LOVE REALLY HURTS WITHOUT YOU

I was sitting having a coffee with my tourettic friend yesterday morning when Billy Ocean's "Love Really Hurts Without You" came blasting through the cafe speakers and he instantly grimaced in that theatrical way that only he does due to his neurological complexities, looking like one of those stretchy face toys I used to play with as a kid.

"What's the matter?" I asked him.

"It's the pain in his voice. He sounds like a disturbed child. I've been bothered by it ever since I heard it back in 1976 when the song first came through the radio."

Pain and Billy Ocean were words I would never have connected before he pointed it out to me and as my friend continued to wince and tic in response to the semi-trauma the track was inducing in him, I began to listen to the song in an entirely new way. Now the intensity of Ocean's voice was becoming more insistent and desperate. How had I ignored the dramatic nature of his impassioned vocal on this song before this moment? To me the track had always just been a bouncy type of break up song but now I was listening to it as if Billy was in genuine serious distress.

Then I remembered the disturbing, but brilliant, ending to the movie 'Filth' (2013) starring James McAvoy which leaves you sort of 'hanging' (pun intended) before smashing into surreal cartoon end credits with the exact same Ocean song. I remember thinking how odd (but somehow typically Scottish) it was to end a film in such grim fashion with an up tempo pop song but it worked. I often find that the jarring cognitive dissonance of contrasting sound and image can be extremely effective in creating a memorable scene or sequence in movies, television or theatre.

Returning to the final dregs of my coffee, I looked across at my friend being hit with sound waves of vibrational trauma and vowed never to underestimate the psychological potency Billy Ocean records can potentially have on a person ever again.

"It's now less a case of getting 'out of his dreams', but out of his nightmares" he said to me earnestly, quoting that other famous Ocean classic.

Feeling like a 'Poundland' Oliver Sacks as we left the cafe, I continued to whistle the tune and my friend continued to grimace.

I'm telling you, Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffmann have got nothing on us!