Curiosities about the passage of time ... interesting discussion in the staff room!

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

Colleagues and I were chatting about Murder on the Dancefloor being No 2 in the charts following the film Saltburn (that I haven't seen) and remarking how shocked we were that it was 22 years ago that it was No 2 for the first time. I remember it like it was yesterday, I was a student and I liked the song then and I still do now.

One of our team is considering retirement this year, she is 66 in the summer and can get her state pension! She remembers being at the youth club in the 1970s and Rock around the Clock/Bill Haley being in the charts, and the re-release of that being actually newer than MOTDF is now (I think there were 19 years' difference). Yet she said it seemed like it was from another world, which of course it was, and it was history to her. It is to me, now.

It got us thinking about how time passes and how distorted our views are. I wondered why this was. I saw Sophie Ellis Bextor live last year, I've lived through her career and songs, I'm a similar age, her music is still current and fresh and it's part of our culture through the Kitchen Disco. Yet Bill Haley isn't, and wasn't for my 66 year old colleague either. Bill Haley seemed ancient to her then but a quick look on Google revealed he was 4 years older than SEB!

I'd love to see what you think about this weird distortion of time!

The Lives She Left Behind is the sequel to Ferney - by James Long, Google tells me.

No, I remember it being in the charts in the 70’s. I’m nearly sure it was TOTP, showing Bill Haley singing it the year it was first released.

I remember the first hit Sophie Ellis Bextor had with Groovejet. It was the soundtrack to our holiday in Oban in 2000. Sometimes a particular song and holiday link up Pharell Williams Happy was also one such much later on.

The passing of time thing is pertinent to me most when I think of songs like the Oban holiday one being 20 odd years ago and then track back and realise 1980 - the year I finished sixth form - was 20 years before that time.

20 years back from 1980 is 1960 - now that really is a long time ago.

Oh, you've just jogged my memoryv@Almahsrt, we had a bombsite near my Primary
school. - we called it "The Wasties"!?!

This thread is fascinating, thanks, ImJustMadAboutSaffron

Blarn · Today 10:32

I listen to the 90s chart show on Absolute radio on Sunday afternoons. I like to see how many songs I can sing along to while cooking dinner!

Oh, thanks for the tip! It's on in our car, the only time I really listen to the radio.

It's made me think, all this music talk. My daughter is nearly 11 and she was complaining about old music and said, "I want something new, like Ace of Spades." She was quite surprised that it's from 1979! I suppose it must be what you're used to hearing.

Rock and Roll never seemed out of date to me, as there was loads played when I was little. I used to think I didn't know who Jimi Hendrix was, till I was 14 and sought it out - I thought "Blow me, my mam used to listen to all this."

Thanks for the reminder of James Long's Ferney.

Yes, I think several people missed that point! I often think the same way - we still had an air raid shelter in our primary school playground, I think it was demolished in the 80s. And the local mill had several waterlogged shelters which were finally filled in and turned into a car park in the 70s.
Music wise, the 90s still seem quite fresh and the last 20 years were only yesterday. I think that 1963 was the major discontinuity in music and the 50s rock & roll another era

We had an air-raid siren on the school site in the '80s. Don't know if it's still there. Will try and remember to look - going home to catch up with school friends.

There were also Nissen huts on the farm, and there are still the foundations from buildings put up by the Americans in the preparations for D-Day (not far from South Coast.) And an Anderson shelter near some of the farm cottages. That's probably still there, just in a more collapsed state (just as the 18th century ice house for the big house is still there.)

We used to live at RAF Biggin Hill - which was a key RAF base in WW2 and it got bombed heavily.

I used to walk in the woods and could see bomb craters.

These would have been made in 1940 - during the Battle of Britain. That would have been the equivalent of nowadays walking around where I live now and seeing bomb damage from around the mid 80s. (if where I lived had been bombed in the mid 80s).

Time is weird

This thread reminds me of something I read when Kate Bush recently got to number 1 with "Running up that hill." It went something like:
There was a re-release of Jackie Wilson's "Reet petite" around the same time as the original release of "RUTH". The time between the original release of "RUTH" (1980s) and the song reaching #1 (2020s) is more than the time between the original release of "RP" (1950s) and the re-release (1980s), yet "RP" sounded more old-fashioned in the 1980s than "RUTH" did in the 2020s.