For Once...

Good times for a change
See, the luck I've had
Can make a good man
Turn bad

So please please please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want
This time

Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time
Lord knows, it would be the first time

A great song from Morrissey - and lyrics that strike a chord with me right now.

The Coastal Town They Forgot to Close Down

Such is the emotional power of music that certain songs remain etched in the memory and remind you of places and people, some you remember fondly, some you may try to forget. Whenever I hear The Four Tops classic number 'Reach Out I'll be There' for example, I'm instantly transported back to Cumbernauld, just outside Glasgow in the late 1960s. As a child in my formative years, for me, this song is forever linked with the new town. To this day when I hear the song I close my eyes and for a couple of minutes I'm back in simpler times when there were no personal computers, no internet, no mobile phones, I would be out playing with my pals - and my mother and father would be in the house keeping a beady eye on me.

Similarly, years later when I lived in Aberdeen there were a couple of songs that summed up my less than happy time in the Granite City. The Proclaimers burst on to the scene in the late 1980s and penned a few memorable ditties, none more so than 'I'm on My Way' (from misery to happiness today) This was a song I never tired of hearing - for obvious reasons - when I left Aberdeen for Edinburgh nearly twenty years ago. But I heard the other song a a few days ago for the first time in years - Morrissey's Every Day is Like Sunday. I had forgotten what a wonderful song this is and it's hard to believe it's twenty-one years since he wrote it. Living in misery in Aberdeen at the time, the lyrics hit a resonance with me which few other songs do:

Trudging slowly over wet sand

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen

This is the coastal town that they forgot to close down

Armageddon - come Armageddon! Come Armageddon! Come!

Everyday is like Sunday

Everyday is silent and grey

Hide on the promenade scratch out a postcard

How I dearly wish I was not here

In the seaside town...that they forgot to bomb Come! Come! Come - nuclear bomb!

Morrissey was,of course, the lead singer with The Smiths back in the early 1980s before he embarked on a solo career. The Smiths were one of the best bands around in a decade which taste forgot and blandness and greed took over. You may try to imagine how wonderful it felt hearing that song - living, as I did, in the coastal town they forgot to close down...