Comfort Music
Comfort Food means different things to different people, for some it's sweet things like chocolate and ice cream, for others stodgy pies and stews, but to me it means the rubbish I ate as a kid like sausage sandwiches covered in HP Sauce, double fried eggs and chips, beans on toast, or the simple yumminess of a chocolate Digestive biscuit dunked in a mug of hot tea. The pleasure of Comfort Food is heightened if it's something unhealthy that you feel a little guilty and self-indulgent about eating (greasy and fatty helps for me) but, like Proust's Madeleine, it evokes warm and happy memories of the past (what we Brits call "Nursery Food") that your taste buds can make real in a way your brain can't.
There's also such a thing as Comfort Music (there is, I invented it the other week), the records you turn to — and turn up loud — when you fancy a bit of an indulgent wallow that are either soft and gooey or excessively fatty in some way. It helps if they aren't "good" for you either, Al Green or Marvin Gaye might be very warm and comforting but they're too "healthy" to be proper Comfort Music, too hip and acceptably cool to make you feel ever so slightly bad the way you do when you tell yourself "I really shouldn't have eaten that whole tub of ice cream."
For example, there's "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty, a big stodgy slice of soft rock made by an old folky with a beard in 1978 when there were far more cutting-edge and radical things happening elsewhere. I should have hated it (Noel Edmonds liked it!) but I didn't, because how could you not want to wallow in that orgasmic saxophone? The record manages to be both warm and cozy and excessively, epically fatty at the same time; the quiet bits evoke the lovely feeling of cold fingers wrapping around a mug of hot tea on a chilly London night, then the saxophone bursts in and it's like biting into that wonderful sausage sandwich and feeling the grease and HP sauce combining to drown your taste buds in a wave of sense memory.
There are worse indulgences than this (which I will probably post at some point) but not many as wallow-worthy as this, especially in this 6-minute version which makes me want to loosen my belt and have a nap when it's over.
Download: Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty (mp3)
9 Comments:
Dollar doing Hand Held In Black And White, Mari Wilson's Just What I Always Wanted, Kid Creole and The Coconuts, ELO's big pop tunes like Livin' Thing; these are the my equivalent.
Although The Jam sometimes feel similar these days, and Blondie's Eat To The Beat album.
I turn to the medley from "Abbey Road," as well as Stephen Stills' first solo album and "Dark Side of the Moon." (Hurricane Smith's "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say" falls in there somewhere, too.)
perhaps its the nostalgia of our generation?
Ooh, whiteray mentioned that Hurricane Smith song. Because it was played so often when I was little, and then never, ever again (at least here) it is the equivalent of a time capsule, taking me right back to elementary school.
I do love Baker Street, and don't have the original somehow (just the Foo Fighters' version) so thank you very much!
I posted the Hurricane Smith song a while ago, it's not up anymore I'm afraid.
Oh, it's long been a prized possession. Thank you, though.
Great, great, great.
My beans-on-toast? Breakfast in America.
My Fray Bentos steak and kidney pud? Out of the Blue
Jason
Wow, Baker Street. I had just started my first day working as a plasterers laborer in Weston Super Mare, a snotty 16 year old and this was on the radio and ever since I am just transported back to those wonderful days. And as Anonymous (above) said - Out of the Blue that ELO album just was my teenage years! But then most of the things talked about here - Kid Creole, Marie Wilson. I also have a dollar song amongst my collection, god knows what it reminds me off but it's a real 'guilty pleasure' Mirror Mirror
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