In my regular cyberspace contact with friends all over the world, songs seem to continue to play an incredibly important, albeit irrelevant, part. Not that they solve any personal problems or help one get rid of life’s frequent dilemmas. But have you ever noticed how they keep cropping up in your existence?

The whole exchange, a kind of nostalgic nausea, was started by a good friend in Melbourne, Manuel Casha, who migrated to Australia in the early 1960s as a teenager and whose part in the Aussie pop scene at that moment in time had become quite a high-profile one. With his popular groups “The Coasters”, “Fuzz” and “Lifesound Dimension” he was scoring high on the popularity charts. One particular song, The Face I love, even achieved nationwide recognition.

Casha and his groups played in venues with other musicians who were later to achieve world fame, including the Bee Gees and the Easybeats. One of his happiest memories is having played on the same spot of the same stage inside the same Melbourne venue where, a week earlier, the Beatles had performed at the height of Beatlemania. So it was no surprise when he gradually transformed our Internet exchange into an interesting game based on the search for a song and a whisper from the past attached to it. We agreed there are always songs that have a special meaning to different people and a different memory for other people.

Manuel got us going with his choice of the Beatles’ Girl, a song that takes him back to those swinging Sixties in Melbourne and other Australian cities. He finds that the lyrics still provoke pictures and situations he lived at the time, as if four whole decades have not really gone by.

With his sentimental missive, he literally blasted open a hornet’s nest. Suddenly we were all coming up with songs that reminded us of different people and different situations from various stages of our past. I am sure every reader, whatever his or her age, can come up with a few songs of his or her own that carry the same nostalgic cargo. We all have our songs and our whispers from the past. Somewhere along the line, a song hits us and is registered in our memory forever. Whenever it comes up on radio or TV, it does its gremlin work. Funnily enough, when it is available in that dust-covered pile of golden oldies at home, you tend to avoid it. Nostalgia can hurt as much as it can rekindle and revive one’s happy and sad memories.

Like the rest of you, I have a full list of those songs, the earliest being Elvis Presley’s Don’t’ be cruel, which always brings back mixed feelings from a Kalkara childhood. We can work it out by The Beatles is another memory-buzzer. It takes me back to the first days of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju, (Movement for the Promotion of Literature) in 1967, when it blared out from every corner as we sought to organise our activities in a variety of places, from the bastions of the Cottonera and the Marsaxlokk seafront to the catacombs in Rabat and the Siggiewi countryside.

Even more directly involved with the Moviment was the Malta Bums’ exceedingly popular Viva Malta, which at the time could more or less be described as “the new national anthem”. Its playing, sometimes live by Freddie Portelli and the rest of his St Paul’s Bay “Bums”, always preceded our incredibly well-attended poetry and drama sessions.

And I could go on forever. God only knows by The Beachboys takes me back to one small bar in Victory Street, Senglea, where we congregated for some beer, when we had the money for it, and possibly a date. I remember we used to drop our threepenny coins into the juke-box and have the song blasted out so many times the bartender must have hated both the song and the group that sang it. We walked all the way from Kalkara for the privilege.

Then of course there are songs that take you back to places you have visited, people you have met and experiences you have had. Lennon’s Just like Starting Over is the song that brings back one of my most treasured memories – the visit in 1983 to the very spot outside the Dakota Building in New York where John Lennon had been brutally assassinated a mere three years before. I have promised myself that one day I will do the same in Granada, Spain, by visiting the spot on the road between Víznar and Alfacar near the Fuente Grande, Ainadamar, “The Fountain of Tears”, where the great poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, is known to have been killed by a firing squad from Franco’s Church-backed, fascist regime. I wonder which song would make it the memory that it will undoubtedly become.

One still has to be careful with the songs and the whispers. An Italian friend who joins us in our weekly “soccer kick-about for the fast-ageing”, is always saying how much he misses the green mountains and the flower-covered valleys of his old village from across the water, to which some of us retort with a testosterone-filled rendition of Heidi, until it is all smiles again during the beer sessions that inevitably follow.

Some songs you have loved or hated become the source of frustration for others. They are songs that in a very indirect way have a negative effect on others. My daughters, for example, always complain loudly when, not exactly voluntarily, they get to listen to one of them. The one that takes this coveted prize is Concrete and Clay by Unit 4+2, a song that I used to play obsessively on a faulty record player, and I dare say their memory of it is no less faulty. They were children still, so they just had to stomach the unlovely din, but today I am regularly warned against even playing it on my state-of-the-art CD player.

And is there any Labourite anywhere in Malta who is not still haunted by the thunderous sound of The Final Countdown (1987), or a Nationalist who does not grimace when catching the random notes of Children (1996)?

You too must have so many memories of songs and whispers from the past. Share them with friends, share them with our readers if you like. It is one good way of seeing this Sirocco-stifled summer through.