THE INTRO

Greek philosopher Plato said that music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. Fast forward 2,400 years, and welcome to your new musical life.1 Your relationship with music and the way you allow its soul-affirming sound to flow through your life is unique, whether you use it as a pleasurable way to uplift your mood, relax and unwind, or a vital coping counterbalance to the challenges and complexities of modern life, or even as a portal to an entire identity and lifestyle ethos, where you marinate your whole life in music. Each person in the UK listens to an average of over 20 hours of music per week. This book explores how you can harness the immersive and enjoyable experience of listening to music into a tool for transformational and beneficial change.

How can music achieve this? Its intrinsic qualities enchant both heart and mind, producing a deeply profound and often obsessionally forceful effect on us that is unmatched by any other art form. Music from any genre, age or culture can enlighten, liberate and enthral to send shivers down your spine or move you to tears because it possesses a backstage 'access all areas' pass that can simultaneously stimulate and increase connections across all brain regions, including those tied to your emotional core. As Kylie Minogue noted,2 music can bring happiness even when you feel blue; in doing so, it can help define who you are and what it means to be human.

From your first sensations of the rhythmic maternal heartbeat in the womb to your choice of funeral music, the love of music remains an emotional and enduring joy. (Despite hearing being one of the last senses to fade at the end of life, you won't have the opportunity to listen to your funeral soundtrack; if you do hear it on that day or the muffled voice of someone saying 'Ashes To Ashes'3 while you lie in a dark, confined space, bang on the sides of that wooden box as if your life depended on it, for it will.)

In Radio Ga Ga,4 Queen sang of garnering all they needed to know by listening to the radio. In a similar vein, this book uncovers, reviews and applies nuggets of sound advice derived from panning song themes from top 10 pop hits from the 1980s (spanning 1 January 1980 to 31 December 1989) that will help you understand, guide and even transform your life by suggesting subtle shifts and positive interventions that help build good habits while dismantling harmful ones. Other themes, titles or even a single word from a song (taken out of context and used in a way that is always tenuous and usually frivolous, then shamelessly shoehorned into the text) are included to create new associations and connections with old songs, weaving a narrative designed to be fun and approachable. The more sober references serve as gateways to learning, developing and harnessing tools and techniques that introduce transformative advice into your life. You should enjoy the ride, even if your life is in perfect order.

Music can be revelatory,5 particularly when it facilitates the uniquely human ability to mentally time travel. For those of a certain age6 (as Tina Turner so delicately described it), 1980s music serves as both a launchpad and a cherished companion on a stroll down memory lane where you can rediscover, replay and recapture those heady days of youthful abandon and relive and revive specific memories banked from what seemed like a simpler place and time. You are most likely to draw comfort and significance from the nostalgic glow of the music that defined your emotionally charged adolescence - music imbued with uniquely meaningful moments, bottled and Labelled With Love.7 Memories associated with music are called music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs). Nostalgia harbours a widely held - albeit rose-tinted - belief that the pop music of yesteryear was somehow better. Music was different back then (and you were so much younger),8 and memory is a naturally pliable reconstruction of a morphing mosaic of fragments rather than a perfectly pristine and immutable recording: your memory recall is more jazz improvisation than compact disc infallibility. In your resonant romanticism, your memory may have marginalised some less desirable aspects of that time. You will likely bestow your first record purchase with intense, emotionally resonant MEAMs to make it as unforgettable as your first sweet kiss.9 By your early thirties, your musical taste will have expanded to encompass multiple genres, cooling your interest in contemporary music enough for you to seek comfort in the reassuring familiarity of music from your early teens to your early twenties. When music from your adolescence dovetails into your sonic synapses, its hold is tenacious.

As you accumulate years and develop tastes, you gain a broader perspective on life. This allows you to explore personal introspection and emotional archaeology, enabling you to sift through all that life has deposited on you along the way. Such excavations can add depth to your life and an extra dimension to the significance of familiar songs, helping you make sense of your present and shaping a more fulfilling future.

Other readers may ask of the tunes of the 1980s what Paul McCartney did in Once Upon A Long Ago:10 what do these songs have to do with me? First, they represent some of the best and most enduring pop music, covering timeless themes that still pulsate with relevance and meaning (explored further in Chapter III). Second, these themes emerge from a democratic platform - the UK top 10 (explored further in Chapter IV) - and from a decade many consider - albeit subjectively - a golden age of popular music. Music belongs to all and is non-elitist - you do not need to know how to read music or understand its theory or construction to enjoy, interact or benefit fully from listening to it. It is only relatively recently in our cultural history that music shifted from a creative, ritualistic and participatory activity to a more physically passive, contemplative audience listening pursuit, especially in adults. Analysing the top 10 pop songs from one decade in the twentieth century is no stranger than focusing almost all our musical attention on Western European music created from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, given the immense span of history over which human-created music has existed, as further explored in Chapter I.

Pop music's concise format transmits its message in a concentrated, entertaining and accessible way. Those unfamiliar with the tunes from the 1980s can appreciate them with fresh ears, free from biases that dictate a song or performer was either super cool or squarer (and less colourful) than a Rubik's cube. The focus of sound advice should always be on its quality, merit and relevance, not from whom, when, where or how it was created or delivered. It's not just the music you listen to that matters, but what you can take from what you hear, and the more you listen, the more you hear. Should you find sonic satisfaction from a song that helps keep you on track11 or triggers an adjustment that makes you feel happier, you will double the dopamine hit, doubling the effect. Engaging with music-inspired advice, insight and lifestyle interventions will have more traction within your life than associating with other tools designed to help improve your life, such as scientific journals, wellness professionals or phone apps. Instead of spending every spare moment glued to your phone screen, listen to portal songs that can help you stay motivated, trigger positive adjustments or align with whatever message or thought the song delivers to you.

The advice, insights and lifestyle interventions presented in this book aim to create subtle changes for someone able to benefit from a gentle guiding hand.12 Most lives benefit from a good airing; others need complete fumigation - a need recognised within songs: The Look Of Love13 describes the feeling that something is missing, while Change14 describes the loss of the essential lust for life,15 where your excitement, energy, passion and purpose have been replaced by living in the autopilot torpor of an unfulfilling and numbing rut-like routine, rinsed and drained of any meaning beyond reaching the end of another week. When it feels like there's lead in your veins, it's easy to acknowledge that something is wrong,16 something is holding you back, but you may be unable to articulate what has caused your once-sparkling pizzazz to diminish, your zest for life to fade and your essence to ebb away: you are alive but not living. The song themes and advice can help you to reoxygenate and recalibrate any flagging or stagnant aspects in your life. Initiating such action serves as a powerful, cleansing reset.

Individual stressors often combine, compound and amplify the collective harm they inflict, so it's wise to consider all the themes in your quest to restore equilibrium. If the environmental mantra is 'reduce, reuse and recycle', then the sonic equivalent is 'revisit, reinvent and refocus'. However, if you have a pre-existing physical or...