Summer of 97

I cannot hear this song without thinking of Summer 1997.

I was still a student, but during the long summer vacation I worked on a radio station in the historic city of Winchester.

The former home of legendary monarch King Alfred the Great – I spent a large part of the summer on my own living in a tiny bedsit, waiting for the weekend when I could rush off to London or Oxford to visit my girlfriend. Those weekends never came round fast enough, and they were always over too quickly.

With no friends, and nothing to do but work, it wasn’t the best of times.

And yet, despite this, my memories of the summer are positive. And it’s all because of this one song.

I don’t think I’d ever heard it before, but it was a trigger track for a listener competition that we rang (i.e. if you heard the song then that was the time that the lines were open for the competition). Put simply, the song was not just the soundtrack to my summer, it also made it bearable.

I only had to hear the opening chords and I was transported from the grimness of my existence in Winchester to the heady glamour of Venice Beach and the perfect Californian sunshine.

For the next four and half minutes everything else stopped, and the problems of the world simply disappeared.

Time could, quite literally, stand still.

Even now, the haunting guitar and the pounding drums make this probably my favourite song to run to, and equally my favorite mood fixer.

Whenever I have to cheer myself up – I put this song on the stereo, crank it up to 11 and BOOM - straight away I’m happier. 

I’ve still got no idea what the song means, but that doesn’t matter, the song isn’t just Novocain for my weary soul, it’s pure musical Prozac. And for that, who needs meaning?