Mood Music

Mood Music ©
By Michael Casey

It’s been a few days since I wrote something, so here’s something new, for those of you in Russia, Portugal, Spain as well as the USA and here in the UK. I’ve been looking at my stats so I know where you are. Stats MR was in fact the original name of the company I worked for before ACNielsen bought us up. Music was a big part of our working life.

We had a Ghetto Blaster which we put on top of the computer, which were as big as wardrobes back in 1978, yes that long ago. Then we’d hit play and the music played all nightshift long, I’m still playing some of that music. Depeche Mode and REM were introduced to me over the decade plus that we had to work nights. Before Dark Room beckoned, and no Dark Room was not a band, it just meant that both the computers could be trusted not to crash and the printers had an auto stacker.

Music does get you in the mood, or make things more palatable, so a bit of music while you work does help. Arthur Askey had Workers Playtime on the Radio you can google that for yourselves. If the job is dire, and you can pick your own definition of dire, then listening to music does cheer you up and make time pass faster.

Supermarkets and Hotels and even lifts, or elevators if you are American, have music, as Life without Music is like being in a mortuary, though I admit I have not had that once in a life or is it death experience yet. The energy and the bounce of music is the pulse of Life itself and so its presence is like our own blood circulating.

They say that music helps study, and no it’s not our kids saying the Beatles or the Stones or Cream helped them study, literally. It’s the sound of music, and I don’t mean Julie Andrews either, it’s the sound of music that does something to our brain. So we are more receptive and happier, they used to say whistle while you work after all.

My brother did have Cream music help him get into Oxford, and then the same music through the same speaker got another brother into Cambridge. As for me, I have the same speaker, now nearly 50 years old, and I met Eric Clapton, I only went to Oxford on the train.

My own daughter listens to Classical music and other strange sounds on her phone, which is her excuse for being on it so much. However she recently got 100%, 100% and 96% in Chemistry, Biology and IT. So either Classical music works or she’s very clever, though my teacher brother always says to his students make sure you sit next to somebody clever.

So all in all music is company, it does soothe the savage beast. When my brother went to work at a coal mine in Newbold Vernon for a year, a gap year before they were invented, before he went to Cambridge, I was all alone in the homework room, and it was music which was my company.
Folkweave was on then I seem to remember, as was Radio 2 with all kinds of everything.  Music is a friend as is radio itself, it’s in the room with you, it’s in bed with you, it’s even in the bath with you. And if you are lucky enough to love a musician you’ve both got rhythm.