Showing posts with label songs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label songs. Show all posts

It Never Rains: Innocent Times, Beautiful Song, Beautiful Performance


Me, in Wuthering Heights mode, with the lovely Andy 

The other week, I was driving along with BBC R2 playing in the background. My husband is addicted to the Popmaster Quiz, although he seldom gets more than three points. Neither do I, unless it's something from the late sixties or seventies. I don't often have Radio 2 on in the car but suddenly, Ken Bruce played this song, and I was transported back to my very early twenties, just finished university, with - theoretically anyway - the world at my feet. Anything seemed possible.

It was a very happy time. I was about to go off to work in Finland for a couple of years and this song, although in reality it's a rueful song about broken dreams, took me right back to that time and that feeling, as some songs do. Especially Albert Hammond's songs.

I suspect this video is from Top of the Pops or something like it. Look at the dancing girls, slightly shy, slightly awkward, aware of the cameras. These were more innocent times, but also dangerous times, mostly because of that very innocence. You can't watch this genuinely lovely performance without remembering that the programme - and the company - had also played host to one of the worst sexual predators the world has seen: Jimmy Saville of evil memory. 

Nevertheless, there's something happy about this unfussy performance, from the clever lyrics to the gentle way the singer engages with the youthful audience that makes you recall the best of that time. 

Watching it, I looked at the young girls dancing and thought back to myself at that age. The pressures on young women to conform to some hyper-sexualised image were there, but they were certainly fewer. Look at their not-terribly-glamorous clothes, look at the make-up or lack of it, look at their hair. We loved clothes and shopping and make-up just as much as girls do now, although most of us couldn't afford to spend too much on them. I remember wearing a long regency style Marks and Spencer's nightdress to a party, a party at which an older woman observed disapprovingly that some young women were wearing nightdresses at parties ...

 I was, however, lucky enough to have a mum who was a talented seamstress - her sisters had worked in tailoring - and she made me fashionable clothes from Vogue Paris Original patterns: a midi dress, a Jean Muir dress, a Doctor Zhivago coat in black wool, with fur around neck and cuffs. But nobody was posting endlessly doctored selfies online, few young women thought they needed plastic surgery to conform to some impossible standard of femininity, and magazines weren't posting pictures of female celebrities and slagging them off for looking anything but perfect. If we were bullied (as I was, mercilessly, in my early teens, moving to Scotland from England) we could at least escape once school was over, retreating into our own little bubble, with music for company. 

I've always had a soft spot for Hammond who is - incredibly - 78 now. Born in Gibraltar, a British national, he is one of our greatest singer songwriters and so often, when you love a song, you'll discover that he wrote it. Songs like Nothing's Gonna Stop Us, and 99 Miles From LA and Moonlight Lady. He's not always as appreciated as he should be, but then prophets have no honour in their own lands and all that. 

Nevertheless, thanks for playing It Never Rains, Ken. I could (and quite often do) listen to it over and over again. 







Poems and Songs for Jean Armour


Back when I was researching my novel The Jewel, about the life of Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, I became aware that there were many poems and songs that had obviously been written with Jean in mind. I suggested to my publisher, Saraband, that it might be a good idea to collect them all together in one place, and they agreed. 

The book - For Jean: Poems and Songs by Robert Burns  - is now available for pre-order here. It will be published in January 2017, just before Burns night. I've collected together the songs and poems that are definitely about Jean with some more that might be about her, or where the poet clearly had her in his mind. Many are love poems although one or two are angry poems of thwarted passion! There are notes on many of them, and a glossary where necessary. 

This is a lovely companion volume to The Jewel, a nice Burns Night gift, and also, a very handy little volume for anyone looking for poems for and about 'the lassies' or for a recitation at the increasingly popular 'Jean Armour Suppers'.