Maeve Higgins

.... on music technology

. . . . on music technology

I LOVE MUSIC. I just really get music, you know? It’s like a language that nobody can teach but I can speak. I’m just lucky, I guess, that I happen to be one of those great people who is always in tune. Music is forever resonating around my being. I’d go so far as saying that sometimes, I think I actually might be music.

Lately, one particular composition has been swirling through me, insisting on being heard. Whole Again, the 2001 single from the cheeky English girl group Atomic Kitten.

With a melody as memorable as any of Mozart’s, lyrics to match Dylan at his opaque best and a message worthy of Simone de Beauvoir, it has lingered in my heart for years. I decided last Saturday that I simply had to hear it again.

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Easier said than done, I’m afraid. Despite repeated requests throughout the morning, Marian Finucane failed to play it.

I was at my wits’ end. I turned to my friend Ian and imagined aloud, dreamily, a world where it was possible to listen to any piece of music, whenever and wherever you want. Ian is the person I turn to for help when it comes to navigating the world through those smooth little bricks with screens on them. You know – the ones that control us. I don’t understand them, but he is a wizard.

He is usually patient with me, although that afternoon he pointed out that much of the technology that baffles me was designed with a range of diverse learners in mind.

People with all sorts of learning difficulties have positive user experiences while I, as yet undiagnosed with any sort of disability, sit by the device in mute wonder.

Ian went through some ideas he had for getting the song into my ears, but his concepts were too abstract, his language too weird. This is what I gleaned from his high falutin’ mumbo-jumbo; apparently I can “download” Whole Again to my “phone”.

Ummm, I doubt that Ian. My phone is pretty busy having its head turned by the latest fad that is “text messaging”. From what I gather, text messaging is basically writing a very short letter to someone and posting it to them through space.

Instead of a stamp you use “credit” and after you’ve sent it you sit near a window and wait for a reply.

Often, there is no reply. Then you bump into the recipient in Aldi and they won’t make eye contact with you. Instead, they make up stories about why they never wrote back to you. There was a typhoon they stammer. I got rickets, real bad rickets.

Oh, please. From time to time, we all tell fibs. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Even I, a principled woman, occasionally lie.

Yes, I’ve read The Corrections. Yes, I’m on the Pill. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that when someone goes to the trouble of writing you a miniature space letter, the least you can do is fax them back.

Figuring out a way to hear Whole Again occupied my every waking moment until a stunning cosmic intervention made it a real possibility. While fingering some curtain remnants in my local Age Action shop, I came across a copy of Now That’s What I Call Music! Vol. 48. Track one, disc one? “Baby you’re the one, you still turn me on, you can make me whole again.”

And you tell me there are no angels in my hair? The album cost €1.70. Steep, for sure, but I’m doing OK for myself. I bought it on the spot, didn’t even haggle the old man down.

Now all I needed was something to play it on. Enter the temple of goods/betting shop that is Argos of Jervis Street. I marched right in there and got myself a personal CD “Walkman”, or “Discman”. It is shaped like a CD, so there is no confusion.

I appreciate technology that looks straightforward, like toasted-sandwich makers, typewriters and looms. A Jack Russell could take one look at those machines and immediately tell you what they’re for.

The whole process only took me last Monday. That’s including the time it took to make a statement to the gardaí about a punch-up I witnessed in the pound shop.

I was in there buying batteries for the second time in one day. You see, I had mistakenly bought AAA ones instead of AA ones. Gas! Myself and the shop assistant had a good laugh about that as he plugged his bleeding nose with kitchen paper.

On Tuesday morning, I popped on the headphones (free with the Discman . . . no big deal), sat back and played that mother loud. Real loud. And quite tinny.

I must have listened to those girls sing their vacant little hearts out at least a half dozen times before the batteries ran out.

Everyone on that Cobh train stared at my Discman, they couldn’t keep their hungry eyes off it. I’ve got to tell you, that truly did make me feel whole again.

Róisín Ingle is away

In other news . . . I just got my ticket to see Billy Bragg and Andy Irvine celebrating Woody Guthrie’s centenary in Vicar Street on September 17th. Can’t wait