Collected memories …
By The Landlord
“Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.” – John Lennon
“Ever poised on that cusp between past and future, we tie memories to souvenirs like string to trees along life’s path, marking the trail in case we lose ourselves around a bend of tomorrow’s road.” – Susan Lendroth
“All art is a gift. Art is life seeking itself. It is our intractable expressions of love for the beauties, ideas and epiphanies we regularly find. I framed the painting. It's now hanging in our den. "I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.” - Vincent Van Gogh
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” – Susan Sontag
“A book is a souvenir of an idea.” – Seth Godin
“Marriage: a souvenir of love.” – Helen Rowland
Not signed, but with teeth marks – a Fall gig ticket, personally bitten by Mark E Smith, from the 1988 I Am Kurious Oranj tour. A small rubber toy skull and torn setlist from Screamin' Jay Hawkins' last ever UK gig. Some cardboard tubing from the London millennium fireworks display, debris caught landing on Waterloo Bridge, shortly after midnight. Marc Bolan tea towel. Elvis underpants. A freshly discarded Prince plectrum, and a Purple One pong-pong ball. Blondie bubble bath. Adam Ant egg cup.
Memorabilia and souvenirs come in all forms, from the marketed and mass produced to the one-off and oddball, and from the list above, I have at least four.
But I'm not much of a collector of ephemera, I'm more into the actual records and books rather than stuff around it. Yet it all, arguably, has subjective value, if not always of the material kind. Today's tat could be tomorrow's treasure, and that's when there's a muddy sparkle to it all, and makes for a fascinating subject, because it's as much as about the people around them as the objects themselves.
So what's the difference between souvenirs and memorabilia, mementos and keepsakes? Subjectively they are hard to separate. Souvenirs might more often be purposely manufactured, bought and sold, for examplke, to mark visiting a place on holiday. They are originally mass produced and less personal, but then an individual might treasure them, because they take on personal associations.
Memorabilia is fuzzier, they some sort of object originally low or no intrinsic material value, but connected to an event or a person or a time, such as a letter, or photograph, or an item of personal use. Yet they can cross over in these definitions. While travelling, a found unique piece of driftwood, a pebble or shell might easily be called a souvenir, while extremely rare posters, tickets, or a scrap of paper with lyrics on them, a famous person's shirt, dress, or old guitar, as memorabilia, might fetch thousands. Bob Dylan’s scribbled lyrics fo Like a Rolling Stone, for example, sold for $2,725,000 in 2014. David Gilmour’s Black Strat Guitar sold for $5,298,000 in 2019.
Memorabilia might be exciting, moving, highly personal and poignant, or on the other hand, later become absurd items of personal narcissism, such as Kim Kardashian attempting to squeeze into Marilyn Monroe’s dress, or this statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles the monkey which sold for more than $7 million.
Can the memorabilia bubble burst? Michael Jackson and Bubbles cast in gold
So for our purposes, let's put them together as items of all kinds that trigger or preserve memories, personal or wider, and in this week's theme can include songs about a specific object that does this, or comes up in incidental detail.
Jarvis Cocker's 2022 book, Good Pop, Bad Pop centres around his collection of all kinds of objects that preserve his cultural journey and connections, bits and pieces stuffed into boxes and suit cases, left in a friend's loft, and rediscovered. They include photos, tickets, clothes, but also stranger stuff he associates with early attempts at songwriting, such as a tattered copy of The Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, a 20-year old packet of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum Extra, a fragment of Imperial Leather soap with the label bit still on it, and connected to his song Common People, an acceptance letter, dated 1988, from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London.
Memorabilia man: Jarvis Cocker
There are many other famous stars with oddball memorabilia collecting habits. Motörhead's Lemmy was strangely into German military regalia, which include Nazi items, but one assumes, surely, more as a style thing than a ideology. "I only collect the stuff. I didn't collect the ideas," he proclaimed but "if I had known how much of this Nazi memorabilia there was to collect, I never would have started in the first place. It's crowding me out of my house." But he was also very generous. according the Keith Emerson, Lemmy also gave some of it away, and apparently, because shared this style interest with friend and Slayer founder Jeff Hanneman, he gave him two of his Hitler Youth knives during his time as a roadie for the Nice. A pointed gesture. How nice.
Lemmy: ‘style not ideology’ curious collector of German and other military memorabilia
Perhaps the most prolific of collectors was the actress Debbie Reynolds, who revealed that "I have over five thousand costumes and props and cars, and I have a twenty-five thousand square foot warehouse full of memorabilia."
Phil Collins, meanwhile, and unpredictably, has long been obsessed with the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, revealing, rather proudly, that "I've got Davy Crockett's bullet pouch and I've got Colonel Travis's belt."
War memorabilia is potent business, from weapons to medals, but there’s an even darker side to it on the battlefield itself, from scalps and body parts and other personal possessions, to the larger theft of war booty.
On a different battleground, referring to an item that would now be worth a fortune, Muhammed Ali once remarked about wanting to “keep these trunks as a souvenir, but now look at them, they were splattered with blood.”
So sporting memorabilia may also come into play in song lyrics. The Ashes urn? Maradona World Cup shirt? Partick Thistle 1921 Scottish or League Cup Final programme? Old betting slips of unlikely wins? The more detailed, and unexpected, the better. Meaningful to some:
In some cultures, souvenirs are very important. In Japan they are known as omiyage (お土産) are frequently selected from meibutsu, a word for products associated with a particular region. Bringing back omiyage from trips to co-workers and families is a social obligation, considered a form of apology for the traveller's absence. In the Philippines a similar tradition is called pasalubong, and in Russia this tradition more often centres on Matryoshkas, wooden dolls that fit inside each other. Perhaps that’s also why that country was often described as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery."
Buying souvenirs can be an addiction. “Le souvenir est une impulsion électrique comme une autre,” writes France’s Sylvain Tesson, in Dans les forêts de Sibérie, but while this word translates as memory in French, there is something true about it as an electric impulse, objects and memories are intertwined, the brain triggered by some electrical charge. So to spark memories for this topic, lets look for variety and colour in lyrical reference, anything from T-shirts to hats, postcards, keyrings, badges or buttons, coins, tokens, statues and figurines, spoons, mugs, bowls, plates, ashtrays, egg timers, fudge, notepads, coasters, or snow globes, from the mass produced and apparently meaningless to the rare and strange. If they are associated with a memory, and trigger an emotion, then let’s collect them.
On those kinds of items, French writer and socialogist Jean Baudrillard describes "kitschis as one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.” But sometimes those cliches can gain a refreshed meaning for the likes of Jarvis Cocker and other songwriters.
Perhaps the most purchased souvenir in the world is your classic model of the Eiffel Tower. What does it signify? That depends on your perspective chatshow host Jay Leno remarked, with some amusing political satire, that “When President Chirac gave [President] Bush a souvenir statue of the Eiffel Tower... Bush said: 'This is great! A little oil rig!’"
Disproportionate sales? Eiffel Tower
Another chatshow host, David Letterman, also took a similar themed remark about home. "New York is great though. If you’re here and want a one of a kind souvenir be sure to take home the police sketch of your assailant.”
Can souvenirs be anything? Perhaps so. A scar? Surely. An unwashed kiss? Of course. So from the beautiful to the absurd, it’s time to collect them up in song as well open up our special souvenir shop, where there’s no waste, and it’s all in the best possible taste.
Giant plastic peace doves? Joy Division oven gloves. Boris Johnson party pack of Imodium? Liz Truss Jenga-style budget podium! Lourdes holy water bubble bath? Pope Alexandra VI condom pack! Auschwitz vinaigrette! Jesus Christ Hammer & Nail Set. Slave Museum flannelette? North Pole fridge magnet. Planet Earth carbon monoxide alarm? Solar System Final Solution Skin Balm.
So then, leaving aside the silliness, it’s time to buy, sell or share your souvenir and memorabilia-related songs in comments below. Managing the till, and and curating the collection, I’m delighted to say, is the excellent Loud Atlas. Deadline for suggestions is 11pm on Monday UK time, for playlists published next week. It’ll certainly something to keep and remember.
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