I was listening to the 1969 Marmalades’ hit Reflections of my Life on Spotify.
It’s a forgotten classic by a band from Glasgow, however as I listened to it this time around, it was with quite different ears to those of the 12 year old who bought it in 1970 as a 45. I don’t think it was just being forty plus years older that gave the song a different feel.
It is a very melancholy song. For me, as with so many others, a couple of lines stood out,
The world is a bad place, a bad place
A terrible place to live, oh but I don’t wanna die.
Given the song was written at the height of the Vietnam War its anti-war sentiment is easy to understand as is the reference to the world as a bad and terrible place. This time around though, it was not the Vietnam War that I was thinking about when I listened to the song, but a photo I had seen on our recent trip. I could neither get the photograph or the lines out of my head.
The photo is on display at the Topography of Terror in Berlin,
