Fran Whiting: Nostalgia is all the rage when you’re over the age of 40

Nothing can bring us back to our youth like music can and that’s why the Triple J Hottest 100 Aussie songs of all-time is a pointless debate, writes Fran Whiting.

Mark Seymour and Hunters and Collectors at Red Hot Summer in Mornington. Picture: Kiel Egging.

Have you heard about The Reminiscence Bump?

Basically it’s when people of a certain age – generally agreed to be anyone over 40 – romanticise events, experiences, people and places from their teen years and 20s.

Basically, the good years before life ground us all down into shadows of human beings endlessly scrolling through instagram sobbing “The Delaneys are in Santorini, Darren, Santorini. Do not speak to me of Bribie again.”

But before the Time of Comparison, we each had – if we were lucky – our golden days.

Our time of wine and roses, and falling in and out of love and taxis, dancing until the ugly lights came on in the club, long beach days and lingering over dinner until the staff started to vacuum around our feet.

And nothing can bring us back to those moments in the way that music can. I can, for example, be at home, unable to move from the coach, idly scrolling though the many recipes for eggplant my girlfriends have shared with me after our big night the night before, when, let’s say New Order’s Blue Monday comes on, and I am suddenly on my feet, moving and shaking with surprising flexibility for a woman who has never done pilates.

Now, yesterday was Triple J’s Annual Hottest 100 celebration and as part of that, it seemed like all of Australia experienced their own, collective Reminiscence Bump.

Triple J asked people to send in their Top Ten Australian hits of all-time, and everyone from the Prime Minister to Sia to Bernard Fanning did. All of their lists were rubbish though, because my list is, I believe, clearly superior in every ranking.

And the reason I believe this (apart from my impeccable musical taste) is because of the Reminiscence Bump. Just about everyone’s lists were rooted in the time that was the time of their lives.

So, depending on their ages, the lists were either chokkablokka (a word I am trying to bring back by the way) full of Cold Chisel, Paul Kelly, Powderfinger and The Gurus, or by people I have never heard of.

My son’s list, for example, did not contain one artist or song I am remotely familiar with, and yet, these will be the ones he remembers when he is an old man, looking back fondly at all those years when he listened to music with no intelligible words whatsoever.

Anyway, here’s my Aussie Top ten, see what you think.

Now, I am clearly in the era when my own reminiscence bump was born – otherwise known as The Era of the Best Music Ever, and yes I will fight you over this.

In the meantime, please send me your lists, I’d love to have a look, and a listen.

FRAN LOVES: Stradbroke Island. I recently went there with my family and had forgotten just how glorious it really is.

Even when it’s overcast, North Stradbroke Island is breathtaking. Photo: Rachael Houldcroft

The sunset from Cylinder Beach cannot be beaten.

Originally published as Fran Whiting: Nostalgia is all the rage when you’re over the age of 40