A six-song playlist inspired by olfactory memory and how some odours can powerfully link you to the past. Close your eyes and breathe in!
[If the Spotify Embedded Playlist does not appear graphically above, there should at least be a clickable link to the playlist.]
First Word
It is said that the sense of smell has a particularly strong connection to memory, often evoking vivid and emotional recollections. Apparently, this link is due to the way the brain processes smells, with olfactory information traveling directly to brain regions associated with emotion and memory. There is an aroma that has stuck with me for the last 55 years or since I was at primary school in Paisley. I have no idea what the smell is, but it is instantly recognisable to me and immediately throws me back in time to the late 1960s. It’s a clean but not sharp smell, like the aroma of newly opened books or something else newly unpacked. It’s possibly a smell related to the start of a new term – maybe the aroma of multiple pairs of shiny Clark’s Commandos – with the compass in the heel.
I smell it very rarely these days, in fact, I cannot remember the last time I got a whiff of it. But on Saturday I was at the Book Festival at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Quartermile and the smell hit me as I walked through the main entrance door. It quickly passed so I turned back to the door and stood on the threshold inhaling deeply, to the slight consternation of others coming through the door. I looked around trying to find something that would be making that smell. There was an aircon/heater unit above the door but it wasn’t on. So, all I could think was that the hard-wearing heavy-duty entrance area carpet looked quite new so maybe it was the smell of some form of glue?
Coming up are six songs of varying genres that jumped into my strange head when I thought of smells. Please note that the sublime Summer Breeze by The Isley Brothers [“Sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom”] has been playlisted before in WIS 28Jul23 and so was cup-tied for this playlist.
Local Boy In The Photograph – Stereophonics (1997)
This was the debut single by Stereophonics released in March 1997. Like many of their early songs that appeared on their first album Word Gets Around later that year, it was based on events and people from the band’s lives in Wales. On first release, it only made No 51 in the UK chart but I recall hearing it on the radio and being immediately taken by the imagery in the opening verse.
There’s no mistake
I smell that smell
It’s that time of year again
I can taste the air
Written by an 18-year-old Kelly Jones in his bedroom, it tells the story of a boy from Flint in North Wales who Jones knew from playing county football when he was younger. The boy went on to take his own life by jumping in front of a train and Jones read about in the local paper. The anthemic song was written as a celebration of the boy’s life. After reaching the top forty with their subsequent singles and the album making the top forty, Local Boy In The Photograph was re-released and reached No14 – the single had the band’s covers of John Fogerty’s Who’ll Stop The Rain and The Last Resort by The Eagles.
Perfume – Sparks (2006)
No playlist inspired by olfactory memory would be complete without this 2006 single from the great Sparks, lifted from their Hello Young Lovers album. It’s a simple concept. Essentially, it’s a song about a girl that doesn’t wear any perfume, leading Russell Mael to declare in the chorus: “That’s why I want to spend my life with you”. Her contrast to other girls is hammered home in the verse lyric, which lists a number of girls (actually thirty over the five minutes of the song) and their different ‘parfum de prédilection’. The rhyming of CK1 with Opium is one of several witty tricks in the lyric.
Driven by an insistent guitar part behind the mix, each break features Ron Mael’s lovely descending piano part. The standout section comes only 1:20 into the tune where a spoken bridge section states:
The olefactory sense is the sense
That most strongly evokes memories of the past
Well…… Screw the past!
Clearly, Russell doesn’t want his nose to remind him of previous girlfriends! A very Sparks-like idea for a song.
Down In The Tube Station At Midnight – The Jam (1978)
Another clear choice for this playlist. The Jam’s single releases are rightly venerated for the consistent quality of the young Paul Weller’s writing, and for demonstrating the musical growth of the band. Having been a fan since the… erm… Start!, I recall the growing sense of anticipation prior to the release of Down In The Tube Station at Midnight in October 1978. After the sonic blast of the first four singles, the appearance of a cover of the Kinks’ David Watts as a double A-side single in August of that year suggested something was changing in their style, even though the other A-side A-Bomb in Wardour Street retained the visceral attack of the earlier material.
When Tube Station arrived, it delivered, and then some. The storyline’s brooding tension and late-night unease were created in the sparse sections by Bruce Foxton’s outstanding syncopated bassline crashing off Weller’s Rickenbacker chord stabs and harmonics. The tension is heightened by a heartbeat audio effect in the left stereo channel at points during the song – something I only realised many years later. This all contrasted brilliantly with the cathartic bursts into the chorus melody.
After opening with the atmospheric sounds of a 1970s London Underground station, the lyric builds the imagery until the mugging scene in the third verse is powerfully described using several references to smell.
I first felt a fist, and then a kick
I could now smell their breath
They smelt of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs
And too many right-wing meetings
Despite the reticence of the BBC to give airplay to a record with strong political overtones, the single reached No15 in the UK charts. Within a year or so, Eton Rifles would be No 3 and Going Underground would go straight in at No 1.
Fun Facts: The photo of the band on the single sleeve was taken on the westbound Central line platform at Bond Street Station, but the recording of the tube train was made at St John’s Wood Station. The image on the back of the sleeve was a picture of a young Keith Moon who had died a month before the single’s release. The band cover The Who’s So Sad About Us on the B-side.
Roses – OutKast (2003)
A much shorter note on this fifth track as I know a lot less about OutKast than I do about The Jam! However, Roses was still one of the first records that jumped into my head when I was thinking about songs with aroma references. I wrote about the progressive rap duo’s first hit single Ms Jackson back in WIS 8Dec23 and noted that it paved the way for their global hit Hey Ya in 2003. That single was taken from their double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below which was essentially two solo albums by André 3000 and Big Boi released under the OutKast name. Roses was the follow-up single and was the only track on André 3000’s album to feature Big Boi.
T’internet tells me it is what is known as a “diss song”, usually deployed by rappers in those tiresome feuds that seem to populate the genre. I say tiresome but they can get serious and end up fatal. But in this case, André 3000 is seemingly dissing a conceited ex-girlfriend called Caroline. It’s all ridiculous but the song does have an ear-catching chorus:
I know you’d like to thank your shit don’t stink
But lean a little bit closer, see
Roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh
Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue (Live) – The Ramones (1977)
Probably the easiest choice, given I concluded on Saturday that the wistful and mysterious smell of my lost childhood that I had been carrying with me all these years might have been carpet adhesive. All one minute and thirty-five seconds of Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue appeared as Side 1 Track 6 on the Ramones’ iconic, eponymous debut album in 1976. Written from first-hand experience by bass player Dee Dee, I recall the minimalist four-line lyric of youthful boredom being picked up by the tabloids in the UK in the aftermath of the Pistols/Grundy affair – the “Filth and the Fury” styled red-top headlines came thick and fast back then.
The song inspired the title of the most famous punk fanzine when Mark Perry began producing Sniffin’ Glue with a piece on the Ramones. I’ve decided to playlist the version from their amazing It’s Alive LP, which was recorded on 31 Dec 1977 at the Rainbow in London, in the presence of Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious and Elton John, apparently kitted out like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Not only do the band play it in a different key to the studio version, they play it even faster – taking only one minute and eighteen seconds to thrash through it. Breathtaking indeed!
The Birds Will Still Be Singing – Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet (1993)
As a life-long fan of musical polymath Elvis Costello, I’ve followed him down the stylistic twists and turns of his career over the years. His 1981 detour into country music on his sixth album Almost Blue introduced me to Gram Parsons and instigated my love of Americana music. I’d like to say his dalliance with The Brodsky Quartet on 1993’s The Juliet Letters did the same for classical music. But it didn’t.
However, unlike many other fans, I enjoyed the recording and thought the meeting of minds worked well. I wasn’t so keen on some of the uptempo numbers – it often sounded too forced, melding the intricacies of a string quartet into what was essentially a pop song structure. But I felt those same intricacies added depth to the slower numbers, enhancing the melody and adding drama to the lyric.
No more so than on the final track, The Birds Will Still Be Singing. The last four tracks have death themes, possibly not overly surprising for a project based on a professor in Verona who answered letters that people felt the need to write to Juliet Capulet. Not only a dead woman, but a made-up dead woman! Declan’s sleeve notes suggest he sees this last song, which communicates to a lover from beyond the grave, as a song of condolence and renewal. And despite some clever olfactory word play (“Eternity stinks my darling, that’s no joke” and “Spare me the lily-white lily with the awful perfume of decay”), this is ultimately a song that brings his song suite to a hopeful conclusion. I think the chorus shows he’s right.
“Banish all dismay, extinguish every sorrow
If I’m lost or I’m forgiven, the birds will still be singing”
Last Word
Adding these six songs to the Master Playlist today will take it up to just over 700 tracks. Seven hundred! All generated from me posting a blog nearly every week since February 2023 with ever more rambling commentary on the tunes. I had retired the previous summer in July 2022, and I started writing towards the Friday night publication to bring a bit of structure to my week in the long dark days of my first winter without a day job. A deadline to aim for, kinda thing.
My life has changed a bit since then and I recently did some tinkering with the blog format with the aim of lessening the input and freeing up some more time for other things. My infamous verbosity has meant this hasn’t really worked and so reaching the 700 tunes milestone seems like a good time to consider the future of WeekInSound.
I realise I made the rod for my own back by choosing the blog name and relating the content (very) loosely to the week gone by. So I plan to remove that rod and abandon the regular weekly Friday night issue. Although the web address will remain the same, I will use the abbreviated WIS title and move to more occasional posts, published when something drives me to the laptop. This may be events like the passing of notable musicians or gigs that I want to review. Or even, six tunes that leap into my head on the basis of some stupid theme – like this week!
So this edition is going to be the last published at 5pm on a Friday. I’d obviously like to thank all the subscribers who have supported the blog in the last few years. But as this is not a farewell, I hope some of you will continue to click on the link for a wee read, as and when a blog randomly drops into your inbox in the months ahead.
À bientôt mes amis!
AR
If you enjoyed this, there is plenty more where that came from. Subscribers receive a link in their inbox every Friday evening at 5pm UK time. You can’t start the weekend without it.
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