I want to tell you a story of how a song can get permanently embedded in one’s mind due to an association with an event.

Way back in the 1980’s I had a period where I was reasonably well paid and enjoyed a drink or three. I used to alternate my drinking halts at that time between the Bull in Barking in East London and a pub just along the road, across from the ruins of Barking Abbey. I think this pub was called the Red Lion. However I later went upmarket and drank in the General Havelock in Ilford*, as it was easier to get a table there and they sold Woods 100 Rum and were not averse to selling Snakebite or a lethal Guinness and Barley Wine mixture.

Anyway, one night a friend and I had gone in there with the express desire to get nicely drunk. We were going to have a few pints in the Red Lion and then go on to the Spotted Dog near Barking station where we knew we could get pint jugs of Port and it was handy for getting a tube home to the West, getting home pissed takes a bit of prior planning and being right next to a station is part of that planning.

My mate and I were standing up the bar chatting and drinking in the smoky and loud and packed pub and wondering if we were again going to fail to to be even reasonably attractive to women when all of a sudden at the other end of the bar there was a complete commotion, breaking glass, raised voices and all sorts. I looked up from my pint to see two pensioners taking absolute chunks out of each other with fists windmilling about. We watch the display of two Septegarians kicking the shit out of each other for a while, laughing at the spectacle and then departed as soon as our pints were finished and before the police arrived.

What caused the decades long earworm is this: While the pensioners were flailing at each other the juke box was loudly playing ‘Reward’ by the Teardrop Explodes. It seemed to me as if the pensioners’ punches were landing on their opponents to the beat of the song.

To this day whenever I hear Reward by The Teardrops I think of this incident. This song will always for me be associated with pensioners fighting in a pub in Barking. No matter what I’ve lived through, or experienced, ‘Reward’ is always associated for me with violent pensioners.

It was all a bit of a laugh at the time, when you are young you don’t think of yourself as one day maybe being in the position of being a punching pensioner. However now I’m much older I can see that I should have learned something back then from what was set before me and my friend, which is that no matter how old a person gets, they can still be subject to passions and not always good ones. One pensioner said something to another that opened the floodgates of resentment between him and his companion. I’ll never know that caused the row between the punching pensioners but I do wonder sometimes what triggered it. Was it relationship related or money or who knows what? However the main point is that even if it was not their intention, these fighting codgers gave me an earworm in the form of the memories associated with the song ‘Reward’ that won’t go away.

Link

‘Reward’ by the Teardrop Explodes band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_sJHPIbVw&list=RDo2_sJHPIbVw&start_radio=1

* I would pause today to use the word ‘Ilford’ and ‘upmarket’ in the same sentence today as the area has declined considerably in both safety and prestige.