This one is unusually hard because, for some reason, I tend not to associate songs with people. I have plenty of songs that remind of of places, or events, or dates, or even seasons. But not people. And I can’t even take the obvious route and pick a song that reminds me of my wife, or one of my children, because, well, there aren’t any. (Songs, that is, not wife or children, of which I have one of the former and two of the latter). Emma and I don’t have an “our choown”, and, although Ellie has her own favourite songs and asks me to play them, none of them particularly remind me of her when I hear them. Abi isn’t old enough to have a favourite song at all yet, although I’ve noticed that she cries less when I’ve got music on. Which is a good thing.

But, anyway, back to the subject at hand. Since none of my family or friends have songs that I associate with them, I’ve picked one that has at least a vague association with a celebrity – in this case, a BBC Radio DJ. The song I’ve chosen is one that could just as easily have been picked as a song that reminds me of an event, but it happens to be an occasion where part of what makes it memorable is the people involved.

The event was the Greenbelt Festival at Castle Ashby sometime in the late 80s – I can’t place it precisely from memory, but I think it’s most likely to have been GB15 in 1988. That was back when Greenbelt was still big enough to attract the attention of Radio 1, and back when Radio 1 still did roadshows in the UK instead of jetting off to the Mediterranean. So that year featured Simon Mayo doing a live roadshow from mainstage one afternoon.

The live roadshow format was fairly generic – a few live on-stage performances were linked by short interviews and recorded music from the standard Radio 1 playlist – so most of the music was from then-current chart acts, either on vinyl or performing live. To the live audience, though, the recorded music interludes were essentially breaks between the real action, and were, consequently rather boring. That is, until one of the regular mainstage compères (I think it may have been Stewart Henderson, but I’m not sure of that either) decided to climb a maintenance ladder onto the top of the mainstage roof. On the roof, he started doing a series of rather exaggerated dance moves to one of the songs being played, and his actions were promptly copied by the crowd. What made it funny, of course, was the fact that Simon Mayo couldn’t see the compère above him, and had no idea why the crowd had, from his perspective, broken out into a seemingly well-choreographed mass dance with no visible prompting. His increasingly bemused attempts to get the crowd to follow his moves instead eventually led to the whole thing breaking down in laughter. This is the song that was playing at the time.

Direct link for those viewing on syndicated sites which don’t support embedding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E