It’s late at night and I’m sitting up in bed. The torchlight on my phone casts shadows on the rolling hills of the duvet before me. The room is quiet but for the insistent ticking of my bedside alarm clock and the occasional whistling inhalation of my wife sleeping beside me.
Without warning, a distant melody begins to play. It’s very muffled, as if broadcast from somewhere downstairs, or from the next-door neighbour’s house. But this sound is coming from inside my head, not outside it.
Still, I recognise it as a real, pre-existing piece of music, and not some slice of artistic inspiration visited upon me – a man who is unable to compose music or play an instrument.
From what I can make out, the tune is catchy and maybe slightly playful. For a moment, I wonder if it’s from the Britpop years. Perhaps it’s something from the Manics’ Imperial phase?
Like a wildlife photographer hurrying to bring their subject into focus, I concentrate on retaining a sliver of the tune, hoping not to lose my quarry in the undergrowth.
For a moment, I misidentify an inflection point in the melody as the ‘I know, I know, I know’ refrain from The Fall’s 1999 single ‘Touch Sensitive’. (That rare Fall composition deemed marketable enough to be used in a car ad.)
But it definitely isn’t Mark E Smith growling away. I quickly discard this false lead, and focus on increasing the volume and clarity.
The reveal is almost too good to be true: ‘It’s the Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops.
Putting aside the heavy irony of that title, the song’s appearance feels truly random. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t had the opportunity to hear it today – certainly not in the past few hours – and I definitely haven’t thought about the song for some years.
But, on a personal level, I was right to locate the song during the CDs-on-the-kitchen-stereo era of the late 90s: I first encountered it on The Ultimate Collection: Four Tops.
The borderline comical melodrama of the group’s songbook made an impression on me, from their titles (‘7-Rooms of Gloom,’ ‘Sad Souvenirs,’ ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’) to their delivery (Levi Stubbs’ plaintive cries of “Bernadette!”). ‘It’s the Same Old Song’ was my favourite new-to-me track on the 1997 compilation.
Apparently, the song was the result of the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team – who were short on inspiration and working to a typically draconian deadline – simply reversing the chord changes of the group’s recent number one, ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)’.
This fact makes me even more curious about why The Fall’s single came briefly to mind during my short investigation. Perhaps there’s a similar chord progression somewhere in there. Or maybe ‘Touch Sensitive’ described a kind of negative space that formed in my mind around the Four Tops’ song – an optical illusion that brought the shapes into sharper focus.
I turn off my torchlight and put my head on the pillow. This should be a fraught moment: one feature of my inveterate sleeplessness is a susceptibility to nagging earworms.
Yet there’s a final irony. Having taken up residence in my mind seemingly out of the blue, this insanely catchy song – itself about the perils of catchy songs – does not metastasize and go on to torment me for the rest of the night. I drift off without being menaced by Motown melancholia.
It might be the same old song, but it’s nice to think that some things can change.
