and I won’t forget the way you held me up when I was down
New Year’s Eve 2020 was emotional wasn’t it. Everyone had their own version of the horrorshow of 2020, my year ended alone with my two cats playing this song on the piano. I have the chords and lyrics (the chart) written out on my mobile phone which I place onto the Christmas cards lining the piano ledge and start
A – C#min/Ab – A7/G – D/F# – F – E7 – D – A
It’s a relatively simple progression down from A to D. I hadn’t played piano for months, literally, despite it standing there in the apartment covered in knick knacks, tennis balls, keys, cards, small musical instruments, wooden kissing fish from St Lucia, perfume, pictures of family – it just wasn’t something I felt like doing over the last few months. I don’t know why – well come on – I do really – but I felt my entire life shrinking around me and in turn I felt like I was shrinking too. The months of inactivity had started to take their toll, my residual vials of positivity and survival were spent on feeding and exercise and keeping a steady watch on my mental health, I didn’t have time to read books or watch TV shows or play the piano. My life became horribly simple : shopping, cleaning, cooking, washing, emails, the news, and one life-saving online blog I participate in called Song-Bar.com. Of course I have music playing most of the day when Jenny doesn’t object to the volume (sensitive ears) so then I put on headphones. But I’m not a huge fan of headphones. I’m one of those gits who likes to play the music in the space, quite loudly. Sorry about that. Anyway.
Jenny had gone back to England on December 17th, flying British Airways in full hazmat, masked, gloved, hoodie and plastic poncho to see her family for the holiday and stay on for sister Mandy’s birthday on the 12th. Usually we’re together on NYE, and we were Very Together in 2020, circumstances of the pandemic threw us into a 24 hour togetherness which we managed very well indeed I’m happy to say. Became closer. More forgiving, more tolerant, more loving. It’s the little things, of course, not being as little as the phrase would suggest. How language lies to us all day long. And although I didn’t want her to leave me, I didn’t express the feeling hardly at all, because she’d made up her mind and there’s no point being a whinging whine inside a 24 hour togetherness. I convinced myself that the break would be a good thing for us both, a change of scenery, a refreshing gulp of air, eventually a strengthening. And I still think that is true, but it doesn’t account for the sheer symbolic drama of New Year’s Eve which has always been a huge night for me, much more than Christmas which to me (not to Jenny) is frankly a vulgar commercialisation of a fairy story at the point of the Winter Solstice, the darkest days being brightened by fairy lights (but not by fire sadly). I do like fairy lights, and there are some festooned around the apartment, not as many as if Jenny were here, some remain in their box because I felt like a low-key Christmas/New Year would be about right for a solo flight across the calendar, so fairy lights are few but some blue ones are draped across the piano, and they’ve been on day and night since Christmas Eve. I’ll turn them all off at some point today, January 1st 2021. Last night they lit up my face as I played this song.
The Zombies are a relatively new excursion for me. I’ve given their lead singer Colin Blunstone and keyboard player Rod Argent more love over the years than the band they both played in. Blunstone has two impeccable singles burned into my heart – Say You Don’t Mind and I Don’t Believe In Miracles both exquisite pop jewels from the 1970s – and in fact when I finally saw The Zombies in Brighton with buddy Martin Steel in 2010 (?), they played both of these songs. Rod Argent had a band in the 1970s called Argent and they had a big hit with a keyboard-driven stonker called Hold Your Head Up in 1972 which I bought and played to death. The Zombies were a 1960s band I had totally missed as a teenager, although the big hit single She’s Not There was in my ear, and in the musical show Return To The Forbidden Planet that I performed in back in 1985.
Much later, in 2018, my new musician friend Tom Wardle (big Beach Boys fan like me) offered me a ticket to see the Brian Wilson Band down in Jersey one night. I said yes thank you so we took the train from Penn Station down to New Brunswick, home of Rutgers College and a wonderful old theatre where Jenny and I had seen Roberta Flack a couple of years earlier. We met some venerable Beach Boys fans and followers outside, and Probyn Gregory (who knows Tom) appeared and chatted too. Probyn plays guitar, French Horn, trumpet and tannerin in the Wilson Band – the latter instrument being a keyboard-based version of the mysterious theremin which you can hear on Good Vibrations, Wild Honey and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (My Pop Life #146 ).
Support act for the 1968-themed Beach Boys show was The Zombies – starring Blunstone and Argent of the original band with Chris White and Hugh Grundy on bass and drums – playing the whole of their trippy pop masterpiece LP Odyssey & Oracle from 1968. This was an unexpected treat. I had the album and heard it a fair bit but live in sequence it was fantastic. This Will Be Our Year appears towards the end – it is simple and clear , melodic and direct :
The warmth of your love’s like the warmth of the sun
And this will be our year, took a long time to come
Don’t let go of my hand, now darkness has gone
This will be our year, took a long time to come
And I won’t forget
The way you held me up when I was down
And I won’t forget the way you said
“Darling I love you, you gave me faith to go on”
Now we’re there and we’ve only just begun
This will be our year, took a long time to come
So it seemed a perfectly natural thing to play for my first visit to the piano for x months. A little context though, as if you hadn’t had enough…
I started drinking at breakfast. Not a habit I’m in at all, but I’d had a wee shot of malt whisky the night before and hadn’t finished it, so there on the counter was a wee dram which became the first thing I drank that day. Then I breakfasted, washed and went out shopping to Trader Joe and Target in downtown Brooklyn City Point. No alarms and no surprises. Three shopping bags, quite heavy, my schtick is to get a Citibike and drape it in shopping bags then actually wheel it home on foot, because if I attempt to ride it, and trust me I have done this many times, my toes end up kicking the shopping hanging off the handlebars, or the bag which I’ve put over my shoulder comes crashing around my arm unexpectedly and nearly knocks us all flying into the traffic. So I’ve developed this mule bike walk home with the shopping. Been doing it throughout the pandemic, shielding Jenny from the virus, masked, gloved, trolley wiped with Lysol, socially distanced (spatially distanced??) you know the drill. So I get home and there is some Song Bar business to attend to, but I decide to crack a can of Guinness for it is New Year’s Eve and I feel like going for the slow build up. My friend Kevin Sullivan who is Irish thinks that this is a form of heresy and of course he’s right – Guinness should never be drunk from a can – but beggy can’t be choosey, and I’m not about to go and sit on a cold sidewalk just so as I can drink some Guinness from a keg connected with hopefully clean pipes to a pump in a bar on De Kalb Avenue. Home comforts include canned Guinnness. What Sean Griffin, the maestro of drinking wisely and with the correct vocabulary, calls “A settling Guinness“. It can take place at any point in the drinking session, can a settling Guinness. Marvellous.
But I’ve neglected to mention that the heart of the morning was taken up by an international row on the Facetime with my beloved, High Wycombe to Fort Greene, an argument which centred like most arguments in marriages on communication, the lack of it, the selection of it, the timing of it, the choices, the revelations, the secrets. I’m not saying that secrets are bad, they are there everywhere always, but I’m not a fan of surprises let’s say. Surprise birthdays for example. Or “I didn’t want to worry you” for example. Without going into details, the argument was not resolved because my two nephews came into the house in High Wycombe, Jamie & Jordan, and Jenny asked if I wanted to speak with them and I said “no” and hung up. Of course I wanted to speak with them, I love them forever, but I was so angry that I just couldn’t. Jenny can switch her anger to one side and answer the phone as if nothing is happening, I’m afraid that I carry my anger into the next conversation until I’ve calmed down. I’m a simpler ape than my wife.
And I wonder sometimes if the mood from the movie you watched the night before lingers into the morning. I’m watching 212 BAFTA screeners if possible before the voting deadline, and I’d seen On The Record, a documentary about Drew Dixon, A&R chief of DefJam who was sexually assaulted by her boss Russell Simmons back in the 90s, and kept it quiet for 22 years along with a dozen plus other women. So it is both a #MeToo for women of colour documentary and a kind of history of hip hop seen through the eyes of a woman, and it is a profoundly moving, chilling and admirable piece of work. Drew Dixon looks uncannily like my first girlfriend, a vibration which hovered through my day, but the night before I’d watched Kaufman’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things which blew me away and slightly freaked me out with its approach to time. Maybe we’re not moving through time says one character Maybe time is moving through us.
At some point during my morning lunchtime Sean Griffin Facetimes from South London with his wife Cush Jumbo and young godson of ours Max. So lovely to see them all, but most of the call is with Sean while he prepares a meal. We talk about the dreadful year and how everyone feels creatively stunted, ashamed of it, and taking one day at a time. It’s like pretending to yourself that everything will be OK. Before Trump was defeated at the polls, the tension was unbearable, but we bore it. Imagine what it is like to be a nurse, any medical worker. 3000 have died in the USA since March, of covid-19. And this jerk who still has a few days left “in power” has soiled his own nappy as people died around us. What a total cunt. All the while I was talking to Sean who was encouraging me to get back in the writing saddle, he sipped regularly at an undoubtedly alcoholic liquid drink in a glass, we didn’t name it. But there it was. And when I hung up after wishing them all a Very Happy New Year, I jones-ed my way to the fridge and poured a large wineglass (the only glass which is large enough) full of Guinness for myself, and sat down to the Jules Family Zoom for New Year’s Eve, which was marvellous. At one point there were nine screens with 14 people in them. Highlights of course were the kids – Tia & Kian – Skye and Lua Blue – were all hilarious and we had the energetic zoom wave goodbye from Lua & Skye about twelve times over a 10-minute bedtime negotiation. And there was Kim with a baby inside her. By the end there was me, Jenny, Jamie and Jordan laughing about the days when they would come down to Brighton in the summer holidays and we would take them to Drusillas or the beach or some country pub garden.
They both have vivid memories of those beautiful days and Jamie, who is spectrum boy like me, remembers where we bought a bottle of citrus Oasis on one particular Mammoth Walk in 2001. By the end of that zoom call I’d had two glasses of Guinness and was pouring a third, still nibbling on micro-dosed gummies from California, laced with THC and adding to the mental relaxation which the day demands. I hadn’t really made it up with Jenny because communication across the Atlantic Ocean, the loss of signal, battery charging and other interruptions all conspire to blur the boundaries of what isn’t being said. The residue of the argument remained in other words.
So when I sat down at the piano I was gently pissed and vaguely high, and I played Treat Her Gently first (from Venus & Mars) playing and singing it. Damn I’m a sentimental old fool but I’ve always loved that song, (so once I was a sentimental young fool I guess). I was going to sing Joy Inside My Tears next but decided on the NYE/NYD classic from The Zombies. As I say it is a simple chord progression which my fingers remembered, but as I started to sing it I knew I’d been ambushed. It was sounding like the truth for a start. And when I got to the middle eight –
And I won’t forget
The way you held me up when I was down
And I won’t forget the way you said
“Darling I love you, you gave me faith to go on”
Now we’re there and we’ve only just begun
This will be our year, took a long time to come
my throat thickened and the words only came out as a strangled sob as the truth of what I was singing crashed into my heart and I missed my wife so much and loved her so much and I hate it so much when we fight that tears rolled down my cheeks and I didn’t mind at all, in fact I thought – yeah, New Year’s Eve 2020 right? Gonna be an emotional one. I’m alone. Lost people this year – Lewis MacLeod my LSE buddy, my friend lost a parent, we all lost regular life and work.
And so I let it go and took a sip of Guinness (yes Kevin I’m an idiot) and played the song again, but once again I couldn’t sing the words because my throat was so thick with emotion that all melody and tune evaporated into the ether and only an ape-like sob escaped from my lips and further teardrops fell. I retreated to the computer screen and various communications, sent the song to a few people because it was New Year’s Eve, heard it once more as a result and wept again. Wow. I thought I’d tapped into some previously unsuspected hole in my heart which could be triggered by this song and I’d have to be very careful and keep it locked in a box from now on. But I think I was just drunk and emotional in reality. New Year’s Eve. It’s like a minefield.
I felt like I was feeling things in ten-minute bursts after that. Weepy for ten minutes. Tired for ten minutes. Dancing around the apartment for ten minutes. Drunk for ten minutes. Hungry for ten minutes. I couldn’t sustain anything for longer than ten minutes. Idea for a film : someone who experiences life in ten-minute bursts. Um….never mind.
There was further Facetime later when it turned toward midnight in England (7pm in Brooklyn) and my wife’s sister Lucy (my sister) was singing on the Hootenanny in the Jools Holland Band on BBC2 which I can find here on the internet. My sister Rebecca was watching at home in Hailsham with Lee and William too. And by now the Bowmore had come out and various toasts were being drunk. Cigarettes were being smoked. And the likelihood of staying awake until midnight in New York City receded into an alcoholic haze. I said my goodnights, texted the few remaining New Yorkers and crashed out at 10 pm with two cats sleeping on my prone form.
When I woke up at 6am it was 2021.
No hangover thanks to milkthistle.
Happy New Year everyone !
Please help us all to move forward, to trust each other, to get better at life.
Magicmenagerie's Blog 