Mid-Week Culture Blast, 11 June 2025

The first time I met Erik Satie, and the mystical powers of the cheap compilation album

Olive-green, slim-spined trees. White water, either from foam or by camera flash. Verdant mountains, tinted blue, like a perfect sky.

The image above doesn’t take me back to this place, wherever it is. Japan has always been my guess, perhaps because of the unfamiliar vegetation, the bonsai-like branches, the tiny figure you can just about see if you look closely: a speck of bright pink that looks like a flower or a child’s balloon from far away (if you squint, you’ll see it’s her parasol). I imagine her dress to be a blue kimono, or a countrified, long Laura Ashley number. Clothes of a filmic, alluring, distant woman, fit for an album of filmic, enchanting music.

This image doesn’t take me back to Japan, but to package holidays in Menorca, the Costa Brava, the Algarve - my mum and stepdad with three kids in tow: one in adolescence, one in junior school, and the other a baby. This album would drift around our post-swimming pool lulls, around over puzzle books and ice lollies, filling the heavy air of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean in high summer —a suitably heady, drowsy, somnolent soundtrack.