WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 14

The Radio in My Head

On the morning of 1 July 2024, I became conscious somewhere in the middle of I Feel a Song (In My Heart) (1974 – Gladys Knight & the Pips – Buddha Records). I hadn’t put it on, I hadn’t been dreaming about it as far as I could remember, and I certainly hadn’t made a conscious decision that this was the appropriate musical accompaniment to the beginning of a new financial year. I was still lying in bed with the CPAP machine attached to me, the birds outside the window providing the only serious competition, and somewhere inside my head an old 45 had apparently been placed on a turntable before I had even woken up.

It wasn’t necessarily playing from the beginning either. That is one of the peculiarities of the radio in my head: whoever operates the turntable doesn’t seem particularly concerned about where the needle lands. Sometimes I get the opening bars, sometimes the middle and sometimes something towards the end, while on this occasion the words I feel a song in my heart had arrived as though I had joined the broadcast halfway through. A particular section might then repeat, even after the song has theoretically finished, rather like somebody lifting the needle and dropping it back into the same groove.

There was nothing particularly prophetic about the selection. I Feel a Song (In My Heart) wasn’t announcing anything, warning me about anything or providing a musical diagnosis of my state of mind. It was simply the record that happened to be playing when consciousness clocked on for work.

The date itself had significance for an entirely different reason. My oldest son, Justin, had given me a financial-year diary for Christmas, and I had decided that I might use it to record how I was feeling each day. I was trying to understand some of what happened inside my head, and there was something reassuringly accountant-like about starting the exercise on 1 July rather than 1 January, even if that hadn’t necessarily been Justin’s intention when he bought the bloody thing.

I still have the diary. It is a large A4-sized book, tattered around the edges now and sitting among the clutter on my desk despite the financial year printed on its cover having long since ceased to be of any practical relevance. Inside are notes from a period when I began trying to keep my life in short lines of prose, putting down enough of each day to remind myself what had happened and, more importantly, how I had experienced it.

Those notes eventually became part of A Year in My Shoes, although I didn’t sit down on that first morning thinking I was beginning another book. I had a diary, a pen, a date and a brain I was trying to understand, and the first piece of incidental information available to me was that I Feel a Song (In My Heart) was playing inside it. Had I started the exercise on 2 July, the song could have been completely different and the story would otherwise have been much the same.

That is the thing about my radio. It is nearly always on.

As long as I can remember, there have been songs in my head. I don’t mean that I occasionally get an earworm after hearing something on the radio and spend the next three hours trying to get rid of it, although that happens as well. I mean there seems to be a continuing soundtrack running somewhere behind everything else, and most mornings I don’t so much turn it on as become conscious of the fact that it has apparently been broadcasting without me.

There are very few mornings when I wake without something playing. Before I have properly considered what sort of day it is, before I have climbed out of bed and before I have necessarily thought about anything more intellectually demanding than removing the CPAP mask, the music is already there. Other than the shrill contribution from the birds outside the window, it can occupy virtually all the auditory input to my brain in those first moments.

The obvious temptation in a book about depression would be to make more of that than the evidence supports. It would be wonderfully convenient if the radio operated as some sort of advance warning system for the Black Dog, choosing a dirge on the mornings when the bastard was approaching and something gloriously upbeat whenever the emotional forecast called for sunshine. I could then claim that my subconscious knows how I am feeling before Logical Jeff has even opened the day’s accounts.

Unfortunately, my internal disc jockey has declined to cooperate with the literary requirements of this book. There is no evidence that he gives the slightest damn about my emotional condition when selecting the morning’s entertainment, and after listening to him for most of my life I haven’t discovered anything resembling a programming policy.

Rainy Days and Mondays might be playing when I am down, but that doesn’t mean it arrived because I was down. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (1974 – from the Ablum Not Fragile – Mercury Records) could turn up on exactly the same morning and be annoying, inspiring, amusing or simply there, depending upon what else was going on. If there is an algorithm operating behind the selections, nobody has given the accountant access to it.

That is probably worth saying because I have spent a fair amount of my life looking for cause and effect. Accounting encourages that habit because numbers are supposed to come from somewhere, and when they don’t reconcile you keep digging until you discover why. Depression has been considerably less cooperative, and apparently so is the music department.

Mostly the internal DJ raids the back catalogue. The songs are things I grew up with, lived with or enjoyed somewhere along the way, which gives him a fairly substantial library from which to choose. Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so there is no shortage of old 45s available for somebody inside my skull to pull from the shelf.

Occasionally he becomes more adventurous and gives me a riff I can’t identify. That is particularly frustrating because I know the bloody thing is in there somewhere, otherwise it is difficult to explain why my brain apparently knows enough of it to keep playing it, but I can’t attach a title or artist to it. I recognise something about it, perhaps a few notes, a rhythm or the shape of a chorus, yet the piece of information that would actually close the file remains stubbornly unavailable.

The frustration doesn’t send the emotional pendulum in either direction, and I don’t regard it as another warning that the Black Dog is approaching. It simply creates another problem to be solved, which is probably the last thing a brain like mine needs because unresolved problems have a habit of demanding attention. I start searching the internal filing cabinet, trying different songs against the riff, reaching for an artist, a decade, a movie, a place or anything else that might provide the missing connection.

Sometimes I can almost get there. The answer seems to sit just beyond reach, close enough for me to know that I know it but far enough away to refuse to identify itself, which is a particularly irritating form of mental bureaucracy. The internal radio has located the record, removed it from the archive and put it on the turntable, while the filing department refuses to tell me what is written on the label.

Eventually I either solve it or something else takes over and the problem disappears back into the pile. There is no great emotional consequence if I fail, just another little piece of unfinished business sitting somewhere in my head, waiting for the moment when the title suddenly arrives hours later and I wonder why the hell I couldn’t remember it in the first place.

There doesn’t seem to be a rule about where a song begins either. Some start at the beginning, others arrive halfway through and others seem to begin somewhere towards the end, while particular passages can repeat themselves for no reason I have ever been able to establish. The experience isn’t of me deliberately singing the song to myself; it is closer to somebody putting an old 45 on a turntable, lowering the needle and allowing whatever is in the groove to take over.

Sometimes the same record hangs around for quite a while. It may disappear while I am concentrating on something else and then return later in the day, or another song may take its place without anybody announcing that we have moved into the next hour of programming. I don’t find that particularly annoying, even when there are repeats, because I generally enjoy the music and have lived with the arrangement for too long to regard repetition as a serious breach of broadcasting standards.

There are times when I consciously change the station. It can be done, although it isn’t as simple as reaching for a dial and moving from FM to AM, and sometimes the first attempt works better than others. Once I manage to replace the song in my head, the original generally doesn’t come marching back demanding its timeslot, so apparently I possess some programming authority even if I don’t have complete control of the station.

External music can take over more easily. In the car I can listen to the local radio station, and on longer trips my Spotify playlists can occupy me sufficiently that the internal station effectively gives way to the one coming through the speakers. I will bop along with whatever is playing and, when I leave the car or the radio stops, sometimes discover that the bopping has continued and the song has simply transferred from the speakers back into my head.

That makes it difficult for me to distinguish neatly between an ordinary earworm and the radio I am describing. The radio is always there in one form or another, so asking when a song becomes stuck in my head assumes there was an empty space before it arrived. In my case there was probably another song occupying the space five minutes earlier.

Some selections are more ridiculous than others, and Mah Nà Mah Nà (1976 – The Muppet Show) deserves a special place in the broadcasting hall of fame. Once that thing gets into your head it can apparently take up permanent residency until, for reasons equally unexplained, it suddenly doesn’t. There are no profound lyrics to contemplate because there are barely any lyrics at all, which is perhaps one reason it is so spectacularly effective at occupying mental real estate.

For me it is the Muppets’ version that comes with it, because the song isn’t merely auditory. I can see Animal bouncing around in the background while the others try to maintain the riff, and Animal, being Animal, decides there are far more interesting places he could take the performance. Off he goes on his own excursion until the others effectively drag him back to where the song was supposed to be.

There is something in that image that resonates rather strongly with me. I have spent much of my life disappearing down side roads involving businesses, ideas, books, projects, fishing trips and whatever other fascinating possibility happened to present itself, only to discover eventually that there was still a basic riff playing somewhere and perhaps I ought to return to it. I don’t want to torture the analogy until Animal requires psychiatric assistance of his own, but I understand the attraction of wandering away from the prescribed tune.

The absurdity of Mah Nà Mah Nà is also useful whenever I become tempted to treat the radio as something more profound than it may actually be. If every song were meaningful, then somewhere there would need to be a fairly impressive psychological explanation for why my subconscious occasionally decides that what the moment requires is Mah Nà Mah Nà. Sometimes perhaps a song is simply a song, and sometimes my internal DJ has decided that cheerful nonsense syllables are what we are having whether anybody ordered them or not.

That doesn’t mean music cannot carry enormous emotional weight for me. It plainly can, and some songs have accumulated memories so thoroughly that it is almost impossible to separate the music from the people, places and periods of my life attached to it. The important distinction is that the emotional meaning of a song and the reason it happens to appear on the internal radio are not necessarily the same thing.

A Daisy a Day (1973 – Jud Strunk – MGM Records) is a good example because that song was chosen rather than randomly supplied. A version of it appeared on the first album I ever purchased, and it stayed with me because there was something in the story that appealed to me long before I had any reason to imagine myself as the older man within it. Years later, when Robyn and I were married, it seemed to say something appropriate about what I wanted marriage to mean.

There is a quality to it that reminds me now of the ending of Up (2009 – Disney Pictures), where a lifetime together can somehow be contained in ordinary moments rather than grand declarations. That may be imposing a later film over an earlier memory, but the feeling is similar: the importance lies in continuing to choose somebody through all the days that come after the ceremony rather than merely making an impressive declaration on the day itself.

A Daisy a Day is actually a song about the other end of that journey. It tells its story from the perspective of a relationship that has already travelled through the years, with age and eventually loss sitting at the end of something that began much earlier. I wasn’t singing about an ending on our wedding day, of course, because ours was supposed to be the beginning. Perhaps what attracted me to it was the suggestion that this beginning might become that sort of journey, that the two people standing there surrounded by family and friends might one day be able to look backwards across decades rather than merely forwards into them.

To everybody watching, I imagine it looked rather pretty. There was the groom singing to his bride, a daisy painted by my son to accompany the song, Robyn crying and plenty of the women around the reception apparently deciding they might as well join her. If somebody had taken only that scene and frozen it in time, it would have made a perfectly respectable advertisement for romance: the song, the painting, the bride, the groom and an implied promise that we intended to grow old together.

What nobody in that room could have known was everything that would eventually travel with us. They couldn’t have seen the businesses that would succeed or fail, the children growing up, financial disasters, arguments, laughter, moves, worries, victories, disappointments and all the ordinary rubbish that accumulates when two people actually attempt to do what romantic songs dispose of in three or four minutes. More particularly, they could not have seen the Black Dog that would sometimes travel with us, because for much of the journey I became extremely good at making sure there was very little for anybody outside the relationship to see.

That is one of the uncomfortable things about looking backwards from here. A relationship can look perfectly good from the outside because, in many respects, it genuinely is good, while still containing things that remain almost completely invisible to everybody else. Depression didn’t make our marriage some sort of elaborate pretence, nor was the happiness people saw at our wedding merely a façade waiting to collapse. Both things could be true at once: there could be enormous love and plenty of happiness in the foreground while something much darker remained remarkably well hidden in the background.

I became good at hiding it professionally and, in many ways, I became good at hiding it socially as well. The people who saw us together could see the jokes, the family, the trips, the things we built and the life we accumulated, without necessarily seeing what sometimes happened after the audience had gone home. Even Robyn, who was obviously far closer to it than anybody else, could only see what I allowed to escape or what became too large for me to conceal.

Perhaps that gives A Daisy a Day a different resonance for me now. The young bloke singing it wasn’t promising that the journey would be pretty; he couldn’t possibly have known enough about marriage or life to make such a promise. He was really hoping there would be a journey at all, one long enough for two people eventually to look back upon all the ordinary days between the beginning and the end and realise they had travelled them together.

We have certainly travelled a fair few of them since then, and the photograph from any particular day would never tell the whole story. Some of what travelled with us was beautiful, some of it was bloody difficult and some of it remained so well hidden that people standing only a few metres away would have had no idea it was there, but the journey itself was exactly what I had hoped that song might represent.

I simply wanted to do something different for Robyn and something particularly special, so I sang A Daisy a Day to her at our wedding reception. This is noteworthy in itself because, despite having an apparently inexhaustible musical service operating inside my skull, I don’t make a habit of singing to my wife. In fact, that is the only occasion I can remember doing it.

Justin had also created a painting of a daisy that we presented to her. The combination apparently worked rather better than I might have expected, because Robyn cried and so did the women around the reception area, leaving me with the unusual distinction of having reduced a substantial number of women to tears and being reasonably confident on that occasion that I had done something right.

That song therefore carries meaning whenever I hear it, but that doesn’t mean that if I wake with A Daisy a Day playing tomorrow morning there must be some subconscious message concerning Robyn, marriage, ageing or the passage of time. It may mean nothing more complicated than that the DJ found the record and put it on. I can supply the memories afterwards without pretending they caused the selection in the first place.

There are also times when the radio becomes quiet. During periods when I push everything away, silence can occupy the room and for a while there may be nothing demanding my attention, musical or otherwise. I am wary of making too much of that because silence isn’t automatically depression any more than You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet is automatically happiness.

More often than not, the radio eventually comes back. There is no fanfare when broadcasting resumes and no station identification announcing that normal programming has returned. At some point I simply notice that another song is there, and life continues with its soundtrack restored.

Perhaps that is why the radio belongs in a book about depression even though I don’t regard it as a product of depression. One of the dangers of writing about the Black Dog is that eventually you can begin handing him ownership of everything that happened in your life simply because he happened to be somewhere in the vicinity. Every bad decision becomes depression, every silence becomes depression, every angry moment becomes depression and every sad song becomes another piece of supporting evidence.

My life hasn’t worked that neatly. Depression has existed inside a life that also contained Robyn, the boys, businesses, clients, golf, fishing, woodworking, ridiculous ideas, successes, failures, laughter and a considerable amount of music. Some of those things have helped when the darkness arrived and some have occasionally been pushed aside by it, but they didn’t come into existence because I was depressed.

The radio is simply one of those things. It was there when I was younger, it has been there through the businesses and the bankruptcies, through raising children and becoming a grandfather, through good days and bad ones, and through periods when I probably gave very little conscious thought to the fact that it was there at all. Depression doesn’t get retrospective ownership merely because I am now writing a book about it.

I would still like to know where the playlist comes from. Logical Jeff would prefer a system, because there ought to be some reason why one particular record is pulled from decades of accumulated music at one particular moment while thousands of others remain on the shelf. There may well be a perfectly sensible explanation for it, but I have no inkling what that explanation might be and no evidence that the selections correspond to the peaks and troughs of my emotional life.

That leaves me with a radio station I apparently own but don’t entirely control, broadcasting from a studio I can’t find, using a playlist I didn’t prepare. I can sometimes change the station, external music can overwhelm it and occasionally the whole operation goes quiet, but most of the time somebody eventually puts another 45 on the turntable and lowers the needle.

The old financial-year diary still sits among the clutter on my desk. Its edges are tattered now, its pages containing those short lines of prose from the period when I began deliberately recording the days and trying to understand what was happening inside them. What started as notes eventually became stories, and the stories became another attempt to make some sense of a life that has not always been particularly interested in making sense for me.

It has also become something I never intended it to be when Justin gave it to me: a documentary record of the war against the Black Dog. Not a history written after the war was won, with the battles neatly ordered and the victor able to explain where the turning point occurred, because I don’t believe there has been a final victory and I am no longer sure there ever will be. The diary records something much less tidy: good days, ordinary days, darker days, moments when I thought I understood what was happening and others when the bastard arrived without providing so much as a forwarding address for the reason why.

There are entries from battles I thought I had won only to discover later that winning one battle did not end the war. There are things that worked for a while, things that didn’t work at all and periods when I thought the enemy had retreated sufficiently far that perhaps I could stop watching the horizon. Then there are the pages that remind me why I never completely do, because one of the enduring lessons of this particular campaign is that absence and surrender are not necessarily the same thing.

I use the language of war carefully because I don’t spend every day fighting. That would give the Black Dog far too much importance and would make the rest of my life sound like little more than leave between battles, which it certainly hasn’t been. There have been marriages and children, grandchildren and businesses, fishing trips and golf games, woodworking and friendships, laughter and arguments, books written and ridiculous ideas pursued, all happening while this other contest occasionally demanded attention in the background.

Perhaps that is what makes the diary valuable to me now. It doesn’t document a war that consumed the whole country; it documents one that has sometimes flared while ordinary life continued all around it. There were days when the guns were loud, days when there was only the occasional shot in the distance and long periods when I could get on with everything else without paying much attention to the battlefield at all.

The war may never be won in the conventional sense, but it continues almost eternally, or at least for as long as I am here to participate in it. These days I know more about the terrain, recognise some of the enemy’s movements and have a better idea which defences are worth maintaining, but knowledge has never amounted to an unconditional surrender from the other side. Sometimes all that accumulated experience means I recognise the Black Dog earlier; sometimes I still discover that the bastard has been sitting there for a while before I notice him.

Somewhere near the beginning of that battered diary is the morning of 1 July 2024, with the CPAP still attached, the birds shrilling outside and I Feel a Song (In My Heart) already underway. The diary would go on documenting one part of the campaign, while the radio continued doing what it had apparently been doing for most of my life, entirely unconcerned by whether that particular day belonged to the war or everything else that surrounded it.

I still don’t know who selected that song or why, and after a lifetime of listening I am not convinced there was a why to discover. Tomorrow morning the war will still be unresolved, the battered diary will still be sitting among the clutter on my desk, and the DJ will probably have made another selection before I even open my eyes. As usual, I will be the last person at the station to find out what he has decided to play, and perhaps there is something reassuring in knowing that, whatever else is happening, the radio is still broadcasting.