It goes without saying, that life and its memories can alter drastically when age, circumstance and alcohol get involved with the telling of its tales.
Happily, I, at the time of writing, only have 2 out of 3 of these, although that is due to the fact that it is still only 10am and the third is a tantalising few hours away. Turkey is a beautiful country; hot yes, politically unstable yes, but, overall it is beguiling and contradictory in its cultural diversity. Where I sit, honeymooning and poolside, mosque towers call to its flock 5 times a day while we happily while away hours under the nuclear torch we know as the Sun, ready for that first beer and another day of lazy self indulgence.
Hopefully, I can be forgiven for revealing where I am at the present, but it does indeed have relevance to these ramblings and their point! ‘Reggae’ is a great nickname for anyone, let alone a barman in Turkey, whose dreadlocks have definitely seen better days, but whose enthusiasm and obvious passion for music, especially of the Western kind, carries no limits.
A wooden stand behind his bar, proclaims by t-shirt, vinyl and poster, his obvious insatiable appetite for said music and each band is proudly displayed in a way that invokes many youthful memories of an old, long gone, record shop in Cornwall. Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones to name but a few, adorn his stand, each one an obvious treasure, each one loved as much as the next.
How glorious to spend time in a blisteringly hot Turkish bar, rifling through memory after memory and feeling a musical kinship that has no consideration for nationality or age. What a joy to see his childlike attempts at singing the lyrics, out loud and defiant yet beautifully wrong, choreographed with his job of keeping my glass full and cold and refilling a bowl full of nuts that I should have stopped nibbling on hours ago!
Music, in any form is truly a universal language and no matter where you are or who you are with, its power to dance with the senses are boundless and ingrained in our very souls, Turkish barman or ageing British tourist alike! It is the love of the sound, the rhythm and the melody that makes us one tribe, human.
Although I’m thinking Putin hasn’t a very good record collection as I’m pretty sure Lenin didn’t have much of a discography.
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I am a lover of all types of music, with each being a memory, good or bad and I also love to paint…with music my inspiration. I have lived all over the world, UK, Australia, Malaysia and the US to name a few. My work is food, my loves allow me to breathe…simple.
