Unlike yesterday, I’ve got so many options for this category that the difficulty is in choosing just one. But there’s one song which recently demonstrated to me just how vivid the “spirit of place” associated with a piece of music can be.
From 1996 to 2002 I worked for an ISP, PSINet Europe (now Telstra Europe). In late 1996 their Brussels office was relatively new and they needed a bit of additional staffing, so I was briefly seconded there to help out with technical support – the first time I’d worked outside the UK for anything more than just a one or two day trip. The fact that I spoke neither French nor Flemish was not, I was assured, a problem – they would only put customers through to me who spoke English!
I have a lot of memories of that period, of which one of the standouts is from my very first day when I was taken to collect the rental car which would be mine for the duration. Having signed off the paperwork and got the key, my colleague told me to follow her as she drove back to the office – something easier said than done, given that her driving was typically Belgian, with an emphasis on speed rather than safety, and I’d never driven a left-hand drive car before. So keeping up with her was a bit of a hair-raising experience, to say the least! Other interesting experiences included visiting Ypres (or Ieper, as my Flemish colleagues insisted on me calling it) on Remembrance Day, and having my only credit card (and only source of cash) swallowed by an ATM one evening – resulting in me having to return to the office that evening and raid the fridge, mostly for waffles as that’s pretty much all that was there, as I had no way of buying anything else to eat. I then scrounged off other people in the office for a couple of days until a replacement card arrived.
The other thing that was memorable, though, was the music. And, in particular, one song, which seemed to be on the playlist of every radio station we listened to at the office or was played in every bar or cafe I visited. So that’s the song I’ve chosen for today’s post.
The twist, though, is that from November 1996 until last year I hadn’t been back to Brussels at all. I returned last year as part of the British contingent for the European Citizens Convention (more about that elsewhere on my blog), and, as the coach which had collected a group of us from the airport dropped us outside our hotel, it felt strangely familiar. A quick delve into my memory, and I realised that I wasn’t just standing in a street that I’d visited when working there over a decade earlier, but I was standing outside a bar that I’d drunk in. And, in the back of my head, I could hear my mind gently playing a song to me that I’d heard in that bar the previous time I visited – the Euro-trance sound of Robert Miles, One & One.
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOtRgaL9OBY