One of life's mysteries has been solved.
Approximately 28 years ago a small fragment of song got stuck in my head. It has run around up there, appearing from time to time, ever since. I have made many attempts to hunt it down, all fruitless. All I had was the vocal line "press the button, hear the sound, elevator up and down", and a sense that the song was in the style, loosely, of Plastic Bertrand.
A few months ago I visited a work colleague's house for lunch. Music was playing. It was another song I hadn't heard in years: "I Like 'Lectric Motors" (you can -- and should -- watch it here), by someone called Patrick D Martin. Last night, while on the trail of Shanghai Au Go Go and other Melbourne early-eighties synth nostalgia, I stumbled upon this page, which was offering to share with me a mini-album by Patrick D Martin (thanks, pal). What the heck, I thought to myself. It's probably all rubbish apart from "'Lectric Motors", but you never know. (It's the thrill of the chase, don't you know.)
So today I listened to it. I got to a song called "Police Paranoia" and thought, that's funny, I could swear I have heard this before. I got to the next song, "Press The Button", and I realised, almost instantly, that this was the song that has eluded me for all these years: "press the button, hear the sound, elevator up and down".
And you know how you wait so long for something, building up expectations in your head that are inevitably dashed on finally getting it? Not this time. It is exactly how I remembered it.
What's weird though (aside from the back cover photo, which in its own way is kinda beyond weird) is that if you had asked me at any time before this year who Patrick D Martin was, I would have said I had absolutely no idea, and yet three of the seven songs on this record -- a record I had no knowledge of until last night -- I have had sitting in my head for almost 30 years. I assume that what happened was that these three songs were, at one stage, on high rotation on 2JJ, in those halcyon days when I spent as many of my waking hours as I could tuning in to the tenuous radio signals that made the journey all the way from Sydney to Fish Creek (weather conditions permitting), fading in and out such that more often than not you weren't able to catch the announcer telling you what he had been playing (or, if it was Mac Cocker, which it often was, you probably couldn't understand what he was saying even if the signal was clear enough to hear it). Which would explain why I may never until 2010 have heard the words "Patrick D Martin", even though his music has played a disproportionately large part in my life.
Today has been a good day.
