T-Total Recall
by Wrongtom
I’ve often been accused of hoarding. True, I have a lot of stuff, and it’s all important. The thousands of records which line my studio? I covet every last one of them, despite probably not having enough life left to listen to them all in full. The tubs of old DATs featuring unreleased tracks I made 20 years ago? Priceless, and if I ever get my DAT player fixed I’ll unleash them on the world, or at least the handful of people who actually click things I’ve linked to on Twitter.
Hoarding is a disorder. The NHS website says I should consider my hoarding a problem if “the amount of clutter interferes with everyday living”. Okay, I’m currently surrounded by dusty instruments. The closest of which, mere inches away and balanced precariously against my desk, is an old synthesizer I haven’t switched on in weeks, but I will, I promise. The NHS also tells me that “hoarding disorders are challenging to treat because many don’t see it as a problem”. Oh.
I’ve also been accused of living in the past, thanks in part to much of my music sounding like a throwback to a bygone era, and, no doubt, my habit of regaling tales of yesteryear. I do have a thing for old music, and the antiquated equipment it’s made on, as demonstrated by my thousands of old records and the dusty synth mentioned above. There’s more to it though, and the reason I might appear to reminisce so often is because my memories seem to play on a kind of dastardly internal streaming service, relentlessly screening visceral scenes from the past 4+ decades, the earliest being a hazy dream-like image of a beach in Ibiza in 1978 when I was 3.
Sometimes these images and scenes are involuntary, and they’re often accompanied by a succession of similar or related memories. The other day I was inexplicably transported back to sitting on my old sofa 10 years ago, only to be hit with a succession of sofa-based memories, from watching the events of 9/11 unfold on the ratty couch in a house share, to retching over the side of my parent’s jungle-print sofa after I got hideously sick following a trip to Thorpe Park in 1987. It all played out in HD with the added comfort/horror of the feelings which accompanied each moment.
For years I figured these acute memories were simply down to never drinking booze, but I was recently alerted to a condition called hyperthymesia, and things began to make sense.
Let’s be clear. There are only six identified cases of hyperthymesia, each of them recalling every day of their lives back to a certain point. The first, in 2006, was Jill Price who can remember everything back to the age of 14, and describes having a split screen in her head with a “loop of memories free falling”. Another was actor Marilu Henner who vividly recalls her time on the set of Taxi back in the late 70s. All can tell you the date and even the day each memory happened.
This isn’t me. I’m pretty good at dating things but I don’t have that Rain Man style human Google function for important events. I could give you a rough ballpark, maybe: it was early 1986, possibly still winter, and I think it might have been the weekend when we sat down to watch the first episode of Lovejoy.
I do, however, visualise time physically. As a kid I made a model of days of the week with 3D letters as obstacles we have to scale to make it to the end. It didn’t quite capture what I was imagining or how I felt, but I do remember it confusing my teacher, not least because she had no idea why I made it. Neither did I. This might be a form of spatial sequence synesthesia in which numbers and time are perceived as points in space, either externally or in the mind’s eye.
A 2009 study at Edinburgh University identified links between “time-space synesthesia” and “the savant-like condition of hyperthymestic syndrome”. The study recognised that everyone has “implicit or explicit associations between time and space”. We might refer to the past as “back in the day” and the future as “ahead”, but those with a form of visual-spatial synesthesia can “consciously report the layout of their spatial forms, which are often convoluted, and can be highly idiosyncratic.”
This is me. Time and memories both exist in my head in overflowing, and often overlapping compartments, sometimes spilling into each other or creating a new section, like my sofa associations. It’s pretty exhausting, and I think I need a sit down.
Perhaps this is why I’m surrounded by stuff, or maybe I perceive things this way because I’m surrounded by stuff. Even before I had loads of my own stuff, I was surrounded by stuff. My mum and dad’s house was full of stuff, overrun with books and bric-a-brac; the accumulative effect of raising three siblings before I was born.
It’s just my mum in that house now but it’s still full of stuff, some of which is mine, and every so often I have a sift through to see what I can bear to throw out. On a visit earlier this year, I unearthed a pile of old flyers. Of course I can’t let go of these remnants of club nights I went to or gigs I played in the 90s, can I? As I thumbed through a handful, I was instantly back there on the stage, or in the thick of the dancefloor, or… wait a minute, was I really at the Blue Note in 1995 watching Levi Roots with Aba Shanti-I!? I remember the night but don’t remember it being the UK’s emperor of hot sauce.
At the bottom of the pile I found some sheets of yellowing paper adorned with my handwriting at the time — all uppercase except for the e’s — and the title at the top read “THe BeATCAVe PART ONe”.
What was THe BeATCAVe, and why didn’t I remember it? As I read through the list of tracks, from Donald Byrd to Depth Charge to Steel Pulse, it all came flooding back. This was supposed to be my first ever DJ set. A friend had hooked me up with a small venue in Surbiton called (I think) The Drum, where their most popular night was a monthly gay session, popular with the local drag and trans community. Surbiton was a lot more bohemian back in the day.
If I was Jill Price, I’d probably look at this and tell you the date and day it was written but I had to guess based on the content. I know I was 18, and most of these records I remember buying in the early 90s, the latest of which is probably Corduroy’s jazz-funk cover of Motorhead’s titular hit, released on Feb 7th 1994 (I looked it up on Discogs), it was a Monday (Google).
I’m now standing in Beggars Banquet in Kingston, handing Dave Jarvis behind the counter a fiver before heading back to college to finish a sub-par cubist painting of a kettle. And now I have a succession of various other paintings I’ve made over the years — a mixed media radiator when I was 17, a poor imitation of a Bridget Riley for my A-level resits, a watercolour of my old school which I tire of painting after an hour and add Giger-esque structures growing on the post-war building like an extraterrestrial cancer — I suddenly feel like the Dr Manhattan of bad art.
Back to THe BeATCAVe and I don’t remember the night because it never happened. We booked a date but it was cancelled, I can’t recall why, and all I have left to show for it is four sheets of paper with a list of tunes I planned on playing. There wasn’t any specific order but I like the way it’s bookended with tracks from Donald Byrd’s Blackbyrd album which I still dearly love. Unfortunately some of the list isn’t on Spotify but if you fancy joining me in a memory which never happened, you can listen below.
One track I’m dismayed to not find on Spotify is the Cabin Fever remix of Galliano’s ‘Skunk Funk’. Another 12” I picked up in Beggars Banquet — on an after college excursion into Kingston with my friend Iraj, I was wearing a blue trench coat, jeans covered in paint and black reeboks — and the first Andrew Weatherall release I owned. This might sound like hyperbole but it’s a record which changed my perception of music.
I’d been listening to a broad range of music for years, and a lot of my favourite records married genres, but not quite like this. There was a lot of talk of journeys and excursions around this time, and these terms still make me cringe, but in just under ten minutes, Weatherall managed to take me on a trip through everything I loved about my record collection.
Using Mick Talbot’s percussive hammond riff and Valerie Etienne’s backing vocal, Weatherall transformed Galliano’s stoned funk into the slow build of gospel meets go-go with a didgeridoo snaking its way around the beat as if it’s an organic acid-line from a 303. Then, just when you’ve second guessed where he’s taking you, a lumbering bass line drops out of nowhere, and you’re stomping to a huge dub-house monster with clattering percussion and drum rolls which echo George Kranz’ ‘Din Da Da’. By the time the fuzzy guitar joins this mish-mash, you’d barely recognise the original in there. Weatherall was a genius.
As I listened to the sheets of cascading synth zaps and rattling timbales, or that ridiculous bassline, I didn’t realise I was hearing Weatherall’s track in colour. Years later I found out this was probably chromesthesia. I’ve since encountered people who physically see colours corresponding to sound, and while my experience, much like hyperthymesia, isn’t this acute, I do have a blurring of the senses where sounds and colours correspond. Sometimes it goes beyond colours, with basslines feeling like I’m being enveloped by an amorphous blob. Sometimes songs conjure images of specific buildings as if I’m in front of, or even in them, which is why I’ve always balked at the old adage “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.
The blob feeling always reminds me of something I experienced as a kid when my dad would take me up to bed, and somewhere between the first step and the top of the stairs I’d have the sensation of being reduced to an atom, and passing another atom in a hazy mustard-yellow expanse. A surprisingly calm feeling before a quick wee and then off to sleep.
I’d forgive you for thinking I’m talking nonsense. I’ve never been tested for synesthesia but I’m aware of what I’ve experienced for most of my life, and considering I make music every day, it’s not something I haven’t explored regularly, trying out sounds and noting how I react.
As for hyperthymesia, it’s too soon to know if there’s a spectrum. It’s not even a decade and a half since Jill Price’s case was published, though the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevsky was recorded as having similar abilities in memory recall a century ago. He also displayed five-fold synesthesia where one stimulated sense triggered a sensation in the others.
Solomon put his abilities to good use in the 1920s, wowing crowds as a mnemonist, showing off his prowess in recalling speeches or complex mathematical formulas. I’d do the same now, but I doubt I’d hold a crowd with a list of sofas I’ve owned.
