A song for Friday.

You see, it doesn’t matter what a song is about or what they put in a video. A song ties itself up in your head with memories because of when you first hear it, or a particular concert, or a certain trip when it was on heavy rotation. And boy, for three weeks in the summer of 2001 did we hear this song a lot. I travelled to Spain will fellow members of the Grey Sky Appreciation Society Tom and Jasmine Salmon, and our navigator supreme Nev. We had rented a car in Barcelona and were going to aim it north, for the Pyrenees, west, for the Basque coast and the Picos de Europa, and then south, across the dusty plain to Madrid. We had brought piles of CDs , confident that with the new millennium all rental vehicles would be supplied with something to play them on. Unfortunately there was some kind of misunderstanding at the rental agency, and they had to dig a battered and bruised old jalopy out from a garage down a side-alley. It was nice and spacious but only had a tape player.

And we only had one tape. Continue reading →

When I hear this song it makes me think of a day between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, not only long before Laura Marling ever released it, but probably whilst she was still at school. I had been given a camera for Christmas, my first SLR, and I was staying at my Mum’s house in Menston, near Ilkley, during the university break. It had snowed overnight, and – and here my memory is a little hazy – I was on my own and decided to head out and up towards the moor to try out the camera. Continue reading →