The Comeback Kid

I’d had a hard back copy of  former White House staffer George Stephanopoulos’ 1999 memoir, All Too Human: A Political Education – for ages. But I never got round to reading it.

Finally, in 2002 I did.

I loved how someone so young could get so close to the most powerful man in the world – and in my mind Stephanopoulos and The West Wing’s Sam Seabourn are one and the same person.

One of the biggest hits of the 2002 British summer was the dance remix of Elvis’ A Little Less Conversation – a song that I cannot hear without thinking of Bill Clinton.

The reason is simple; I only got to read Stephanopoulos’ weighty tome on my bus journey to and from work, time I’d also use to listen to the radio. Radio formats being as they are, you could almost guarantee hearing Elvis during the course of that 40-minute journey through Central London, and I invariably did.

So now whenever I hear the song I think of Clinton. Pavlov would be proud.

The bizarre thing is though that I don’t think about sitting reading a book about Clinton whilst rammed into a slightly small seat on a Routemaster bus; rather the song triggers a mental movie montage of Clinton. So I see images of Clinton on the campaign trail, Clinton in the Oval Office, Clinton playing sax in his shades, and so on.

Maybe I’ve seen such a montage on the news, but I don’t think I have – it’s simply a fusion of two memories from the same time coming together.

This has happened to me twice before, if I hear Bryan Adams’ ‘Heaven’ then it reminds me of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ which I was reading at the time that Adams’ hit was all over the radio like a rash.

Whilst, That’s When I Think Of You by Australian rock band 1927 conjures up images of me reading Michael Ende’s ‘The Never Ending Story.’ I was obviously a fan of both at some point in 1988 (and still am) and so the memories have fused, co-joined in my mind, each item inseparable from the other.

Some day I’ll probably cut some archive footage of Clinton to the sounds of a danced up Elvis, but in the interim, in my head, it’s a damn good edit!