Old Fogey’s Favourites

This is from 1986 - from country singer Lyle Lovett. He was famous later for being one of fim star Julia Roberts’ temporary husbands. It’s a man’s song, for which no apologies. I must admit I don’t get all the words and some of the verses of this song don’t seem to bear much relation to the chorus - perhaps it’s just the culture difference which makes them opaque to me. But others do, and carry a lot of meaning, about self delusion, romantic dreams and the conflict of hopes and dreams with down to earth reality. And speaking your mind - which, being English and steeped in reticence,  I find very hard.

‘If I were the man you wanted, I would not be man that I am.’

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Philip Larkin described James Joyce  as “a textbook case of declension from talent to absurdity”. Having worked my way through Joyce’s works, as far as the second page of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, I’m inclined to agree with him. I was impressed by ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. I read it first as an impressionable boy of fourteen. The Hellfire sermon chapter scared me out of my wits - I doubled up on Confessions for the next six months. At twenty I tried to impress my student friends by reading ‘Ulysses’, and through utter doggedness finished it. Some parts I liked - Bloom watching Gertie, the dirty bits in Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated internal monologue. But much was simply yawningly boring. I concluded that life was too short to read it again. As for ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, I fell before I left the paddock. It’s a book unread by all but academics - only they, it seems, can understand its conceit.

His collection of short stories ‘Dubliners’, though, is of real quality, culminating in the most moving story of all, ‘The Dead’. It deals with the events at a twelfth night dinner, 1904, in suburban Dublin. Little happens -  some singing, playing, dancing, a festive dinner, an absurd but appropriate speech by Gabriel, the somewhat smug, superior but interesting protagonist. At the end of a good evening, as he and his wife, Gretta, leave, she is transfixed by the sound of a voice singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. For a few moments she is a stranger to Gabriel. Then they leave. Gabriel is by turns, touched, baffled and piqued - and he can’t let the matter drop. Later at their hotel, he presses for an explanation. She tells of a young man who loved her, twenty years ago, who used to sing the song to her. He was sickly and died. She had never been loved as she was by him. Overwrought by her memories, she falls asleep, leaving Gabriel to his melancholy. The final pages are an immensely moving rumination on love, passion and death.

It’s a wonderful story that, in 1987, was made into a wonderful film by John Huston. It was his last film. It stars his daughter Angelica as Gretta, Donal McCann as Gabriel. They, and the rest of the cast, are well nigh faultless. Huston conceives the action differently from Joyce. For Joyce the events were contemporary, now. For Huston, and us, they are long passed,  witnessed from a distance, the distance of more than 80 years, where all the actors in the drama are long dead. Like ghosts they are repeating the actions of that night, as we might do ours when we too, like they, are long dead.

The moving moment where Angelica stops to listen to ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ can be see here - it is the crux and turning point of the film, made all the more poignant by Huston having the camera hold on his daughter’s face for so long. The melody does return at the very end of the film, over the final credits. This time it is on the harp, a slight and fragile sound that might so easily be snuffed out. It is followed by a little waltz, as if referring back to the little joys of that  evening long ago, a faded memory, almost gone.

It is played by Ann Stockton.

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This is a slight song, written and sung by the English singer, Dido Armstrong. She’s popular with my children, and for some reason this song has wormed its way into my head. Mary’s gone off, leaving Danny in England, anguishing about their relationship. We know it’s over but Danny hasn’t got there yet.

‘As the sun rises on Mary, it sets on him’.

She’s the shoulder he cries on, and young love being strong and fickle, it’s not long before his affections are transferred wholesale to her.

‘As the sun sets on Mary, it rises on him.’

At the end there’s an unmistakeable smile of triumph in Dido’s voice.

‘I’m taking care of Danny, and he’s taking care of me.’

I don’t think Geography could have been Dido’s best subject at school. Her time difference isn’t right. If Mary’s in India and Danny’s in England, she’s five hours ahead of him. So when the sun sets on Mary, there would still be three or four hours to go (depending on the season) before it rises on him.

Pedantic, of course, but it’s the details that always trip you up.

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The ‘Rainbow’ melody, mentioned in my previous post on Judy Garland, was Chopin’s - from his Fantaisie Impromptu Op.66. It starts furiously, as if in a storm, clouds scudding across the sky, then the melody arrives like sun through rain. It could not be more appropriate for chasing rainbows.

This is Christina Ortiz. She doesn’t sentimentalise the lovely melody, and it’s all the more touching for that.

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Among the touching remarks she makes about my previous post, Muriel says that she ’still believes in rainbows.’ Me too - and there have been quite a few around in England this year, the bright spot of this dreadful summer of sun and rain. In May the Met Office, bless ‘em, promised us a hot ‘barbecue summer’. They have not stopped apologising.

You can see why the English are so stoical - what with our weather and the public service amateurs that watch over us.

Here for Muriel is Judy Garland, chasing rainbows. And a little test.

Who wrote the original melody?

I’ll give the answer in my next post.

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One of the benefits of getting on a bit is coming to realise that the things you had to pay pounds for fifty years ago, you can now buy for pennies. That black vinyl LP that cost 30 shillings (£1.50) now costs less than 50p (not even discounting for inflation), as part of a double CD compilation on Not Now Music (check it out on Amazon).

This is from 1957, and the incomparable Peggy Lee. Originally from her LP ‘The Man I Love’ it is ‘Happiness is a thing called Joe’. I like it, apart from the melody, for the seductive way she seems to be seducing me into thinking that if my name was Joe I might be the man she adores.  I’m not sure what feminists think about her. I suppose they would admire her success as a woman but I’m not sure they’d approve the little girl vulnerability, inside that velvet voice, that makes men like me melt.

Her command was masterly.  They would approve of that.

And whichever way you look at it, Peggy Lee had class - in the true American sense.

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Sometimes intense experience catches you by surprise. It’s an ordinary hum-drum day. You’re not expecting it. And when it hits you,  you wonder what hit you.

It was 1 December 1983. My career was on the slide. I didn’t fit in; I didn’t talk the same language. I was too intense. Things mattered to me that seemed of no consequence to those around me. They looked at me oddly, and, when at last I noticed, it was clear I was going nowhere.  So it was Friday and I escaped to the church of St John’s, Smith Square, which the BBC broadcasted a weekly recital. I didn’t know what the programme was, but I didn’t care, and stumped up the fiver to get in - for an hour’s relief from incomprehension.

The recital was given by the Austrian pianist, Edith Vogel. Three Beethoven piano sonatas, ending with the ‘Appassionata’. She was then in her early sixties, the same age as I am now. She didn’t cut an impressive figure. She seemed dowdy, grey steaked hair, no concern for her appearance. And when she played she wasn’t without faults. Like Schnabel there were fluffed notes. But the moment she sat down and touched the keyboard it was like icicles forming in air.  I could only listen with my mouth open.

This is from Beethoven’s Sonata No.21, the ‘Waldstein’, the first sonata she played on that programme. It starts with a slow Adagio which leads haltingly towards the final movement. Vogel plays the Adagio as tragedy, like a Shakespearean soliloquy, all internal self questioning and rage, unquenchable passion - then, at last, calmed, by that cascade of cooling harmony that is the heavenly melody of the final movement. Rage returns at intervals, but love and harmony win out in the end.

When I returned to work afterwards, I didn’t care. There were more important things.

This is my recording from that concert. For some reason, at the time, I edited out the applause, which is a shame, for it was tumultuous.

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This is one of the strangest and most remarkable sounds in popular music. It is ‘Bird Song at Eventide’ written by the English composer Eric Coates. Its melody is full of nostalgia for an England of golden summers before the First World War.

Usually it is played by an orchestra with bird song sound effects. Here is the version recorded in 1949 by the English entertainer, Ronnie Ronalde. He whistles. The central melody is done straightforwardly - it is his mimicry of the songs of the blackbird, nightingale and cuckoo that is astonishing.

It is beyond good or bad taste.

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In my last post I talked of my grandfather’s experiences in the First World War - or Great War as it was known to his generation - on the occasion of, what would have been, his 110th birthday. Two days later, Harry Patch, the last of all the Tommies, died at the age of 111.

Among the songs my grandfather used to whistle and sing, were the old soldier songs from that war. ‘Pack Up Your Toubles’ used to puzzle me with its line ‘while you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag’. Till he told me a Lucifer was a match. And this most famous of all the songs the Tommies sang - ‘Tipperary’.

These songs are hard wired into the English psyche. I used to sing them to my children when they were small, to send them to sleep. It’s now hard wired into them too.

So in memory of Harry Patch, my grandfather and all the Tommies here is John McCormack singing ‘Tipperary’.

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My grandfather, Will, would have been 110 years old today. He fought in the First World War, lying about his age, was captured by the Germans in 1917, and spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Germany. He told me that though he was hungry all the time, this was one of the happiest times of his life - working with animals in the open air - and even though they were the enemy, he, like so many Tommies, never really hated the Germans.

When he got back to England, his open air days were over. He went down the pit. Later, when he was thirty three, married with two young daughters, the roof of the tunnel where he was working fell in on him, breaking his spine. He was crippled for the rest of his life.

As a child I remember him, sitting in the corner of the front room, hands clasped behind his head, one withered leg crossed over the other, rocking himself backwards and forwards, whistling and singing this song.

‘We’re three little lambs who have lost their way. Baa, baa, baa. We’re little black sheep who have gone astray. Baa, baa, baa. Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. Lord, have mercy on such as we. Baa, baa, baa.’

Here, in memory of my grandfather, is this most melancholy of songs, of lost youth and mortality. It is sung, in this, its most famous recording, by Bing Crosby, with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.

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