived far from a music shop. When I was in England in high school, I had to wait until I could make it to Cambridge or London. But when I got to university in Boston, it was fantastic – what a city for music!
D: So if you wanted just one song, there was no way to get it?
F: Actually, you could, if you wanted only the single. And in the UK, that’s how the top 40 was determined, only by single sales, and fans of the band would buy their singles just to see them go up the charts, even if they already had the album.
D: That sounds like such a waste of money! Buying the single when you already had the album? That’s absurd!
F: Not always, because the singles contained B-sides, and in some cases, the B-sides were better than the songs on the actual albums. You know Suede, my all-time favourite band?
D: Yeah, you never shut up about them. They’re okay, I guess. “Animal Nitrate” is cool even though the video's kinda creepy, but “The Wild Ones” is way too soppy for me.
F: You'll appreciate the rest of their music later. Anyway, their B-sides were incredible, and they were reason enough to buy the singles.
D: Okay, so what about music videos, how did you watch those?
F: On MTV. That was the only way to see them. And if you wanted to watch a certain video, you just had to sit and wait and wait for it. My friends and I would hang out all night watching videos and the highlight of the week was a show called 120 Minutes on a Sunday night. Those videos were epic.
D: Seriously, what a waste of time! You’d have to sit through loads of videos you didn’t like just to wait for one you did? Ugghhh…
F: Yeah, that was part of the fun. And when you did get to see the video you were waiting for, it was such a special treat. We could also record hours of MTV on our VCRs and then watch and fast forward to get to the videos we wanted to see. It was also a good way of discovering new music if we watched them all.
D: Alright, so I know when you were a kid you didn’t have Shazam. What if you heard a song somewhere and didn’t know what it was?
F: A ha, well, there were definitely times when I heard a cool song somewhere and I had no idea what it was, like the time I was in a café in Ljubljana when I heard this beautiful, enchanting female voice and I asked what it was, but they had no idea.1
D: That sucks, so things weren’t so good back then.
F: Well, you win some, you lose some. Remember those Katy Perry tickets we got you for your birthday?
D: Of course, that was an awesome present, the concert was so good. I tried to show you my videos, but you weren’t interested.
F: That’s because the quality was so lousy! Honestly, why the need to film? Why not just put your phone away and enjoy the music, enjoy the experience? The sound quality was shaky, and the videos were blurry.
D: But I wanted to remember the songs and how cool they sounded. I guess you’re right though –they didn’t sound as good later.
F: We used to get bootleg live tapes of concerts – you know, illegal secret recordings people made. The quality was often iffy, but those were such a treat to find – after years of looking I finally found the legendary Joy Division gig at the Paradiso in Amsterdam from 1980 in a secondhand record shop in Harvard Square. And when we went to gigs, no one filmed anything and there weren’t smartphones blocking everyone’s view. If a band played a ballad, we all held up our lighters.
D: Everyone had lighters?
F: A lot of people smoked back in those days and plenty of people brought lighters to shows anyway. And by the way, those bloody tickets were so damn expensive!
D: Geez Louise, dad, you’ve mentioned this before, and you make me feel so guilty. I said thank you a million times.
F: I know, but 300 quid! Good lord!
D: How did you use to get tickets?
F: For a high demand show like U2’s Zoo TV tour, you’d have to camp out the night before just to be in the queue for when Ticketmaster started selling tickets at 10am the next morning. But for other shows, you could go and queue up around 5 or 6am and hopefully you’d get a ticket before they all sold out if you weren’t too far back.
D: Shit, you had to wait for hours to get tickets? And overnight? What if it was cold?
F: I told you about your language! Yeah, sometimes it was cold – I remember freezing my ass off to get Oasis tickets years ago, but it was definitely maybe worth it.
D: Damn, I’m just glad things have changed. Some of that sounds like a total nightmare.
F: No way, it was great, really. Especially the mix tape culture. It wasn’t just romantic, friends used to make them for each other.
D: Oh yeah, I wanted to ask you about one of your mix tapes, the one from your friend Andrew. It was called the ‘Swell Trip Tape’, and it had a ‘smooth trip’ side and a ‘chilled trip’ side, what’s that all about?
F: Um, never mind all that, I think it’s dinner time…
I encourage you to check out some of the bands I’ve mentioned if you don’t know them already – do yourselves a favour and check out Spiritualized (start with the title track, continue with the rest): Ladies and Gentleman…
Even in black and white, Susannah Hoffs had the dreamiest, most mesmerising eyes. You could get lost in them, not to mention her seductive and luscious voice. Check out this peach of a tune from when she went solo: Unconditional Love
In the comments, I’d love to hear about your experiences with discovering new music. Who? Where? When? How?
If you’re a language learner and would like to read about how you can use music as a learning tool, then have a look at this post – Music lyrics: a poetic and beautiful language-rich resource
With the holidays among us, why not treat your loved one or frenemy to a copy of A Classroom in Kyiv, the somewhat perfect present, no matter what holiday you celebrate. Get the damn thing here already, or directly from me if you’d prefer not to support one of the nasty big boys.
(I also have a few copies in my Kyiv flat, but that won’t help anyone; I have a few copies in Vienna if you’re in the area; and if you’re anywhere near Dorking, my sister has an extra copy lying around, with literally shitty paw prints all over it thanks to her cat Clementine, so you can negotiate a lower price with her).
In the UK, the paperback is also available at The Great British Bookshop and other retailers but for the life of me I can’t figure out where. I’m not very good at this stuff. I stick to the writing (which also has its challenges).
This was in 2002. I returned to Ljubljana for the first since then in March of this year and looked in vain for where I thought that café might have been. I never did find out who that singer was.
Having a boyfriend make you a mixtape was a sign of true love!
Love this Daniel! It reminded me of a few things - the prestige if you had music video channels at home. I eventually had VH1 and would just sit there, glued to it. But when I went to university I didn’t even have a TV so it wasn’t until YouTube that I was able to go back and see the videos that had been made during that period. They just weren’t shown again like they are now!
Also those evening sessions with Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq. I remember my brother sending me a tape he’d recorded of them playing Elastica’s Connected, which is the first time I’d heard them. This seems such a strange way to fine new music now that I can hardly believe it was real! Thanks for the reminder.
And how is Ms Hoffs looking now I wonder?!