Jonny McCambridge: Did music really end around 1995?

As soon as the regulations permitted it, my family bubbled with that of my wife’s brother and sister-in-law. This meant that my son, while denied the social enrichment of school and play facilities, was able to occasionally meet and have fun with his cousins.

What started as a long-deprived opportunity to enjoy the company of loved ones, soon developed into a routine. On Saturday evenings one family travelled to the home of the other, the children played excitedly together while the grown-ups enjoyed a glass of wine or beer and a takeaway meal.

After that we relaxed on the sofa while the kids watched a film or played video games in the next room.

It was in these moments of relaxation that a habit developed which is now so familiar that I cannot remember how it began, or what I did on Saturday nights before. In turn, each of the adults took the remote control and instructed Alexa to play their chosen song. The evenings passed easily in this way, with a medley of musical tastes forming the backdrop to laughs and shared anecdotes.

The tenacity of the habit is such that even now, when the restrictions have loosened and we can do more things, we still almost always find ourselves in one house or the other on Saturday nights passing the little black remote control around and playing our songs. There have been plenty of difficult days in the last couple of years, but these moments have been treasured.

None of which is to suggest that the game is perfect. The relaxed social environment and the addition of alcohol ensure that there is often so much chatter that the music is drowned out.

My many suggestions on how to formalise the rules and improve the efficiency of the game remain unfulfilled. My entirely earnest proposition that we should erect a whiteboard to record song choices and avoid duplication, was laughed at (I have heard ‘Raise More Glass’ by Pink so many times that I now make sure that I time my toilet break to coincide with when it plays).

Similarly, my recommendations that a stopwatch should be introduced to make sure participants take no more than 30 seconds on their song choice, or even better, they are submitted in writing in advance, have been met equally unsympathetically. In my utopia, all of the songs would be chosen by me and everyone else would listen in respectful silence; but when other people are involved, I am prepared to give and take a little.

Being a middle-aged man, the majority of my song choices are predictable. There is a fair amount of Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, a smattering of Dire Straits and The Housemartins and a dose of Neil Young and The Waterboys.

Occasionally, I will go a bit more alternative and indulge in some Richard Thompson, Midnight Oil, Billy Bragg or Eric Bogle. To be even more obscure I might introduce some Jackie Leven or Andy White. My mind is sadly wired to think there is credibility in finding a song that nobody else has heard of.

Sometimes, just to really annoy everyone, I even select a classical piece.

As I have played this game over the months, and listened to my family’s musical choices, a gradual realisation has spread across me. I know absolutely nothing about contemporary songs or artists. For me, music ended somewhere late in the last millennium, around the time when Oasis and Blur were locked in battle and Britpop ruled the charts.

This is not to suggest that I am entirely unaware of modern musicians, I’ve heard of Ned Shearer, Edel and Manye Vest. Nor, is this to be interpreted as an old person’s lament that all young people’s music is rubbish. I have no argument that music now is inferior to how it used to be; rather the point is my absolute ignorance of it.

Lately I have been wondering why this should be so. I am not aware of any particular point when I decided to pull up the drawbridge and stop accepting requests. Perhaps there was an unconscious decision at some point 25 years ago when my brain simply decided that it had had enough, had reached saturation point in terms of artistic acceptance.

Maybe it is just a natural part of growing older, that as fashions and trends change, we all get mentally stuck, become old people yearning for the sounds that we associate with a time when we were young, ambitious and when the world still seemed full of promise. I don’t know.

Then I thought about it some more. I used to have a few vinyl records and a bedroom full of cassette tapes (the majority of which were blank tapes which I had recorded albums onto). When CDs were introduced, I gamely tried to keep up, buying a new stereo and spending money modernising my album collection.

After the demise of CDs, I’m not sure I ever really understood the process of collecting music again. It became something that people had on their phones through apps which I had heard of but knew nothing about. Top of the Pops was gone, and I never owned an iPod or an Mp3 player. Sales were replaced by streams and downloads. Perhaps, for me, music was the main victim of a world which was changing faster than I could understand. Armed with my array of uncertain thoughts and conclusions, I approached my wife. I communicated my views on our Alexa game, how it could be improved, how it had made me realise there was a gaping hole in my musical knowledge, how I feared my mind was still stuck somewhere back in the last millennium, how much I missed Top of the Pops and the old blank cassette tapes, how I have never downloaded or streamed a piece of music in my life, how I really, really wish she wouldn’t pick Raise Your Glass by Pink again.

She stared hard at me. ‘It’s just a game. Maybe you’re thinking too much about it.’

Perhaps she is right.