Addicted to Vole

Earworm: what a wonderful word. It describes, as nothing else quite can, the effect a really invasive melody can have on your consciousness. Hear the song once and you will hear it again and again, on a loop in your brain. At the pub quiz the other night, the answer to a question was Brotherhood of Man, and at least two of us subsequently suffered the torture of hearing ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ in our heads for the rest of the evening. I don’t usually think of myself as Drinking To Forget, but this evening might have been an exception.

So are people who love pop music more susceptible to earworms, or are people who are susceptible to earworms more likely to love pop music? I’m not sure, although I suspect that extreme susceptibility may actually help you to come to hate the music in all its forms. The earworm, after all, was the essence not only of Brotherhood of Man’s victory at Eurovision (in 1976), but of most others of the 1960s and 1970s, too, and it could be argued that Britain’s long era of failure in that competition began when we stopped entering songs that drove you to the edge and sometimes pushed you over into the depthless pit below. But susceptibility, I think, is the key. If your mind works in a certain way, it’s all you can do to defend yourself against ‘Get Lucky’ or ‘Blurred Lines’ or, more recently, Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’, which I still think is a wonderful song, while acknowledging that I might not feel so well disposed towards it in six months’ time.