PRESS PLAY AND CARRY ON

In a week that has seen geopolitical turbulence off the scale (but fortunately not on the Geiger Counter dial) a couple of personal kicks in the teeth (but fortunately not requiring dentistry) and the fourth birthday of thebusinessofpleasure.com we take a peek at the music that helps us make it through the night…

Last week when my twenty-something son showed me smartphone footage of ballistic missiles above the skies of Israel, I had to remind him that his grandparents had to shelter from the grandparents of those same angels of death. We'd seen one together when we visited The V-2 rocket (aka the Aggregat-4 ‘Vengeance Weapon’) at the Imperial War Museum in Kennington. Designed to attack London in response the Allied bombing of German cities, it was also the first human-built object to reach space, and therefore the progenitor of Apollo 11, Musk’s SpaceX, (and, tangentially, Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, etc.).

While my parents were (fortunately) safely hunkered down in their respective bunkers in Clapham and Fulham, their parents would have almost certainly been unaware of the slogan “Keep Calm And Carry On,” which was also featured prominently at the IWM. With true British efficiency, hardly any of the 2.5 million posters printed in 1939 ever saw the light of day (or the gloom of the underground bomb shelters).  It wasn’t until the dawn of the second millennium, when a copy was discovered in a second-hand bookshop, that the slogan started springing up everywhere.

The year 2000 also saw David Bowie headlining Glastonbury.  Bowie, the first ever contributor to my ‘Support Team’, (the music-makers I turn to when things get tough) had only performed there once before, back in 1971, alongside Traffic, Hawkwind and the divine Melanie.  However his principal business in ‘71 (again fortunately for me) had been recording Hunky Dory, without which I would not have been able to obtain a single O-Level.  Age 16, I played the cassette tape (visit Victoria and Albert Museum) continuously whilst studying, completely unaware of the neurological mechanisms underpinning music-priming, such as context-dependent memory and cue-dependent recall.  And to this day, I would probably be able to scratch a pass at A-Level Biology, having memorised (and hard-wired) the wrong text book.

A bit later in life, I would play (and replay) Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater before making any potentially life-changing calls. Schubert’s Swansong, Beethoven’s Seventh (slow movement) and Wagner’s Overture to Tannhauser were also early recruits to the Support Team, with Elgar’s Nimrod  leading the squad out onto the field (I defy anyone’s spine not to respond to Barenboim’s 1997 version with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra).

But I am hardly unique in deploying music for my emotional ironing.  From the soul-healing lyre David played for the tormented King Saul in Biblical times, now a globally recognised symbol of (‘im-biblical?’ ) mental rebalancing as the Guinness harp logo, to Congreve’s ‘Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,’ the benefits of dem darned beats have been well-documented.  However, this week a study was trailed which could add substantially to our understanding:

*MoodyTunes: A single cohort study of a music-based smartphone app for mental health and mood regulation in young people.’

The full article will be published in the excellent Frontiers in Psychology shortly, but the headline results included the following:

‘…70 participants aged 13-25 used MoodyTunes over a 4-week period.  Pre-and post-intervention measures assessed mental health literacy, coping self-efficacy, depression, anxiety and stress levels. Results demonstrated a significant increase in mental health literacy and decreases in anxiety and stress.  Depression was found to have decreased although not a significant level. No significant change in coping self-efficacy was found.’ **

Perhaps the results might have been better across the board if the study had not just been restricted to the passive absorption of music, but had been extended to include singing and dance?  Perpetual wallflowers aside, surely there would be precious few of us who wouldn’t recognise the health benefits (both mental and physical) of a good bop?

Yesterday morning at the bus-stop I got the weirdest looks for singing a few of my hand-picked 'Diaphragm Team' (the vocal warm-up equivalent to my Support Team).  No-one actually said anything (probably because I appeared ever-so-slightly deranged) but I had a reply to hand just in case:

“Blame it on the ‘seventies education system, Missus.  When every school-day started with a session of full-throated hymn-singing” (and/or sniggering, hair-pulling, rubber-band firing and synchronised farting).

Of course after 44 years in The Business of Pleasure, my repertoire today leans more on Musical Theatre than The Common Hymnbook; Pilate’s Dream from Jesus Christ Superstar  replacing Hills Of The North Rejoice!,  The Moments of Happiness from Cats replacing He Who Would Valliant Be, but Jerusalem still sits very nicely next to Stars from Les Misérables as part of my Blake-Boublil-Schönberg early-morning mash-up.

One 2004 study*** into the benefits of ‘Diaphragmatic Breathing’ (the silent version of what I was doing at the 156 Bus Stop) suggested that one week of breathing practise not only reduced PTSD and Depression in the short term, but that the ‘effects persisted for 24 weeks after the intervention had finished.’ This was a ‘non-randomized’ study, i.e. the participants were specifically selected by the researchers, and the selection criteria?  They were all survivors of the 2004 South East Asian Tsunami.

I cannot imagine the utter desolation and despair that natural disasters, or their man-made equivalents, must have on the minds of those that lived through them. And I hope to Hell I never do. But for many of us in The Business of Pleasure, the imagination is the coal-face, the place of work, and so it is not always necessary for us to be physically on the beach, or within the Strike Zone, to be deeply affected by the shock-waves.  It’s the way we’ve trained our minds to work over the years.  And even more reason to always keep a Support Team and a Diaphragm Team close, compelling and ready to rumble.

DT

28 June 2025

*A moblile app developed in Western Australia designed to help users improve their mental health by interacting with music

**Garrido, O’Keeffe, Chmiel, Boydell, Doran and Nguyen, 2025

***Descilio et al, 2010

IMAGE: Gustavo Dudamel