In a couple of weeks time I'll be going to see The Prodigy play in Newcastle again. Yesterday my mate sent me a photo of the current set-list, which started me getting hyped for it, and this morning I had Climbatize stuck in my head. This set me on a wee nostalgic carpet-ride, back to summer 1997 and got me thinking of an album I did back then - my fourth ever - called Manufactured Beats, which was directly inspired by The Fat Of The Land. I had a very vivid recollection of being in my room, sat at my Amiga, making tunes on OctaMED: stuff like "Derelict" and "Chemical Calm". I remembered making the crappy "cover art" in Deluxe Paint III. I remembered a sense of how important my music was becoming to me at that time.
The trouble is, this powerful memory I was having was a false one. Demonstrably so. As I was thinking about it, it gradually occurred to me that the scene I was picturing in my mind was wrong. I was recalling being sat at a large corner desk, facing the wall with the window. But the time I was remembering was years before I got that desk. The actual desk I had that summer was a small white one I'd gotten as a bairn sometime around 1989/90, when I got my first computer - a Sinclair Spectrum 128k. By 1997, that desk was over by the wall adjoining the neighbours house. I was still sharing a room with my brother and there wasn't space for a bigger desk until he left home a few years later. Nothing I was "remembering" about that time was correct.
Now I know that memories are not any kind of actual sensory imprints. They are always reconstructions and rationalisations, which is true also of our vision generally. What we sense visually is not necessarily what we "see" - what our minds reconstruct. (Look up the famous "gorilla video" experiment which shows this.) I was already aware of this, but this experience struck me as a powerful example of this phenomena. It also struck me that after 30 years or more, I am really struggling to recall what my bedroom was actually like. There are certain facts I recall, like my brother having a hi-fi in our room, and I am able to sort of extrapolate certain memories from that, but such memories are less like genuine recollections and more like rationalisations. I know the desk was small and there's no way it could have had space on it for the Amiga, the mousemat, the portable TV and that big old 80s stereo system... and so I "remembered" that at some point, we put a longer board of MDF on top of it to make more desk-space. It has taken me some hours of recalling such fragments of data before I have been able to visualise what the desk area looked like with any clarity. And for all that effort, it's still not linked in any way to any memory of that Prodigy album or any of my early music, even though logically I know that must have been the environment in which I began making music. This disjuncture is really messing with my melon, man.