A strange thing happened last week. I found myself tearing up on the news Daryl Braithwaite was calling time on his live music career.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

It wasn't the news itself - at 77 and facing health issues, bowing out while sad was not unexpected. No, it was the song that accompanied the news, which triggered a wave of unexpected lump-in-the-throat nostalgia.

Weird because I hadn't paid much attention at all to Daryl Braithwaite or his cover of The Horses when it rocketed up the charts in 1990. And I don't recall ever seeing the cheesy video that accompanied it. Yet somehow the song and the video were last week deeply moving, tapping into a vein of memory I didn't know existed.

Curious, I looked into why old music - even if not that familiar - can raise tears decades after it was on high rotation and despite the fact I hardly listened to it when it was. At least I wasn't aware I was listening to it.

The answer lies in the brain's ability to store memory and music's knack of triggering it. The hippocampus is our emotional data centre. It's where memory is formed, stored and retrieved. The amygdala links specific memories to emotions. The music itself acts like a search prompt, which retrieves the memory. The emotion The Horses elicited in me was happy and sad at the same time.

So what was going on back in 1990 when the song became such a hit? It was a time of great turmoil. The Berlin Wall had fallen the year before. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Apartheid was being dismantled in South Africa. All very hopeful.

On the flipside, Iraq had invaded Kuwait, the US invaded Panama, and ethnic trouble was brewing in the former Yugoslavia. Oh, and interest rates had peaked at 17.5 per cent and Australia was in in the depths of the "recession we had to have". Unemployment hovered just over 6 per cent, reaching 8.2 per cent by year's end.

If The Horses was playing in the background during all this, there's little wonder it triggered such mixed emotions in me when it got a fresh flogging last week.

Of course, The Horses........

© Canberra Times