all by myself

Music is extra emotive at Christmas. Particularly carols. And Bing Crosby. And Merry Xmas (War Is Over), which I find unbearably poignant even when things are relatively peaceful; I remember D and I once singing it at karaoke and then bursting into tears simultaneously; it can have that effect. And while the music can get grating, since we don’t really ‘do’ Christmas and thus have no need to trudge through shopping malls being bombarded with the same songs and melodies over and over again (I haven’t once heard Wham!’s Last Christmas yet this year only cover versions, and bizarrely, I am one of the few who never get tired of hearing that song – might have to dust off my Pudding Mix original 12″ and play it on Christmas Eve: as it always takes me back to being a fourteen year old in 1984 and just feeling woozy in the glow of Christingle) —- in terms of the earworm, so far the season has been benign.

But today I don’t want to write about Christmas music. I want to write about restaurant music (I do realize that complaining about such things is such a ‘First World Problem’ —but then so is raving and gagging about perfume).

I suppose the problem is that my extreme sensitivity to music in restaurants, cafes, bars etc, anywhere there is a soundtrack going on where you are eating and drinking and making merry (or just trying to read a book) sometimes makes me feel like I am the only one in the world who is actually in possession of auditory apparatus. Does no one else ever complain about this? Sometimes I imagine that I am the only one who even notices (an exception; I remember when I was in Florence with a pack of perfumisti for the opening of the Lush Perfume Library, and the very musical Ida Meister of Cafleurebon - an excellent opera singer, by the way, was with me in trying to get the groovy hotel staff to tone down and turn down the utterly inappropriate disco music they had chosen to dj us with over breakfast – who wants that when they have just woken up? It was unbearable ).

My hearing isn’t even that good, to be honest; I have had tinnitus for almost twenty years and hearing loss in my left ear of up to 40%, but I am still acutely receptive to music and noise and am finding that this is driving me away from establishments I might otherwise frequent far more frequently. Sometimes I really fancy eating one particular thing – after all, eating out in Japan is fantastic – but find that, knowing precisely what CD, or playlist on their computer they will be playing in advance makes me unable to stomach entering the premises. Particularly if the volume is too high (this I NEVER understand; I am club/dance lover, I like music L O UD -which is how I got tinnitus in the first place – when the music is the key point involved; we did all night house/techno for D’s birthday in Hamamatsu and I was practically making love to the speakers despite my affliction; the other night we were blasting out records with a new Bose speaker he has bought; a live album by Michel Polnareff made me feel as if the French singer were singing into my very soul); but surely background music in a restaurant or cafe is something different, no? On the Hamamatu, night in question, looking for somewhere to eat we had initially settled on one of those craft beer/organic hamburger type establishments, not entirely our thing but we were hungry and we had started out late, but sitting down, Enrique Iglesias’ Hero, which really isn’t one of my favourites, was playing so loud that despite the embarrassment of getting up and leaving when you have started talking to waiters, it would have been utterly unendurable for me to have sat there. I could hardly hear myself think, let alone peruse the menu. We had to go. I am just not going to be able to enjoy my dinner being blasted with shite.

Anyway. To ‘All By Myself’. Eric Carmen’s plaintive 70’s miserabilist heartbreaker (there was a lot of miserable music in the seventies, wasn’t there?) based on a piano piece by Rachmaninov is a personal melodramatic fave, at least every once every few years or so, and discovering a nice ‘Western Style’ restaurant in Kamakura that serves gratins and pasta and tuna melts, comfort food with delicious salads, I was happy and amused to hear it again. It had been a while. But not three times in one evening, the selection on loop (is this a strategy to drive out customers more quickly? Just stay for 40 minutes until the dreaded Melissa Manchester track (‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ demonically comes back on again? The first time we heard it we laughed at the campness of it all, even if the shrillness of the singer’s voice drills through the delicate side area of your head like a partial lobotomy, but surely this is not a song you want to keep hearing on multiple occasions (is the chef, listening to this MD (they have an MD player in there, an anachronism from the 90′) not. in fact, insane?(we have been to the restaurant three times now; it might not be possible for me again, even if on Tuesday night the volume was at least mercifully lower though I am not sure I can handle Melissa again.). For those of you who don’t know this song, do feel free to check it out below:

I mean I don’t hate it, particularly the soft seventies opening, but let’s face it, if you are near the speakers and trying to hear what the other person is saying while forking things into your mouth, this power ballad is taxing to the nerves to say the very least. You feel as if you need to start clapping when it is finished. To let the eaters just eat in peace, couldn’t they just play some nice quiet jazz? (strangely, the more Japanese the eatery, usually the more Western the music usually: a cheap place in Ofuna I like plays melancholy jazz ballads and Bill Evans type piano, not overtly on repeat either. You can sink into your seat for a while, get refills of oolong tea and lose yourself in a book or your phone like plenty of other people). The other night, conversely, we felt like something hot and comforting and went to a tonkatsu restaurant, excellent food, but where banal saccharine Japanese tv themes in major keys played seemingly by a robot corroded my enjoyment of the evening greatly, particularly when it seemed to all have gone back to the beginning (have these people never heard of playlists/ mixtapes? Last night we made/had dinner at home listening to a compilation a friend in New York had sent, meandering through all kinds of genres but still coherent, and at low volume; it was perfect; that way you can lost in the music and just forget it is there, even; to me,letting things just repeat over and over again suggests a severe lack of imagination and delicacy/thinking about the customer (and the staff: I think I get this from my mother, to be honest. She used to work at a department store for Austin Reed, and was driven to utter distraction by Christmas music that would start at the beginning of November or earlier, practically ready to shoot the speakers out).

For my birthday this year, we went to Hakone Yumoto, a hotspring town an hour or so away, and came across a very bohemian and bizarre cafe restaurant right up our street, full of strange statuary and paintings, the kind of cavernous place you could lounge for hours sipping cafe au laits; the soundtrack, this time, classical, which suited the ambience perfectly…….but then there are only so many times you want to listen to Mozart’s Turkish March or even my beloved Debussy; the first time hearing my signature piano piece Clair De Lune made me sentimental and nostalgic, for when I played it as a child; the third time….time to get the bill.

The occasion that truly took the biscuit though was this. Many years ago we had discovered a very plush Croatian restaurant in the posh backstreets of Nihombashi near the gilded flagship Mitsukoshi department store, all red velvet Europeana and beef stews and dill and the like: fancy wine and an enjoyably retro atmosphere. it was not cheap, but it was one of those impromptu ooh let’s try here where you have food you have never tasted before, a new ambience. The wine was good.And the Croatian folk music they were playing was perfect for the setting. At first, we just sank into our seats and enjoyed the view. Perhaps a 35 or 40 minute CD. Exotic. Different. And unfamiliar music is of course less immediately grating than a famous song you know and can’t abide, or even one you do like, but just don’t want to keep hearing over and over again. But repeated music is repeated music nevertheless, and after about three spins of the exact same list of ditties I eventually asked the seasoned waiter politely if he could possibly play anything else.

“I’m sorry, sir. We only have this one CD in the restaurant.”

“.,…….,,……?!!!”

I asked him how long the restaurant had been in operation.

“About thirty three years, sir.”

Thirty three years of the same CD.

IS THIS JUST ME ?