In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.
‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.
First I came across a row of Lennon fans from Newcastle singing along to Plastic Ono Band. They were wearing headphones and filmed in close-up: a wall of plain faces and plain voices. They looked like most people and like most people would probably be mortified if asked to enact feeling: Give me loneliness! Give me existential pain! They might not like talk of feelings at all.
These were not their words, and without getting up close you could not distinguish their voices, but their faces expressed, with great force, their feelings.
‘What am I supposed to be?’
‘I just believe’
‘Nobody else’
Singing along located and released something. We need other people’s songs because, on the whole, we don’t have our own – as Auden pointed out in his Secondary Worlds lecture on opera:
In the primary world, we all have experienced occasions, when, as we say, we feel like singing. We may sometimes even attempt to sing, but if we do we are dissatisfied with the results for two reasons. First, most of us cannot produce pleasing sounds; second, even if we are professional singers, we cannot compose a song expressly for the occasion but can only sing some song that is already in existence, which we happen to know …
In other rooms were German Michael Jackson fans* and Madonna fans from Italy. The person who moved me most was a girl whispering along to Thriller. To the left and right of her were young men pulling on white gloves and attempting to moonwalk. She stood still, twisting her hands, barely moving her mouth. I went up to the screen and leant towards her:
‘It’s after midnight.’
She sang as if she didn’t understand the words but they weren’t the point. She had found something that made her noise for her.
* Most too young to have been born when Thriller was released. As my daughter, currently living in Berlin, observed: ‘The further east you go, the more Eighties it gets.’
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