Repeat 'Til Fade
Gillian Reynolds
Daily Telegraph, 22 April 2001
… That is why popular music is radio's mainstay. We hear a song, fix our hearts within it, hold the memory. There was a series on Radio 4 last week that showed brilliantly how this works. Repeat 'til Fade took a different song each day, making a collage of versions and memories with each. On Monday it was Jeff Beck's Hi Ho Silver Lining, the one that even boys get up and dance to; on Tuesday Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry; on Wednesday the first of the power ballads, If You Leave Me Now by Chicago; on Thursday Rose Royce's weepie Love Don't Live Here Anymore; on Friday, Stairway to Heaven, the ultimate hippy chanson, sturdy enough even to withstand Rolf Harris' wobble-board version.
I heard the first and was hooked thereafter. This was strange as, with one exception, I hate all the songs. I mean hate, too – of the instant switch-off, rising gorge, creeping flesh kind. Yet there in these little aural essays were all the reasons they had instant effects and enduring power.
In the taut way of the Radio Times these days, only one producer was credited, Alan Hall. So I apologise if there were other hands at work, thinking up the clever edits and the ingenious double-trackings, gathering up the right quotes, searching out the variant versions, but thank you, Alan Hall, for opening five unexpected doors on to long corridors of memory.
