If music be the food of love

...then get stuck in

According to Yusef Islam(if you don't know who he is then you need a good wake-up) music helps to feed the soul. We need music for spiritual fulfilment and nourishment. On reason we sing hymns at church is to express our faith in another way. It offers something different and we remember the words more if we sing them to a tune, rather than mindlessly repeat them each week.

I think that listening to music for fulfilment is connected rather strongly to psychology. By listening to music at significant times of our lives we take a musical photograph where, when we next listen to that piece of music, we take ourselves back. They aren't as vivid as photographs - you aren't taken back immediately, but, with some recollection it does eventually work.

For example, Last Nite by the Strokes takes me back to the summers of 2001 and 2002, when they were reaching a more wider audience within the realms of indie/popular music. The album, Is This It, with the black glove on the ladies bare bottom, with a paper inner booklet rather than over produced glossy finish - i remembers it all like it wer yesterday - the heat of the sun, the drinking, the celebration. all good, all innocent, all exciting, all real.

I started singing a song from Oliver! the other day in my room. I played Mr Bumble in the Lionel Bart version of the Charles Dickens classic whilst at secondary school. It was a great role and relished one of the most famous lines of the play: "Mooooorrrrrrrrrreeee??????" Obviously it didn't have the high pitched wheeze of Harry Secombe but I made up for that with an equally comedic performance. Well, that's what I thought at the time.

Music takes me back to all different periods in my life. The first time I heard the Clash was when I went to a party and only put it on to impress a girl I quite fancied. A ll I will say now is that a few years down the line...married, three children and a massive house...is ain't what I has got.