I just can’t get you out of my head

Things would surely have been different if he’d been listening to Eric Clapton’s soporific 1991 hit, which has been identified as No 1 in-car “stress-soother” in a list compiled by Martin Kennedy, head of performance at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Surrey.

Depressingly, and possibly revealingly, Kennedy’s other choices in this category are similarly antiquated, the most recent being Sting’s Fields of Gold, from 1993. And his “heart-racers” fail even to nudge their way into the 1980s — the Eagles’ Life in the Fast Lane fronts the list from way back in 1977.

In an important sense, though, Kennedy is on the money. Because the way we choose which music to play in our cars, or which radio station to listen to, is dictated by impulses that are far more to do with mood, emotion and nostalgia than trends, taste and street-credibility.

If classic car songs have a common thread — apart, that is, from catchiness — it is that they are innately, unashamedly cheesy. Indeed, the act of driving along to a favourite song is arguably the most liberating way of listening to music. “Here in my car, I feel safest of all,” Gary Numan sang on his 1979 chart-topper, a perfect description of the four-wheeled sanctum in which we are cocooned from peer-group pressure. Nobody is going to say, “I can’t believe you’re playing Toploader”, for the simple reason that nobody can hear it when you do. Thus, as you blitz up the hard shoulder or sit cursing in the traffic, your off-key rendition of Dancing in the Moonlight will fall on deaf ears. Which is almost certainly a good thing. In space, as the Alien poster had it, nobody can hear you scream. In your car, on the other hand, they can’t hear you massacring Robbie Williams, either.

But if we accept that the choice of in-car listening is a liberated one, what of the effect those choices have on the way we drive? Should the motor industry’s beloved phrase, “performance car”, be reapplied to the way the driver — rather than the car — behaves when the engine sparks up? And would the Italian handbrake merchant really have acted differently if he’d taken Kennedy’s suggestions to heart and dug out his Commodores CD before setting off on his journey?

To the millions of Britons who battle daily with congested city centres and gridlocked motorways, this may seem a laughable proposition. “Let me get this right,” said a Londoner friend of mine who counts himself lucky if he gets from his south-of-the-river flat to his Notting Hill workplace in less than 90 minutes in the morning. “You’re saying that if I played Don Maclean and Carly Simon I’d stop screaming at other motorists and my blood pressure would go back to normal? Presumably it would cut my journey time as well.”

Given the nature of his twice-daily duel with Ken Livingstone’s doctored traffic lights, this man can be forgiven his cynicism. But the link between in-car audio and driving performance is inextricable, according to Dr Adrian North, senior lecturer in psychology at Leicester University. The experience of listening to music in any environment, not just in a car, stimulates our recticular activating system (RAS), North says, and this affects our level of alertness.

So, if we listen to something loud and fast — the Stones’ drivetime-perfect Start Me Up, for instance — we set off more activity in the RAS, which makes us feel more alert. But heightened alertness is only a good thing, North suggests, if it is compensating for a previous shortfall — in other words, if you’re feeling sluggish or drowsy, then a blast of Meat Loaf may be just what the doctor ordered, and represent the difference between you driving around a roundabout rather than over it.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? Ah, you’re thinking, now I understand why that slapheaded neanderthal in the delivery van caused me to career into the bollard the other day. The poor fellow was simply too high on testosterone, junk food and Huey Lewis & the News to notice me driving along blamelessly in front of him. How can he have been expected to do anything but force me off the road?

But it isn’t just truculent Transit drivers who get overcome. Major Christopher Gilding thundered up the M5 at over 100mph and ended up telling the bench he thought he was part of an imaginary cavalry charge. The Royal Marine was listening to the Wellington’s Victory march by Beethoven, written to celebrate the battle of Waterloo. “Suddenly there was a bugle call and a thunder of hooves as the cavalry appeared,” he said. “Quite simply I joined that cavalry charge. My adrenaline was going and I gave my horse its head. It was certainly an error of judgment not to notice the police car behind me.” His excuse for over-stimulation of his RAS didn’t do the major much good. He was fined and banned for seven days.

Can the right sort of music have the reverse effect, balm as opposed to balminess? North thinks it can, although again he adds a caveat, warning that quiet, slow music “can be good if people are in a stressful situation like a traffic jam, but bad if their RAS is already low, as it would be if they were driving while tired”.

Would that life were that simple. Would that the soothing tones of Stevie Nicks could waft from your speakers just as you were preparing to leave your car and run to the opposite carriageway to engage in a deep and meaningful dialogue with the driver who’d swerved into your path. Hang on, there might be a concept there. All you would need is a device to measure RAS in the driver, and Bob’s your uncle. Minutes away from nodding off on the M4 after a hard day at work? Don’t worry, here’s a blast of Walking on Sunshine. A thin white mist beginning to cover your eyes as the lights go against you yet again? This quick burst of Three Times a Lady by the Commodores will soon sort you out.

That said, all the senior psychology lecturers and heads of performance in the world can’t deconstruct or rationalise the sheer, unadulterated joy to be found in jumping into a car, winding down the windows, hitting the gas and pumping up the volume. As a group activity, this can score itself into your memory for all time: one of the best scenes in the film Almost Famous is when the rock band the movie portrays come back from the brink of splitting up by singing along to Elton John’s Tiny Dancer on their tour bus. And the rosy glow of collective nostalgia presumably explains my enduring love for Summer Nights, a song that soundtracked my high-speed teenage jaunts around East Anglia in an orange Beetle.

And that’s the point, surely. The alchemy that occurs when the foot exerts pressure on the accelerator at the exact point that the stereo booms into action is inexplicable. For three blissful, spine-tingling minutes man, music and machine meld to produce, as Freddie Mercury once put it, “a kind of magic”. And, wonderfully, it’s a magic that can be replicated at the push of a button. Rewind.

How motoring music tickles your fancy

Everything we hear, see, touch, and smell is processed by the reticular activating system (RAS). It’s the cerebral playmaker, filtering thousands of messages every second and passing them on to other areas of the brain for action and reaction. How we interpret and respond is managed by the brain’s reticular system stimulating the thalamus and cortex areas of the brain, and controlling attentiveness and level of arousal. The RAS, a large, net-like area at the bottom of the brain cord, also reacts to our internal feelings, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as sensory information coming from the outside. It filters out the things we don’t need to pay attention too, like traffic noise, and governs how alert we are. The RAS also governs our moods. Listening to your favourite music can lead to the release of serotonin, the hormone that makes us feel happy

Heartracers

1 The Doors: LA Woman, 1971

2 New Radicals: You get what you give, 1999

3 Oasis: Cigarettes and Alcohol, 1994

4 Primal Scream: Rocks, 1994

5 Mozart: Symphony No 25 in G minor, 1773

Stress soothers

1 TLC: Waterfalls, 1995

2 The La’s: There She Goes, 1990

3 Soul II Soul: Keep on Movin’, 1989

4 Bob Marley: Jammin, 1977

5 Marvin Gaye: What’s going on, 1971