Milk teeth

Remembering first records and wines

6th July 2002 (probably)

I would have been eight years old. Back when the tooth fairy was my biggest benefactor, sponsoring an over-dependence on Campinos. A pound coin gained from a molar lost. It was the summer and two months of fannying around in the local park lay ahead, not allowing the scabs on my knees to heal. Still, there was always time for a weekly food shop.

I held the coin tightly in my fist as we approached the automatic sliding doors of Tesco. I bolted from my parents, hurrying down the aisles towards the back of the supermarket where the CDs and DVDs were kept. Growing up, this was always the most exciting part of the outing. I was too young to care about nonperishables, nor was I old enough to worry about comparing the £/kg on various brands of fat free greek yoghurt. This was another world. A section of the supermarket that made you feel almost guilty for venturing towards. The non-essentials. Glamorous faces lined up in a Who’s Who? of new releases: Nelly, Atomic Kitten, Gareth Gates. But I wasn’t there for these pretenders. They weren’t worth a mouth full of milk teeth. My heart was set on one single and one single only.

No sooner was I relinquishing my hard-earned cash than I was rushing into the living room towards the CD player. The plastic case like an oyster shell ready to be shucked. I prised it open with my fingernails as the machine stuck out its greedy tongue. Down the hatch. Shouting began to leak from the speakers. Can’t stop, can’t stop the beat… suddenly the song burst into life…

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Memories from our childhood are notoriously unreliable. In truth, I’m not sure whether the first single I ever bought was from Tesco or Woolworths. Or that it even cost a pound. Sometimes we short-circuit our memories, finding anything with which we can hot-wire our brains. An old photograph, an eyewitness account or, in this instance, a pop song.

Music is powerful. Each beat, each snip of melody acts as a sonic breadcrumb that allows us to retrace our steps on our journey back home. Whenever I hear Junior Senior’s Move Your Feet, I’m transported back to that summer. A time of youthful innocence when I took no notice of the B-side’s title (Chicks and Dicks). A time when my eldest sister could tell you the track listing of each and every one of the Now That’s What I Call Music! albums. Chronologically.

When we talk about our first records, it’s often with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. These songs aren’t necessarily reflective of our current tastes, existing in an alternate reality, though they still hold a special place in our hearts. Junior Senior have barely been a feature in my life for the last twenty-two years, however, upon hearing Move Your Feet, I’m compelled to do exactly that. The way the bassline in the chorus seems to fidget like a jumping spider, the flourishing fanfare from the synthesised brass and, above all, Jesper Mortensen doing his best Michael Jackson impression. My body is 60% water and, as much as I’d like to believe that the rest is made up of The Beatles’ discography, the Danish pop duo are very much a part of who I am.

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In contrast, recalling the first wine I ever purchased comes with much less pride and a lot more embarrassment. Contrary to most ‘Meet the Team’ profiles on the websites of fine wine merchants, my first wine experience wasn’t a bottle of 1982 Lafite during the opening test at Lords. It was a £3.99 bottle of either Sainsbury’s House White or Red at the tail end of fresher’s week. Move Your Feet spoke (and still speaks to) an innate love for funky grooves and catchy melodies. The supermarket plonk however only revives a prehistoric belief that wine made me feel a different kind of insobriety to John Smith’s (as well as decreased bloating and a prolonged breaking of the seal).

Listening to Junior Senior is like popping a vitamin of nourishing nostalgia. It allows me to time-travel back to the good old days with the click of a play button. Recollections of the wines not so much. Perhaps it’s a blessing that I can’t revisit the exact bottle of wine, especially considering Matt Walls’ somewhat unenthusiastic review. Two grim ghosts, which still haunt the archives:

NV Sainsbury’s White Wine | Musky peach, and an unpleasant spicy note, a kind of fake oak smell. Some fruit on the palate, but lifeless and sullen. 74 points, poor value.

NV Sainsbury’s Red Wine | The faint aroma of spicy red fruit given off still manages to be aggressive. Mean and short, with little on the finish but acid and scratchy tannin. Moody. 74 points, poor value.

“Lifeless and sullen.” “Mean and short.” I’ve been called worse things in my lifetime. It’s true that the first wine doesn’t invoke the same happy memories that Junior Senior do (the toxins have long been flushed from my system). However, it was an introductory lesson, representing the beginning of my own wine education, whether I knew it at the time or not. Buried deep in my taste memory, it has subtly given shape to a standard by which I judge every glass of wine, and my idea of what a good bottle should taste like.

Now, I can appreciate the artistry of more complex expressions - whether we’re talking about David Axelrod or an Amontillado Sherry - but my tastes in both music and wine come from far less classy beginnings. We have a tendency to mythologise our first experiences of new things, but our tastes are always evolving. Having said that, a flash of familiarity can take us back to a place and time long since lost to us.

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Music-evoked autobiographical memory or, in plain English, the idea that personal experiences can be triggered by music, is nothing new to us. Just as scent and recollection are intertwined. While the first wine may not be worth going back to on a basic taste level, our first records are somehow different. They move us in ways that even our go-to artists wouldn’t be able to. They become more than just a song, more than just a groove.

On the face of it, Move Your Feet is a song of pure joy. It extols the virtues of dancing in any which way you see fit. It champions music and dance’s powers of unification. For me, it’s the keyring which prevents the memories of the summer of 2002 from getting lost. It’s the purple-coloured hyper-link to my formative years as a music-lover. It’s even the reason that this song by Nicki Minaj stirs something inside of me twenty-two years later.