At The Palais Theatre, most of the audience of 3000 would have known Your Bright Baby Blues. At The Railway Hotel, probably only two brothers.
I witnessed how song memory can be locked away, or partitioned, in a brain that is ravaged by deterioration and confusion.
“Is that all the man sings? ‘How does it feel?’” Hannah, five years old, is making a play-dough birthday cake. Jesse, nearly three, is drawing a map of the world. I’m podding peas.
For once, people in Los Angeles and London and New York might be sitting around listening to a song about where I lived, rather than my sitting around listening to songs about all the places that they live.
I confess it was more than just clothes that drew me back to Hyper Hyper on those rainy afternoons. There was music. And The Boy. Perched behind the counter, nose in a book, he seemed to exist in some other world, one with particularly rarified air - it was all over him like a scent.
I couldn't escape the crush (in both senses of the word) the first time I heard it. I was dumped, pulled under and dragged disoriented across the sandy sediment of my adolescent existence. See My Baby Jive was excoriating.
You can tell by the catch in Neil Finn's voice that it was a tough gig to play and sing this song for his former band mate.
Then, one day, I am sitting in an okonomiyaki restaurant as a rare treat, when Bridge Over Troubled Water comes on the radio. A song so familiar that I had ceased experiencing it as a piece of music a long time ago. If anything, I was slightly dismissive of it: the glossy production, its mawkish grandiosity.
I'm eating a cheap and nasty pizza – a fitting feed for a failed novelist. I’m watching The Panel. About three slices in they introduce a New Zealander called Bic Runga. I’m enraptured.
Mary Gauthier entered my little world and reinforced the notion that songwriting is a great art form as worthy of any other. To me, she was, until then, an unknown master of songwriting.