It’s funny what you remember and what just fades away with time. In the late summer of 1985 I was in Istanbul for no reason I can recall, probably just because I like the city so much and wanted to visit again or because I was on my way back to London after a flight to India on some cooked-up company business. But the only thing I can remember from that particular stay in Istanbul is that it was hot and the hotel I was staying at had a rooftop pool. I decided to cool off in the pool after a day I spent in the sweltering Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) in Sultanahmet (Fatih), looking at old books and maps and buying some antique tiles that I still have in a place where I see them everyday.
But aside from the tiles, what I remember most about that trip was a song that I heard for the first time, “A Good Heart,” which was playing through the rooftop sound system while I was swimming. The singer, Feargal Sharkey, had been in a band from Northern Ireland, The Undertones, that I used to play a lot on KUSF and had worked with when I came to work at Sire Records. The Undertones’ big underground hit, “Teenage Kicks,” a punk song, sounds nothing like “A Good Heart,” which is pure Brit-pop, but you can still recognize Feargal’s unique voice.
As for the photo of me up top on a ferry crossing the Bosphorus, that looks a lot more recent than 1985. One of the things I’ve discovered now that I’m trying to write a memoir is that trips to the places I’ve been to countless times— like Istanbul— kind of blur together so that you forget a lot of particulars about each individual trip. Sometimes I can recall the trips based on who I was with or a great meal eaten, an interesting person met, a missing jacket or, as in this instance, a first hearing of a Feargal Sharkey song.
Mystery partially solved! Roland remembers the photo. He took it in 2009, more than two decades after I heard "A Good Heart" for the first time on the hotel rooftop. He doesn't recall much about that particular trip to Istanbul either except that one night we met some Afghan refugees who had come to Turkey overland and were selling cheap rugs and hats on the bank of the Golden Horn.