The darkest hour . . .

Songs transport us back to our past more efficiently than any other stimulation (though smells come a well-placed second). The power of a three-minute tune to bring back time and place with incredible clarity is extraordinary. Emotions also return, almost as strongly as the original experience – although now with the bitter-sweet icing of the retrospective view.

I thought this as I listened to Transfatty Acid by Lamb – the opening line of which is “no one said it would be easy” – a statement intended to conjure the trials of past eras. I used to listen to the song as part of a Café del Mar compilation around the turn of the millennium. Yet one occasion stands out, of me sitting alone in my small flat in North London – half-cut after several cans of Stella.

I’d never intended living there. It was an investment property while in the US. But there I sat, after being thrown out of a shared house in Camden, with a string of failed relationships behind me and the foolishness of my recent career choices starkly apparent.

To top it all, 10-years of non-smoking had recently been thrown away and I sat there puffing on Marlboro Lights, a brand that hadn’t even existed in my smoking youth. It felt that the past few years of giddy excess had finally crashed around me as I watched the fog build up under the ceiling and cracked another can – probably nodding just a little too deeply to Lamb’s song of suffering and endeavour.

Did I cry? I can’t remember. Probably – why not go all the way? In fact, I can remember a thrown glass around that time. Oh yeah, I was determined to indulge in all of misery’s thin pleasures.

Yet the reminder – due to setting the iPod to random while preparing dinner for my lovely and loving wife and wonderful (though occasionally naughty) boys in our beautiful home (there’s a point to this – don’t worry) – was, indeed, a bitter-sweet retrospective. Because I could now look back at that moment – the filling ashtray, the tired furniture, the solitude of failure – and realise that it was the darkest moment. I think it was deep winter (I’d left the Camden house in December, so my guess was that it was January, hardly a cheery month). In early February I took a friend on a nightout. She’d never been to The Cross – the famous nightclub behind King’s Cross station – so I promised to take her. We got on, we kissed, we started dating. I fell in love.

That summer was wonderful, and my small flat – in fact the top-floor of a small tower with unbroken views over Clissold Park – proved perfect for developing a grown-up relationship away from the pressures. A year later we were living together. A year later married. A year after that we were preparing for the birth of our first child.

Yet if I’m honest (and male), the downer back in that bleak January centred on my career. That winter I had to cope with the “failure” of my first book. Also, the enterprise I’d left banking in order to set up was going nowhere. Post dotcom crash, our internet “incubator” had declined to the point of being no more than a fight to save face (and savings). Our dreams looked naïve, as did my writing ambitions. So when I lit that next Marlboro Light, my thoughts would turn to what I’d thrown away. Banking in London, Moscow and New York – cutting deals with Russian oligarchs and financial whizzkids. For what?

But, again, it was the darkest hour. I’d often thought of starting a PR agency for banks but I’d never “got around” to it. My part of banking – corporate banking – was crying out for intelligent public relations from someone that fully understood the sector. But I’d always been too fearful. Stuck in the avoidance activity of “keeping a job” I’d done nothing about it. I was too concerned about the potential humiliation.

Well here I was – down and humbled. There was no fear of failure anymore because failed was the current state. There was only one way up.

Lamb’s words came back: “Did anyone tell you that the road would be straight and long?” No they didn’t. And it wasn’t. But once I realised it was a road I travelled, with a destination I wanted to get to, I worked out how to deal with the bends and occasional obstacle.

Of course, the retrospective sweetens the memory, and probably laces it with a little licence. I doubt I rose from the chair and started Moorgate Communications the next day. But, encouraged by my new girlfriend, it certainly happened that year. So thank you Lamb for such an atmospheric song. I couldn’t have got so low (and therefore so high) without you.