An apologia regards my fondness for Celine Dion. Not that I'm embarassed - my music taste is weirdly nebulous, in that I actually like some things from most genres - I like romantic slush, and I like experimental weirdness, I like dance-rave-repetitive-noise, some rap, some classical, some Britpop, some blues. I've got one of the widest music tastes I know - and it's probably because I'm not a terribly discerning listener. I have favourites, naturally, but I can listen to pretty much anything and enjoy pretty much everything. No, this is not a challenge. If you interpret it as such, then I have four candidates for the most irritating songs of all time waiting in the wings. For the record, "Dodo/Lurker" by Genesis, "Games Without Frontiers", Peter Gabriel, virtually all Mike Oldfield, and "It's A Lie, It's a Fake" from a weird music site. "It's a Lie" is the worst, because not only does it get in your head - it's appallingly out of tune, so you can't even hum it.

Or maybe, as a musician, I'm drawn to weird stuff like chord sequences and interesting production values, and not artificial ideas like genre - I tend to describe most things I like as "a bit prog"...

So I'm not ashamed of Celine Dion, because even though she's cheesy, she does occupy a hole in the market for cheese - and does it marvellously. Her voice is great, and her fans are terrifying. The real question is how I became a Celine Dion fan, and I'm going to recount it partly as defence for people not convinced, and also because it's quite a good story. 7/10 at least.

I can't remember exactly when it started, but it involved a very vivid memory from childhood of a music video from Top of the Pops. I could remember the plot, more or less: it starts with a man on a motorbike being crushed by a burning tree, and then his ghost wanders around this huge empty house with a woman in a white dress wailing about it. Over the years, the memory got a bit messy - there are scenes I remember which didn't ultimately turn out to be in the video, and in the weird way of childhood memories it was all tied up with Princess Leia and the three times table - no, don't ask, because I have no idea. I was only six at the time. Now I think again, perhaps it was No. 3 on the TOTP chart that week?

Anyway, flash forward to about three years ago. I brought the memory up - and my dad, who I clearly remember was serving us a TV-tea when we were watching it, obviously had clearer memories of it. We spent about an hour on the internet, and he worked out that yes, it was a Celine Dion song. Amusingly enough, it was called "It's all Coming Back to me Now"...

Youtube didn't exist back then, in the Dark Days, so I had to wait till Christmas when he got me her "Best Of" DVD. Watching it was uncanny, and terrifying in the way revisiting childhood things are, but it's also a great video in it's own right:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPUIXWg9-Dw >

You can see why it might really stick in the mind of a child. And in the past few years, I've wondered how much it has influenced my thinking. To go back to Lord M, he has this intense problem with two women in white dresses in his past, and about which the sheer iconography of a fleeing blur of white fabric is the most striking thing. Which, one can logically infer, means that I have a very strong image of a Woman in White - and there are other ones in other stories, or films and books I've enjoyed or been scared by. Lucy in Dracula, for example, I always concieved like that. It's an image that just instantly sticks with me. My art project perfume was called White Lady, and even my pseudonyms - Ninquelosse - are the same idea. Maybe my entire love of the Gothic genre started there. Alternately, it happened the other way around, with Lord M. being obsessed with Silver, and his Lucy in the 1700s, and that's why the video struck me...but that bends reality a little far for my liking.

It's a possibility. It was only after I got madly into The Picture of Dorian Gray that I remembered the first time I had come across the story, also as a small child, in a big encyclopedia of weird things. There's a truly terrifying illustration of the painting. For literally half my life, I'd always been genuinely worried by oil paintings and portraits. It was only discovering the original novel which unlocked the memory of the first time I read it, and solved why I so strongly disliked them. They still scare me, but now it's an enjoyable type of terror.

Again, I wonder whether I like the book so much because I had discovered it so long ago, or whether the discovery was a sort of prefiguring of the later love. When I re-read the synopsis-story in the encyclopedia, I even remember the images which occurred to me on reading it so long ago. They're different to the ones the book leaves me. For example (pardon the minor spoiler) the synopsis only mentions that Alan Campbell kills himself, not how - and I always knew that he drowned by a foggy river: very vivid image indeed. Actually, he shoots himself. In his lab. And if we're going to get all circular about pre-occupations and imagery, Lord M has some very interesting things to add about foggy drownings - but it's far too late for that worrying line of questioning. And by now you're probably all thoroughly confused.

Back to White Ladies: Cathy Earnshaw, for example, and Wuthering Heights is a funny one. Wikipedia didn't exist in the Dark Days either, but apparently the song was based on it. What goes around, comes around. A quote from the song's writer:

The scene they always cut out is the scene when Heathcliff digs up
Catherine's body and dances in the moonlight and on the beach with it. I think
you can't get much more operatic or passionate than that. I was trying to write
a song about dead things coming to life. I was trying to write a song about
being enslaved and obsessed by love, not just enchanted and happy with it. It
was about the dark side of love; about the ability to be resurrected by it... I
just tried to put everything I could into it, and I'm real proud of it. It's
about obsession, and that can be scary because you're not in control and you
don't know where it's going to stop. It says that, at any point in somebody's
life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a
certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and
disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it's not just a
pleasurable feeling that comes back, it's the complete terror and loss of
control that comes back. And I think that's ultimately a great weapon.

I've never actually thought the lyrics were that good, actually, but the funny thing is, I've always had those sort of strong associations with the song. And I didn't even know that scene happened, though I've read the book. Once. Too scary.

Wikipedia also tells me there are two other versions, an earlier one by Pandora's Box, a later one by Meat Loaf (unsuprisingly, considering how Meat-Loaf-y it sounds), who saw it as a duet - and Spotify turns up a few more. I'd listen to them both, but I've already pointed out how the song has it's creepy clutches into my psyche - I'm on my own, and it's dark. Apparently, Meat Loaf's video also uses a very Gothic aesthetic, with dead lovers and all: it's going to be fascinating to watch.


Anyway, to circle around to my original point: this is how I came to have a whole DVD of Celine Dion music videos, and after I'd watched mine once or twice, I did watch the other videos. Pure cheese, but enjoyable - and I particularly like that you can switch on the subtitles, and effectively sing along. So I have got pretty fond of all the reasonably decent songs on there. And I really love "Then You Look At Me". I found the sheet music for that and all. "Live for the One I Love", "Because You Loved Me" and "To Love You More" are also pretty good. Girl with a one track mind, but some times you do need that, like after a whole evening of Ovid. It never did the Beach Boys any harm.