Syndrome (de) Mémoire Fausse

While we have been travelling around Europe we have largely been out of range of good English language radio (or any other language, as far as I could tell) – the World Service of the BBC having substantially disappeared from the terrestrial World to the Online, which is fine if you have internet access but not otherwise *. As a result we have had recourse to local stations. With a few exceptions - Turkey being among them, where we could listen to a channel playing Turkish music - there was no local traditional music, only the same fodder, mostly post-pubescent nymphets squealing in pseudo-American accents about “ivry tam Aa see yaw fez”. The nymphets generally went on to tell about how the object of their affections made them “feel saddisfaad, deep down insaad”. Anyway, that’s when we plunged the CD’s into the player.

Now that we are in France we have a choice between Radio’s “Culture”, “Musique (Classique)”, “Info’s”, “NRJ” (Energy –geddit?) “F U N” and, what is currently playing in the background, “Nostalgie”. This last plays hits from the 70s and 80s, rather as Radio Two used to. Given the world-wide dominance of American and British pop music, most of what is on Nostalgie might as equally be aired on an equivalent UK station but occasionally a piece comes on in French or a familiar song is played in a version which was not successful in Britain. When that happens it’s a shock. It’s as though The Grim Reaper has abruptly appeared at your dinner table or you spot a helicopter in a depiction of the Crucifixion and nobody else seems to notice or find it odd. I’m suddenly hit by the idea that memories that I thought I had of thirty years ago which I believed were common to everyone of my age were not shared as much as I thought. Perhaps that’s true even of close friends?

A lot of the music of twenty to thirty years ago is still played frequently on the radio and so to an extent is still current, but in the mid-70s I lived in Belgium and had a brief exposure to French pop music. Quite a lot of that I hadn’t heard since, but now, here on Nostalgie are Maxime le Forestier, Sheila, Michel Sardou, Gérard Lenorman, etc. sounding just as they did then and wiping out the intervening years. It’s weird, man! (On the other hand, I have seen photos of them as they are today – French singers going on forever, like Cliff Richard – and they look older than I do. Well, they must do, I don’t look as old as they do, do I?)
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*I suppose the advent of mobile phones has made those public service announcements which used to be broadcast on Radio Four on the lines of “could Miss Jacqueline Armstrong from County Durham, believed to be travelling in Devon and Cornwall in a Ford Anglia, registration number 531 PTN, please contact Newcastle General Hospital in connection with her sister” obsolete. I wonder when they stopped? Did anyone notice?