In good times and bad times, in this family there are always the tunes

As might be unsurprising for someone who has devoted much of her working life to writing about the creative form, to say that it has been music that has seen me through my year of terrible things would not be veering into melodrama.

It was songs that helped get me through the shocking deaths, just two weeks apart, of my mom and one of my closest childhood friends in December last year (which I wrote about here). And it’s been music that has soundtracked nine months of cancer treatment, streaming through my headphones as I sat in different doctor’s waiting rooms, steeling myself for more bad news; as I lay at home recovering after surgery; as I leant back in the chair while the chemo made its way into my arm; as I took gentle, healing walks through my neighbourhood in the pause between treatments.

Alongside the music, holding me steady amidst the sea of grief and pain have been my family and friends. So it’s perhaps no surprise to know that one of the greatest joys of 2024 (because even in a terrible year there is joy aplenty) has been a playlist curated by my family, made especially to help propel me forward during my treatment.

Instigated by my partner Jeremy, Anthems for Blasting Cancer - ABC Collective, is the manifestation of what I imagine was an intention buried somewhere in the dark heart of Spotify’s corporate profit-seeking headquarters: to enable people, in different places across the world, to come together in community and music. It was accompanied by a WhatsApp group where everyone wrote about their particular choice.

The playlist opens, just perfectly, with First Aid Kit’s “Emmylou”, chosen by my youngest daughter Emmylou. I have written previously about this Swedish duo whose song about the artist we named our daughter for is, she noted, “one of the earliest memories I have of actually sharing music with my mama”. “I think I first heard it in my mom’s office in our Parktown North house. Ever since, I think of her (and how much I miss that house) with each listen. Plus, it’s a pretty good reminder of how much we need love and people we love which my mom, luckily, has in abundance”. With these words, Emmylou drew together two of the themes that would arise frequently in the playlist as it unspooled over nearly five months: love and nostalgia - and how beautiful it was to be wrapped in both of these when going through the bodily assault that is chemotherapy.

Jeremy offered up the playlist’s second selection, Van Morrison’s 1967 track, “Brown Eyed Girl”. “Maybe because of its over exposure in too many mediocre movies and despite my reverence for the man Van, I have never rated this song much,” he wrote. “On a recent walk, it came up on a playlist and it was as if I was hearing it for the first thrilling time. It’s at once joyous and heartbreaking and Van’s performance is through the roof. ‘Hey where did we go?/Days when the rains came’ is such a great opening line. And the way he sings ‘Sometimes I'm overcome thinking 'bout it/Making love in the green grass/Behind the stadium with you’ is, after knowing this song for 40 years, suddenly overwhelming.” And right there, in Jeremy’s always beautiful writing, was another theme that emerged as the ABC Collective playlist blossomed and expanded: rediscovering music all over again and I too felt the unfurling of “Brown Eyed Girl” in new, heart-stopping ways as I listened through my trusty Marshall headphones.

Another rediscovery was my brother Nicholas’s selection of “Our Lips Are Sealed” by Fun Boy Three, a band formed by Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding after they left The Specials and, like New Order, proof that band disintegration can deliver new and fantastic sounds. The song, and his accompanying text, catapulted me back to our childhood in uMhlanga, South Africa, Nicholas recalling how the song emboldened his first kiss, adding it was surely because “Diane had played the song around the home that I knew it was a soulful number!” “It also gave me fuel in that 13 to 14 year old ‘stare out the window’ time and allowed me to feel ok about being a little strange. Shame! Thanks DC.”

My other two siblings similarly offered up songs that reached deep into the special wellspring of love that emanates from that lifetime of togetherness that only siblings can call their own.

My sister Catherine returned me to our shared bedroom in the low-slung seventies brick house that we lived in until our parent’s divorce, with her selection of Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night”. Catherine adored this song and I also fell pretty hard for the “tartan teen sensations from Edinburgh”, with the pre-teen me loving “I Only Wanna Be With You” most of all (and only much later, discovering that the Ivor Raymonde and Mike Hawker-composed song was originally recorded, with vim and verve, by Dusty Springfield in 1964, the Scottish idols giving a nod to their teen audience in changing the “want to” in her original to “wanna” in their version). In her message accompanying her choice, Catherine included a link to a video of the classic Bay City Rollers lineup performing the song on TopPop, a Dutch music programme, pointing out the boys’ slim-fitting, half-mast pants which we knew well from the poster we had on our bedroom wall (and a style which is just waiting to be rediscovered by Gen Z thrifters).

Actually, when we were bonafide Bay City Rollers fans, Catherine and I never saw any of their videos or filmed live performances because television only made its appearance in South Africa in 1976. And even when it did, the single channel broadcast two-and-a-half hours in Afrikaans each night and the same amount of time in English and there was no chance that spiky and feathered-haired pop pin ups from Scotland were going to make it into these slots, that were tightly controlled by the apartheid authorities. Besides, we didn’t have a television in our fracturing family home, and would catch what we could on our paternal grandparents’ set, sitting alongside Gran and Grandpa in the one-bedroomed extension where they lived at the rear of our house, sinking into the gentle comfort of their couch while eating handfuls of Quality Street chocolates, happily out-of-sight-of and unregulated by our health-and-budget-conscious mom.

More nostalgia came from my brother Mathew whose selection of Juluka’s “African Sky Blue” brought me to tears - for the rediscovery of a touching song off the 1981 album, African Litany that I had not bothered with in years (and the deep longing I still have for my birth country that it surfaced in me), and also for his words. “It was that time when varsity jols (parties) in the Student Union Hall would invariably invite the unwelcome presence of teargas … Juluka at the forefront of multiculturalism and amazing performers to boot. Di, I am sure you were there keeping a beady eye on me making sure I was ok as a ‘wet behind the ears’ first year.” Mathew was right. Whether it was at the Student Union watching Juluka, with the threat of the apartheid police never far away, or in the punk clubs of Durban where I strained to keep an eye on him in the mosh pit, pogoing to Dog Detachment in his repurposed army jacket, I was never far from my younger brother as he experienced the thrill of live music for himself.

Actually I wept quite frequently when the song selections and words came into the ABC Collective.

Like when my oldest daughter, Jami-Ella, chose Bongeziwe Mabandla’s “Thula”, noting that both of us are adoring fans of this South African artist, and that “we’ve both had the pleasure of working with him over the years”. “We saw Bongeziwe perform a few years ago in the bar area of Utrecht’s Tivoli (he returned a few years later to headline a festival in one of the main venues). We were both relatively new to living abroad and it brought me to tears. It made us feel both homesick and proud of the incredible South African musicians we’ve been fortunate enough to work with.” Mabandla wrote “Thula” for his mom and it has acted as a balm, a closely-held lullaby in moments of sorrow and sadness and I will never tire of listening to it. My son Zachary’s contributions included another surefire harbinger of tears - Bright Eyes’s “At the Bottom of Everything”. As he wrote,

“Bright Eyes is one of my mom’s favourite bands and, because of her, I’ve become a huge fan and this (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning) is one of my favourite albums of all time. Hearing ‘We are Nowhere and It’s Now’ off the album always reminds me of driving down to Cape Town with an absolute cracker of a playlist made by my dad (taking into account my mom’s taste in music too, but chucking in a Donald Fagen just to irritate her a tiny bit) and hearing this song on repeat with other timeless classics like (The Smiths’) ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and (Dr. Dre’s) ‘Nuthin’ But A “G” Thang’. Good times and good tunes.”

As my chemo progressed, the contributions streamed in. Tim, my grandchild Myla-Rhye’s dad, offered up The Sugarcubes’ “Mama” saying “this music is emotional and introspective yet juxtaposed with whimsical and absurd lyrics”. “A perfect blend to mirror the chaos and beauty of life. I feel this is a wonderful tribute to the indefatigable love of a devoted matriarch.” My niece Jessica’s contributions included Taylor Swift’s “The Manuscript” and a song from Wicked - “Defying Gravity” by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande - selected, she said, for being uplifting and hopeful and I drew from its female power as I wrestled with the surrealness of a breast cancer diagnosis, nearly nine months down the line. A selection from a musical was controversial among some members of the playlist group but it brought back memories of my sister Catherine and me, lying on the floor of our childhood uMhlanga home, safe underneath the faraway, dark wood ceiling of our double volume lounge, each holding onto one side of the Evita lyrics, letting an ocean of emotion wash over us as we listened to Julia Covington singing “The Actress Hasn’t Learned (The Lines You’d Like To Hear)”. After some time, we didn’t need the lyric book because we knew the whole soundtrack off-by-heart. We recently found a vinyl copy of the album in a charity shop near where we live and although it came with the exact lyric booklet that Catherine and I treasured, I found that I can still sing along, so deep are the words imprinted in my memory.

As is unsurprising for someone who has been a Swift devotee since one of her early demos made it into the Johannesburg home our children referenced so frequently in their song messages, alongside songs like Feist’s “1234”, The Shins’ “New Slang”, Orville Peck’s “Kalahari Down”, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ “Breathless” my daughter Hannah’s contributions included Swift’s “Clean (Taylor’s version)”. And it was another Hannah-selected Swift song that closed the anthems to blast cancer when my chemotherapy ended in the week before Christmas - specifically “Soon You’ll Get Better”, with The Chicks, which details the artist’s response to her mom’s second cancer diagnosis. Andrea Swift has come through breast cancer treatment twice and the tenderness - and anxiety - of the song is unmistakable, Swift’s emotion-laden voice borne by the sisterhood of Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire on featured and backing vocals, with Strayer also contributing banjo and Maguire fiddle.

“I love that she says ‘you make the best of a bad deal’,” wrote Hannah, “because obviously there is no one else in the world who would have the same kind of resilience and presence of mind in facing this as Diane Coetzer has!”.

Again, tears.

I leave you with this dear reader.

There’s not enough space to capture all the moving write-ups and song selections here but I will never forget the thoughtfulness, love and care that went into every single one and would urge you to think about doing the same when someone you love is in need of being wrapped in community and music.

As you can hear for yourself if you’re on Spotify, the range of the songs on The ABC Collective is tremendous. There’s Zach’s selection of Cornershop’s “Sleep on the Left Side" and DJ Ganyani and Nomcebo’s “Emazulwini” (“an absolute banger” he wrote, adding “the chorus essentially means ‘we come back’, like this family does from irritating, difficult and hard times”); there’s Jami-Ella’s “Saturday night tune” which came in the form of Hak Baker’s lovely “Doolally” (we are both Baker fans) plus her selections of “Not” by Big Thief (“featuring,”she wrote, “Adrianne’s haunting voice and a nod to our Oma Adriana who gave Myla her second name”), and also Blue’s “U Make Me Wanna”.

“Blue were my FAVE boyband from that era. And I had the luck to speak to my crush from the band, Lee, on the phone when my mom did a landline phone interview with him, pre-Zoom days, from her tiny office at the back of our house. I was thrilled!”.

There was Jeremy’s flow of songs that included a selection that mean everything to the two of us (Allo Darlin’s “Tallulah”; John Murry’s “Southern Sky”, Bob Marley’s “Bad Card”) along with Talking Heads’ “Pulled Up” (Alternate Pop Version) and there was Emmylou’s impeccable choices of “Tezeta (Nostalgia)” by Mulatu Astatke, Fontaines D.C.’s “In The Modern World” (“for a song about feeling nothing, it sure makes me feel a lot of things”), Beatenberg’s “The Prince Of The Hanging Gardens” and Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” which we had heard Patti Smith exquisitely cover at Paradiso on the day I turned 60 this July. Hannah’s additional contributions included Youssou N’Dour’s “7 Seconds”, featuring Neneh Cherry (which, she said, made a case for a kind of shared humanity in its trio of languages, English, French and Wolof), The Shins’ “New Slang”, and Michael Nyman’s “The Promise”, which I used to play to Hannah when she was in-utero - a reminder that music has bound me to my children since before they were born and keeps us tethered always.

And, finally, this.

In the ABC Collective WhatsApp group, my sister Catherine shared pictures of one of the playlists that I made for her when I was living in Johannesburg and she was in Cape Town. Here is one of those, handwritten and featuring drawings by toddler Hannah. Twenty years on, it (mostly) stands up.

Wishing all Notation readers a great 2025. For me at least, I know it is going to be a better year than this one.