My lessons were cut short after my driving instructor’s father-a walrus in a shiny navy polyester blazer-asked my recently-divorced mother out on a date to a pub on the outskirts of Oxford. I should say here and now that I cannot drive. “'Crush' by Jennifer Paige-basically Now 41 for a year.” “My dad loved Robbie Williams so much he’d drive around the block until it finished in the radio.” “Coldplay X&Y and Best of the Monkees: when one ended we started the other.” A veritable and weirdly specific buffet of parental taste purchased as part of a three for $10 deal from a bucket at a Shell garage. The author in their childhood, as a backseat DJĪsk anyone under the age of 40 what they listened to in the car as a kid (as I did on Twitter) and the answers will be equal parts heartbreaking, awful, and hilarious. Put on “Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox and I will instantly slide back down my spine to our old Honda a mess of warm ready salted Pringle crumbs decorating my lap, the bib of my dungarees lying across my fleshless tits like a clipboard, woozily staring down at the tiny knotted strands of my latest friendship bracelet. Basically, if Kanye wanted everyone to connect emotionally and entirely with The Life of Pablo, he shouldn't have held his listening party at Madison Square Garden he should have held it in the backseat of a Vauxhall Astra. It doesn’t just accompany the memory-it becomes the memory. Music is, in that four-wheeled box, everything.
You become more cognisant of every beat, every lyric, and every emotional key change as if you’re Truman Burbank picking the soundtrack to your own life. As your eyes glaze across mile after mile of grey tarmac and flittering cateye lights, your sense of hearing becomes amplified. When so much of your environment is reduced to a three square metre box of nylon upholstered padding and roll-down windows, music seems to flood your synapses in a way it rarely can in the outside world. Because music heard in a car crystallises in your head like almost no other. I'm talking about music that has the power to sweep you rudely back to your past, with no prior warning. I'm not talking about shitty guitar anthems squashed onto four CD compilations with an "approved by Jeremy Clarkson" sticker on the case. Car music-the playlists that serve as the soundtrack to so many of our journeys-is a very particular beast.
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