Dexy's Midnight Runners- Reminisce (Part Two)

"We were both 16, they were sweet, warm nights and it's a fond memory now. We decided we should adopt a song, a song that was current. She wanted "I'll Say Forever, My Love" by Jimmy Ruffin, I wanted it to be "Lola" by The Kinks(...)Well, she won. It was never really acknowledged but "I'll Say Forever" became the song."

"The overall theme of these columns has been the interplay between place, song and listener in acting as a


trigger for memories or impressions.The ability of music to do this is well known, a Proustian effect by which hearing even a snatch of a song can bring recognition of the past in a present moment(...)


(...)Songs, of course, aren’t usually written with this mind – they are, more likely, intended for the moment.

(...) The track here, however, Reminisce Pt 2 by Dexys Midnight Runners, takes a step back by being a song not primarily about a place but about memories –in this case, of a teenage love affair – recalled by songs of the time.This came from their 1985 album, Don’t Stand Me Down.(...)




There is, however, something troubling about this reminiscence – the date the song recalls and the tunes it is remembered by don’t match up. The words place the romance in the summer of 1969. However, the two songs in the running for the couple’s special tune, Lola by the Kinks andI’ll Say Forever My Love by Jimmy Ruffin, came from the summer of 1970(...)Likewise, the two songs played on the radio and by which Kevin Rowland remembers that summer - Wedding Bell Blues andLeaving On a Jet Plane – weren’t summer songs at all by the time they reached the UK. Wedding Bell Blues was an early Laura Nyro song, performed by her at the Monterey Festival in 1967, but the USA and UK hit was by the Fifth Dimension, reaching the UK charts in January 1970. Similarly, Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of Leaving On A Jet Plane was on the radio in the winter of 1969 and in the charts in early 1970.

(...)In a real sense, this doesn’t matter and could be poetic licence. This is a song, not a historical record, and there may be good reasons for the switch in year and telescoping songs over a period of time into one summer. (...)Perhaps, in the same way, a lost love is more appropriately remembered by I’ll Say Forever My Loverather than, say, by Middle of the Road and Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.
(...)Perhaps, too, it merely shows that memory is fallible though, in truth, both Leaving On A Jet Plane and Wedding Bell Blues do sound like summer songs. It is human for the mind to recast the past. It didn’t always snow at Christmas ; the first gig you went to wasn’t really the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club; and it wasn’t always a golden summer on Cromer beach. It only becomes dangerous if you go searching for a rewritten past and expect to find it in the present. This is an odd song.(...)It does make me think about the past though, and realise that the distance between now and this song is greater than between the song and the young love it describes. In the interplay of past and present it has itself become a marker along the way."
Read more in http://songsaboutplaces.blogspot.pt/2011/04/reminisce-part-2.html