What am I supposed to do with a girl like Jesamine?
*
One of a clutch of Mum’s Sacred Singles, almost all from 1968, which have lodged ever since in my cortex and achieved mythical status as soundtracks to a country childhood with a single parent. Perhaps the poppiest of the clutch with an undeniable Beatlesque appearance, a gentle ballad with vocal harmonies, orchestrated emotional pop music. I was eleven years old when I first heard it, in the summer of 1968 on Radio One. Mum bought it soon afterwards in Eastbourne and we then had the shiny grooved seven-inch disc in its paper sleeve in the house.
Every morning I would wake up, go to the bathroom and wash and brush my teeth, dress, go downstairs, eat breakfast, grab my schoolbag and blazer and walk up the village road to the bus-stop. Catch a bus into Lewes and walk to school with hundreds of other kids. Reach the classroom, open the door and see Mr Knight and a group of kids pointing at me and laughing. Looking down I realised that I had forgotten to put my trousers on. Then I woke up.
This happened quite regularly.
I think I had already designed The Survivor – the child who would Be OK – myself, using shutdown techniques which came instinctively, built over the years of domestic arguments and fighting between my parents, solidified when Mum was admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown in 1965, and confirmed, plastered and painted when Dad moved out and they divorced in 1966/7. I remember little of those years, and tend to be repetitive when writing about that time. A set of memories, moments, faces, feelings not so much.
We lived opposite a farm, and one day Mum decided to get six hens from Mr Dennis the farmer. We built a rudimentary pen for them to scratch around it and fed them some kind of cornmeal and then one morning I went out and there was an egg. A large egg, but when I went to pick it up it wobbled. There was no shell. It had the membrane keeping it intact so I picked it up gently and carried it into the kitchen. “No shell” said Mum, “well I expect it tastes the same“. And she made scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast, and it tasted better than the shop eggs all right. The next morning the same thing – one egg, no shell, the next morning two eggs, no shells. They were all delicious but Mum went across the road to Mr Dennis and asked him what was going on. He told her to feed them grit. Gave her a bag to start her off. I remember throwing this grit – small sharp stones like the ones on the road – into the pen. The chickens eyed the ground and started scraping with their feet then – yes started to eat the grit. Extraordinary. The next morning we had an egg with a shell.
And I must have been eating a little bit of grit as well don’t you think? Creating The Survivor. The one who wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown. All sensitivity to be locked away behind a shell. We camped in the garden one night, made a tent from throwing a blanket over the tree branch. Pillows, blankets everything went in there. Paul and I bedded down around 9pm and came inside at midnight I think.
One day Mum made a cake for Mrs Dennis the farmer’s wife. One of Mum’s famous anecdotes which she repeated on a regular basis and which forms part of my own Personal Picture Of England. Mum carried the cake over, probably on a plate with a tea towel draped over it, it may have been a fruit cake – Mum made a good one, or possibly a sponge, these were regular joys in our house. Mum apologises as she offers the baked gift to Mrs Dennis – “I’m sorry the cake is a bit soggy“. Mrs Dennis doesn’t waste a second : “Moist, Heather, the cake may be a little moist“. Mum felt put down in the same kind of way when Dad would correct her English – a sore point in other words – and that was why she repeated the story, with a smile on her face. Mum told me recently that when we left the village “everything fell apart” and one of the things she produced as evidence of this was Mrs Dennis having an affair with Ben Walker, and other village shenanigans, but mainly the fact that disciples of ceremonial magick practitioner and occultist Alistair Crowley moved in to our cottage and performed diabolic rites in that same garden where we’d fed the chickens grit. Caused quite a stir they did. By then I was a child of Lewes, those cobbled streets which came with flaming torches once a year on November 5th where the figure atop the bonfire was the Pope. The years of drugs and the occult were ahead of me, but I never did study Alistair Crowley properly and there is still time I think.
This song appeared at the same time as Dream A Little Dream by The Mamas & The Papas and Hey Jude by The Beatles, Gotta Get A Message To You by The Bee Gees and Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin. Do It Again by The Beach Boys.
Happy days.
The Casuals : John Ebb singing the lead vocal, were from Lincolnshire
Paul Weller‘s favourite song apparently, and he’d heard that great session drummer Clem Cattini had been on the kit and so used him on a solo LP. The truth is Clem can’t remember half of the sessions he’s done but was happy to work, and was always a great drummer. He’s played on 42 Number One Hit Singles and hundreds of others.
A few weeks after I’d posted that letter I received a postcard from Mum. I can’t remember what was on the cover, but I’ve still got it, somewhere, in storage. On the back of it she’d written
Dear Ralph, Listen to Bird On A Wire by Leonard Cohen love Mum
So I did. I didn’t know the song because I’ve always had a prejudice against Cohen, who knows where it started, but it was confirmed when the twerp who directed my screenplay feature film New Year’s Day in 1999 (see My Pop Life #226 Exit Music (For A Film)) announced one day that Leonard Cohen was the greatest musical artist ever. “Oh well”, I thought. “Never mind”.
I sought out the song, found it on Youtube, put on the headphones and listened. Jesus H. Christ.
Like a bird on the wire Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free Like a worm on a hook Like a knight from some old fashioned book I have saved all my ribbons for thee If I, if I have been unkind I hope that you can just let it go by If I, if I have been untrue I hope you know it was never to you Like a baby, stillborn Like a beast with his horn I have torn everyone who reached out for me But I swear by this song And by all that I have done wrong I will make it all up to thee I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.” And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”
It was so devastatingly on the nose I couldn’t believe it. It was astoundingly eloquent and painful, honest and real. It chimed with me in this way too – that my Mum had chosen to reply to the most honest and painful letter I’d ever written to her with a song. Her Pop Life. I wrote about Mum a few times in here, but My Pop Life #147 Days is probably the most positive. I printed it out and posted it to her about four months ago. Perhaps My Pop Life #112 The Night is the least positive. I didn’t post that to her. Yin & Yang.
I find it almost as difficult writing about my relationship with my mother as it is having that relationship. But not quite. Because here I am.
I remember good motherly moments. In Selmeston I was filling a hot water bottle from the kettle and poured boiling water over my hand, dropped the hottie and rubbed the hand in a classic schoolboy mistake. I was still at primary school. All the skin came off and boy did that hurt. Raw. I remember getting a lot of love that evening from mum – no details in my memory like calendula cream but the hand was certainly bandaged and cocoa was made.
Paul, Andrew & Wendy at the Sand Pit c1967
The entry called Days (see above) concerns positive afternoons at The Sand Pit watching butterflies with Mum, Paul and Andrew, sometimes cousin Wendy was visiting from Portsmouth. An oasis of peace and good memories.
When I decided aged 11 that I no longer wished to attend Sunday School at The Vicarage she accepted it immediately and made no fuss of any kind. Grateful for that !
And more than grateful for the Sunday early evening ritual of Pick Of The Pops on Radio One with Alan Freeman. Without fail. The weekly chart countdown, from 30 to the Number One. We would play along, sing along, cheer for our favourites, sulk through the bad songs. Embedded in my pysche. A love for Pop Music.
Summer 1964, Mum Dad Ralph Paul & Andrew. I’m in the middle.
And then there’s the not-so-motherly moments. These commenced early in 1965 when Mum had a Nervous Breakdown and was admitted to hospital to recover. Her Mum, our Nan, came up from Portsmouth to the East Sussex village to help Dad look after me, seven, and Paul aged five while Andrew, just under one year old, went in the opposite direction to be cared for by Aunty Valerie, Mum’s sister in Pompey. Mum was in Hellingly Hospital for nine months. Mainly blotted out of my memory – but pieces of it remain in My Pop Life #55 Help!
I started to build the walls around my heart that year. After Mum came home it seemed as if normal had vanished forever. Dad was kicked out by Mum, they got divorced when I was eight years old. About eighteen months later (?) Mum had remarried to John Daignault. (Pronounced like the French, ie Dag-Noh his parents were French-Canadian). They fought regularly but also seemed to love each other.
But once we moved away from the village in 1970 (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) things changed. We were all separated for nine months in different families in different locations. When we eventually got rehoused in Hailsham (without John Daignault – Mum would say “Dag-Know-Nothing” lol) things would get seriously weird. By now Mum had been diagnosed as a manic depressive AND a paranoid schizophrenic and any other words that were in vogue at the time, and had been prescribed in-vogue and experimental drugs to match all eventualities. As discussed in Help! she was one of many women who were used as guinea pigs by the medical profession in the 60s & 70s, as depression and its variants were slowly acknowledged. They were in the top cupboard in the kitchen, behind my chair. She would ask for one or another of these tablets regularly – Melleril, Librium, Stellazine – and others, prescribed to see what they would do, all different colours, upper or downers who knew. There would be violent episodes as we grew bigger and mouthier. Second husband John Daignault appeared (again), then disappeared after a fight with Paul and I and another when Mum was pregnant with Rebecca. Her episodes got more and more random, surreal and dangerous. Often I would be ordered to walk to the phone box 500 yards away and call the doctor. I was fourteen years old, and had to grow up fast: “My mother needs some different medication/treatment/hospitalisation” I cannot remember any of the conversations but I do remember it was the thing I wanted to do the least. I dreaded those walks to the phone box. At some point in the 1970s we had a telephone installed in the house. A trim phone. But the violence lurked, the threats, the sobbing fits, the midnight crawls around the carpet, the fights with the swinging arm often containing the poker though it rarely connected. It’s all blurred now. We all adapted in different ways, inside our own heads and our own lives. Paul and I shared a bedroom being two years apart in age, so there was some solidarity there. Andrew had his own bedroom and some privacy but must have been lonely and isolated. Rebecca was just a child.
By the time I got to the sixth form I was spending more and more time away at the Ryle‘s house in Kingston where I played in a band with Conrad . I had four or five surrogate families over this period of school – the Korners also took me in more than once (My Pop Life #64 Fresh Garbage) so did the Lester family in Chiddingly (My Pop Life #245 Double Barrel) and Sheila Smurthwaite took me in twice, once in Ringmer and once in Lewes (Watchtower). I relished all these weeks away from my mother and from Hailsham, I got to spend time with what appeared to be happy people, actual families who functioned relatively normally and spoke to each other with love and affection and support. I am so grateful to all of these families for literally saving my humanity. By then I had built the castle wall around my heart and become a survivor replicant, but Rosemary Ryle, Shirley Korner, Sheila Smurthwaite, and Mrs Lester all managed to find a way behind that wall, and so did their children – all my age – Conrad Ryle, Simon Korner, Pete Smurthwaite who died two years ago sadly, and Simon Lester. We all remained close friends. They stopped me from becoming bitter. From being a criminal. As did my other friends whose houses I did not crash in, but who nevertheless were there for me : Andy Holmes, Andrew Taylor, Shirine Pezeshghi, Pam Norris, Julie Furth.
Did Paul and Andrew have these support families too? Paul often stayed with Gilda in the village in the early days, but once Hailsham happened he fell in with Vince and some other Hailsham people – Richard and others. Andrew was at primary school through most of the 1970s and I’m ashamed to report that I cannot remember whether he developed these emotional supports, these escape families like I did. In this sense, I abandoned him much like Mum and Dad did. And Rebecca. God knows how she made it through with such a great sense of humour, because she is as funny as fuck and a real tonic whatever is going on. Neither of us are really talking to Mum any more because it is still abuse that we receive on the whole. It has taken its toll.
The abuse started when I found these escapes.
When I got home I’d get it from Mum. “Spending time with those people, going to parties, leaving me here” kind of stuff. Guilt tripping me, just being nasty. She did come to see me in a school play when I was 16, and Dad came too, they sat together, they were probably proud as punch. I don’t want to paint a false picture of misery and mental illness. It isn’t that simple. None of us went into care at any point. None of us ended up in prison, or overdosed on heroin. We adapted. We survived.
Things didn’t get any better as I left home and went to work in Laughton Lodge, a hospital “For The Mentally Subnormal” (oh those 1970s). I was a good nurse. Saved some money and went away to America with Simon Korner for five months in the summer of 1976. An amazing trip (see, for example My Pop Life #235 You’ve Got A Friend), then came back and immediately went up to London for my first year at LSE. I’d successfully escaped. Paul had been kicked out by then and was working in the Tax Office in Eastbourne, living in Pevensey Bay. Andrew was at Hailsham School. Rebecca was at Primary School.
Mumtaz was my girlfriend through college and we would go down to Hailsham to see everyone, sometimes at Christmas. There were always dogs and cats around. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas.
Happy Days : Christmas with Mumtaz, Becky, Andrew with Pusspuss, Me, Paul & Mum with Snoopy.
One Easter we went down and Mum was having a serious breakdown, waking us up in the middle of the night crying, cursing us both for “going to parties and having a good time” and then crawling around on the floor gasping for breath and cursing the doctors. It was an extraordinarily horrible weekend and I don’t think Mumtaz went down again after that. Mum was racist anyway. ( I wrote it as my first play in 1986 and called it Drive Away The Darkness, kind of my version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Got a reading at The National Theatre and that was that.)
But Paul and I made the error once we’d both returned from our Mexico adventure (see My Pop Life #31 Enough Is Enough) and went down for Christmas. Mum had bought a VCR which will probably date it, and bought a video for us to watch – The Belstone Fox. She then decided that we would be watching it at 10pm on Christmas Day. This clashed with King Of Comedy on C4 (will also help date it if I could be bothered to look it up – the 80s anyway {1984}) which all of us wanted to watch. No. We tried to explain that the VCR meant we could watch The Belstone Fox any time we wanted to, kind of the whole point, but No. We were watching it at 10pm Christmas Day. Voices were raised, drinks were knocked back, things may have been thrown. Paul and I ended up down the pub in the High Street nursing our wounds and Mum went across the green to a neighbour. We never went down on Christmas Day again, and started to hold “Christmas” in mid-December then all do our own thing on the 25th December. What a relief.
Was this the infamous Belstone Fox Christmas? Paul & Mum
The dysfunction continued. I left Mumtaz and started to date Rita Wolf. Mum regularly delivered nasty phone calls mixed with calls where she would talk at me in a stream of consciousness rant for an hour – barely room for an MmnHm then she’d hang up and I’d say to the now dead phone “How are you Ralph?” I suppose it depended on what drugs she was taking, or not. Whenever the four of us would get together (once Becky was old enough to travel independently) – I’m remembering parties in Archway Road N6 where we would try to make sense of it together in a tight group and no one else could get a word in, what did they know of Heather our mother? It became an open therapy session where we would get the latest from Becky and talk about a phone conversation or the new third husband Alan. Alan is a decent man – he treated Becky as his daughter, and still does to this day. Bless him. Andrew went to college and Mum & Becky moved to Polegate into Alan’s house and the story continued. Sometimes it felt good around this period – we all hooked up for birthdays and Alan’s son Mark would be there, we’d talk about hip hop which we were all fans of and by now I was with Jenny and she was witnessing all the nonsense first hand.
Debbie, Mark, Andrew, Becky and 1st husband Peter, Paul and Colin. Mark’s birthday December 1991
Was Mum a victim or a Perp? Had her life conspired in such a way as to give her nervous breakdowns? I always felt dutiful towards Mum even though I didn’t like going home. Always felt sorry for her and used to blame my dad as I said in the letter. But slowly I began to separate the mental illness from the person. She could be remarkably unkind. But took me years to do this separation in my mind because it was excruciatingly difficult, while slowly stitching my relationship with my father back together thanks to his patience & kindness and my own understanding that I liked having a relationship with him, and I didn’t need to stay angry. The middle years I suppose. I was in therapy for a while, I’ve been on anti-depressants for a while, I diagnosed myself as Bipolar, Paul did the same, Andrew reckoned he was Borderline Personality Disorder – confirmed by professionals – the words change but the feelings are what they are. Dysfunctional family alert. Unpredictable behaviour. Individual may need drugs, therapy, love, support and to think before speaking.
Mum and Alan, Mark just offscreen
Without nailing down the dates, Mum divorced Alan just after the time when Jenny and I bought a house in Brighton. She left the Polegate house and found a small cottage in Willingdon, just outside Eastbourne. She lived there with her two dogs – Trish & Jason – and used to walk to the shops and up to the beautiful South Downs once a day and now and again take a bus into town. Becky was in Strood by now with John Coleman 2nd husband and father to Mollie, Ellie and William. Andrew was with Katie in Bournemouth and they had a son – Alexander. I remember these as happy times. I used to drive over from Brighton to Willingdon – a lovely drive along the A27 across the Ouse and Cuckmere valleys – or along the coast through Seaford to Jevington and turn left. The dogs would bark at me, then approach gingerly, then show affection eventually. A bit like Mum. Suspicious and untrustworthy but happy to see me. We would drink tea and smoke cigarettes and listen to music. Sit in the garden. Jenny had had one insult too many though and never accompanied me on these trips. No need. One day Mum had read a newspaper piece on me talking about Withnail & I – my youth in Lewes smoking weed with the hippies and bikerboys & my mates. She was furious (on the phone to Jenny) telling her I’d let the image of Lewes down with my drug-taking stories. I won’t indulge in the grand ironies present here but Jenny simply said she didn’t agree and it was the truth and Heather hung up on her. Jenny called her straight back and told her never to do that again. Mum apologised, they’ve hardly spoken since – Becky’s birthday maybe.
The South Downs from Wilmington nr the A27.
These were my years as number one son. Paul was abroad and Andrew was in Bournemouth. Perhaps they were getting the abuse then – their turn. Probably though it was Rebecca. We were never all in favour at the same time. And I would go mainly for guilt reasons because she was my mum. What did I get back? Some affection, some love maybe, more interest in my cats than in my wife. It is extraordinary that when I try to remember the bad times they hover just out of reach and I feel like I am betraying my own mother even writing this down. I’m not. I’m being true to myself.
There was a narrow staircase going up to the bathroom and two tiny bedrooms – it was like half a cottage really. The rural poor. As her legs and lungs started to get weaker, the stairs became an issue. I know that she would sit down and go up backwards on her bum. The knees couldn’t manage. The walks ‘up the Downs’ had finished. Someone organised a health worker to visit and Mum would be using a commode and sleeping downstairs. Watching TV eating chocolates pottering around. Eventually – and this took forever – she accepted a move to a bungalow – no stairs, accessible bathroom – on an estate in Hailsham. Town Farm where we’d lived in the 1970s. The painted ponies go up and down.
Becky finished her marriage to John and moved down to Hailsham around this time too. Mum became noticeably grumpier too. Perhaps the medications changed. It was never as relaxing or pleasant visiting her in the bungalow. But what am I actually saying? I feel like I can resurrect some kind of timeline without really tapping into the truth here. So frustrating, so opaque and confused.
In general it has been impossible to share my true feelings because – well, they are unacceptable in polite society. For example, I remember I was writing a screenplay for producer Robert Jones in 2002 and we had a meeting in his Soho office chatting away when I said something like “actuallyI don’t like my mum” and he was so shocked I don’t think he looked at me the same way again. (we did a TV show in 2014 called Babylon which I acted in later on though.) Society and most people rightly place their mothers at the very top of the tree of respect. She bore you in her womb. She birthed you, breast-fed you, taught you to speak and walk and fed and watered you. I get it. And she did all that. But then something happened.
I think Mum is a vulnerable bully. A phrase I created in my 30s. Accurate. Weakness and power. She is a powerful woman, no question about it, she has powers too. But always presented in this wobbly weak-voiced way until the switch. Then vicious, merciless, darkness.
Becky’s 40th. Andrew taking a picture while I do the same. Mum not looking well.
Although I whinge & whine about the treatment I got, Becky my sister had it far worse than any of the brothers. She is the closest to her mum, and moved down to Sussex from Kent to be closer to her and got years of aggro & abuse as thanks which became physical eventually. Becky stopped talking to Mum in 2017 and we protected her by filling in, phoning and visiting. Then one day Bex had an argument with her man and walked out of the house into her car and drove round to Mum’s. She still doesn’t know to this day why she did it but as she drew up in the nearest parking space there was smoke pouring out of an open window and she ran into the back door where Mum was sitting. The kitchen was on fire. She somehow dragged Mum outside into the garden under protest and called her friend Jan and the Fire Brigade who were both on the scene within minutes. A neighbour took the dog and Mum was taken to hospital, and eventually into sheltered accommodation since it was felt she could no longer look after herself. What are the chances of that? We all have powers, unacknowledged, unused. Three months later she was back in the bungalow, until it became clear after another fall that she wasn’t physically strong enough to walk herself around the place, even with a zimmer frame. Now she is permanently in a nursing home in Polegate and has lost her independence at the age of 85.
It isn’t going to all fit into one blog and neither should it. I cannot recall the early 2000s when we were in Brighton & LA, and Mum would write stink letters to me, and sometimes I’d reply. It was always feast or famine, you’re not good enough as a son, you should be ashamed of yourself travelling around the world while I live here. She was always sick to the back teeth of someone or other, a doctor, a neighbour, a husband, a daughter. Eventually in 2009 I wrote the letter to Mum which appears in My Pop Life #255 Mother – and I sent or emailed copies to Paul, Andrew and Becky too. They all supported me. I was grateful. Then I got the postcard reply.
I was gobsmacked to be honest. There is something indestructible about my Mum. There was some renewed respect. But it was also a cowardly response, not to write anything meaningful, apologetic or honest. Just “listen toBird On The Wire“. No, not good enough. And we wouldn’t become close again because I didn’t really trust her anymore. That had started to disappear when I was eight years old I think, but confirmed in those teenage years in Hailsham when twice a year or more Mum would pack a small bag – I would help her often – and call a taxi to go to Amberstone Hospital for a break – a rest. Another mental breakdown. An episode. Call it whatever you like. And the doctors would approve and the social workers would allow me to look after the family and pay the coalman/milkman and other bills and I wouldn’t even miss a day of school. We all had keys. That was when I stopped trusting my Mum. And she’s not stupid by any means, she has some truly sagacious qualities and sees through people before they’ve had a chance to settle. Finds their weakness or vulnerability. And then pokes them with her insight – it is never kind, always cruel. She did it with Amanda Ooms our friend from Sweden who came with me one day to see her. In a way Mum is an empath but not a particularly kind one. She hurts she feels pain, and she wants everyone else to as well. She always feels sorry for old people struggling, for the homeless or the hungry or the gypsies. So I’m amazed at how she falls back on racism time and time again though because three of my four great love affairs have been with people who suffer from racism because of their skin colour and culture. And I don’t forgive that in particular. The reason I stopped speaking to Mum two years ago was when she said – in a phone call from New York to East Sussex, after Jenny’s sister Dee had died at the age of 59 after an operation and we were struggling with the grief –
“You love Jenny and all those black people more than me don’t you?”
The cruelty and the unkindness felt instinctive and also calculated. The mental illness feels like a disability. They’re entangled like a load of useless wire behind the television, but when the picture goes you have to sit down and untangle it all. I have spent my entire adult life untangling those wires. And I decided after the last attempt to to insult me and push me away that I would stay insulted and stay away. Fuck the wires. We haven’t spoken a word since.
What is also tragic though is that she understands all of this, she has both intellectual and emotional intelligence – more than most in fact. And her choice of song reveals that.
“I have torn everyone who reached out to me”
And thus she remains unforgiven.
She has often talked about wanting to live in a cave, not wash, not see anyone except her dog and the birds and insects. I’m not going to help her with that.
She is like a shadow over all of our lives. And an absence too.
*
I saw Leonard Cohen in Brighton in 2013 when he was 79 years old. He did three encores, and 28 songs in all, putting the kids to shame. Bird On A Wire, perhaps his most revered and famous song was number three on the setlist. It pricked me like a sea urchin, shivered my timbers and brought water to my eyes. Also present : Dance Me To The End Of Time, Famous Blue Raincoat, Hallelujah & Chelsea Hotel #2. He did not sing Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You, supposedly about their affair in the early 1960s, two Canadians in Greenwich Village singing songs and writing poetry to use as lyrics. He was elegant and wise, generous and inspiring. He died in 2016 three years later.
Bird On The Wire is a stunning piece of songwriting. I have tried in my way to be free. Yes we can all relate to that. I have saved all my ribbons for thee. Well no you haven’t. And is that appropriate? I’m your son, not your lover. Quite oppressive if you dig a little deeper, quite possessive. Quite fucking weird. If I have been unkind, I hope you can just let it go by. Well yes I can. I have. I’ve let it all go by. Thank God. If I have ever been untrue I hope you know it was never to you. Simply not true. Abandoned too many times for that to be even half true. Also slightly oppressively incestuous. I have torn everyone who reached out to me. No doubt. No doubt. It’s the most honest line in the song. It’s an appeal for forgiveness – is it? It certainly isn’t an apology. I will make it all up to thee. Way too late for that. In 2009 I was 52. Childhood gone. Romantic. Delusional. And didn’t.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.” And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”
Amazing lines. The crucible of life’s contradictions. The balance. Do I feel good about myself? Didn’t I do enough? What’s it all about Ralphie ?
I’m out of gas on this topic. Time to publish and be damned. I still don’t like my mum. Forgive me.
Mum always did have good musical taste. So, from Cohen’s Anthem :
High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again
1965 was the year of The Seekers, The Shangri-Las, The Skatalites, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Bert Jansch & Ken Dodd, The Byrds & The Beatles, Bob Dylan & Tom Jones, Mum’s nervous breakdown and subsequent divorce from my father. That all bled into 1966 too. I was young – 8 years old – but not that young.
I previously wrote about the time my mum spent in Hellingly Hospital in My Pop Life #55 – Help! by The Beatles but it was all a blur in the end, apart from those few memories. The songs of that year stand out as beacons of clarity in a world turning darker and confusingly indeterminate – twinkling shards of light in the doubt – but looking back the only ones I strongly remember were the number 1s (of which The Seekers had two). And I wonder if that is because my dad and my Nan were looking after us, and they didn’t have the radio on much, or maybe it was 1965 and they didn’t play Radio Luxemburg or Radio Caroline. So only the ones off the telly got through to my ears. Strange thought. Like a rent in the sound firmament.
Me holding my brother Paul in the early 1960s
Even though The Seekers break-through year was 1965, I rather feel that this song is set in 1966/7 after Mum had come out of hospital and bought The Best Of The Seekers LP and played it quite a lot. Especially the first three tracks : Morningtown Ride, A World Of Our Own and The Carnival Is Over.
Mum had escaped from hospital by pretending to go for a walk one day. She’d earlier made friends with a woman who was on the same meds as she was and a few beds along, and one day the woman had disappeared. I actually remember Mum telling us this on one clear autumn day, when Dad took me, Paul and Andrew into the visiting room at Hellingly. (although I’m not sure that Andrew was there though at around one year old. He was in Portsmouth with Mum’s sister Valerie).
Anyway Mum, Heather Brown as was, said that she assumed the woman had gone home, got out of that place and was back with her family. Then one day Mum had gone upstairs for something (?) and there was that same woman walking along the corridor, drugged up to the eyeballs and not recognising Mum at all. We didn’t like that story and neither did Mum because shortly after that visit she was back home. She’d just walked out and got on a bus.
Later on, maybe 1967 or even later, she told me of the circumstances of the escape and how the doctor had phoned her at home and said she would have to come back and she said no. For a few days they negotiated, Dad, Mum, Dr Maggs and then she voluntarily went back to hospital for a short while, on the strict understanding that it was for a few weeks only. I can’t remember how long for. But a deal was struck and so at some point she was finally back at home to our huge relief. I can’t claim to remember the celebrations, the hugs and kisses or the arguments that followed, just a few images of marmalade pots flying into the wall; glasses being removed and held high in the air; “don’t be so stupid“; regular use of the words ‘bugger‘ and ‘off‘ and even the occasional ‘sod‘. We hated it.
All this time or thereabouts, Lynne was babysitting for us. She was a kind of flowery hippy type, skinny with long frizzy ash-blonde hair. She would marry our dad in 1973 if memory serves. There’s an infinitely sad photo of Ralph, Paul and Andrew with John & Lynne outside the Brighton Registry Office. The tear-drop shirts give me the date. Years later mum would tell us of others, and other things that happened before the divorce was granted sometime in 1966 on the grounds of “mental cruelty”. I didn’t really understand at the time, and actually remembered the entire two year period later as – a divorce followed by a nervous breakdown. My memory had literally re-ordered the universe so that it made sense. The divorce caused the breakdown. We can all understand that, to some degree. But no. It was actually the other way around. I unpicked the actual facts much later when I was fully grown and older than my parents were in 1966.
I was still walking to school half a mile south towards the Downs and life went on as before but without Dad. Nan still came up now and again, or more commonly it was Wendy who turned up who was our cousin from Portsmouth and must have been a teenager by then. I wrote about her in My Pop Life #102 when she visited a few years later and went to Eastbourne with Mum to see Desmond Dekker.
The sacred music from this mid-sixties era is imprinted onto me like a stick of rock, all the lyrics, harmonies and tunes. The Sound Of Music. Oliver! Motown. The Beatles. Dionne Warwick. And, yes – The Seekers.
They were part of that early-60s folk wave of clean-harmony middle-class white folk who had a particular confidence, and a bright, clear and gently righteous sound – Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers, Peter, Paul & Mary, The New Christy Minstrels, Joan Baez and John Denver. The Seekers were somewhat more poppy folk from Australia and their first release was a version of Waltzing Matilda, which I have to report reluctantly is not as good as Rolf Harris’. They travelled to Britain by ship then performed alongside Dusty Springfield (see My Pop Life #149) whereupon they also met her brother Tom who had earlier been in a popular group with his sister called The Springfields. He wrote and produced a song for The Seekers called I’ll Never Find Another You in 1964 which eventually got to Number 1 in the UK. He also wrote The Carnival Is Over, Georgy Girl and A World Of Our Own. The clear female voice is that of Judith Durham whose pitching is straight as an arrow clean centre of every note, supported by the three fellas whose harmonies thrillingly nestle under that clear pure voice, supporting and stretching the melody to its full promise and providing hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moments every time.
The Carnival Is Over is sung to an old Russian folk melody called Stenka Razin with original lyrics written by the poet Dmitry Sadovnikov in 1883 – and he told a historical tale of the Volga boatmen – a terrible dark story :
The Ballad of Stenka Razin
From beyond the wooded island To the river wide and free Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted ships of Cossack yeomanry.
On the first is Stenka Razin With his princess by his side Drunken holds in marriage revels With his beauteous young bride
From behind there comes a murmur He has left his sword to woo; One short night and Stenka Razin Has become a woman, too.
Stenka Razin hears the murmur Of his discontented band And his lovely Persian princess He has circled with his hand.
His dark brows are drawn together As the waves of anger rise; And the blood comes rushing swiftly To his piercing jet black eyes
I will give you all you ask for Head and heart and life and hand. And his voice rolls out like thunder Out across the distant land.
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga Wide and deep beneath the sun, You have never seen such a present From the Cossacks of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever In this band so free and brave Volga, Volga, Mother Volga Make this lovely girl a grave.
Now, with one swift mighty motion He has raised his bride on high And has cast her where the waters Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry What is this that’s in your eyes? Let us thunder out a shanty To the place where beauty lies.
From beyond the wooded island To the river wide and free Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted ships of Cossack yeomanry.
It is a darkly male, anti-love, pro-warrior kind of song. Not many of those in my Pop Life. It alarms me that there is a strand in song – in men – with this death-cult kind of feeling being expressed and I copy it here for interest and as a kind of appalled question – is that who we are? Really? It actually appears very Greek – Medea killing her children. According to Wikipedia “the Dutch traveller Jean Jansen Struys (1630—1694), says that the murder was meant as a sacrifice with which Razin hoped to appease the much loved and feared Volga River”.
In the Tom Springfield re-write the darkness disappears and we have a simple yearning lament for something lost, perhaps a brief affair with a lion-tamer or a clown, but the circus is leaving town and we get sympathetic lines :
Like a drum, my heart was beating And your kiss was sweet as wine But the joys of love are fleeting…
My mother, consciously or not, must have used this as an anthem for her own broken marriage. Or perhaps it was lodger and lover Stan leaving for his home in Australia which was the heartbreak. It has a funereal beat to it, tragic and fated but yet graced with ethereal & beautiful harmonies that really lift you up from tragedy into a place of light and joy. Quite an extraordinary effect. It worked on Mum, and it still works on me. Some of the best songs have both joy and sadness in them. And it hasn’t escaped me that I have avoided the in-depth discussion of my parent’s divorce and instead devoted some time to an exploration of the song. There is a pattern here I believe. Most of my traumatic moments, my lonely moments, my brave moments have been hidden inside my personal soundtrack. The music made it all bearable. Now older, I can be ambushed by all kinds of things which operate the hidden triggers to open those boxes of feeling, not always musical. And I’m not sure if I have very much to say about my parent’s divorce anyway, except that it put me off marriage – or so I thought. Once I was in fact married, I realised that it was divorce I wasn’t interested in. Marriage was fine, as long as it was for ever.
Andrew, Selmeston East Sussex 1965
Morningtown Ride opened the Seekers album and was our lullaby that we used to rock baby Andrew, now two, three years old :
Train whistle blowing, makes a sleepy noise
Underneath the blankets for all the boys and girls..
Rockin, rollin’ ridin, out along the bay
All bound for Morningtown, many miles away…
Andrew it was who was hit hardest by the divorce because he had no real memory of his father being at home. In that sense I became his father-figure at the tender age of 8. In later years I always placed my younger brother in goal so that I could score past him, and he would get revenge by entering Paul and I’s bedroom and breaking carefully constructed Airfix kits. Middle brother Paul’s version of the damage control that comes from a broken & dysfunctional home was a simple but devastating remark he made when I was 30 years old :
“Ralph, you got the lion’s share of the confidence in our family”.
This is undeniable – as the oldest of three boys left at home with a recovering single mother, I’d had seven years with both parents, a reasonably stable base from which to build a person. Paul had five years, Andrew one. But having two parents isn’t the be-all & end-all of a healthy childhood. Many other things come into play. The carnival might have been over, but we could all still sing about it and we were all still together.
thank you for the days….those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days…
Red Admiral
I hated my Mum and my Dad when I was growing up. Who didn’t ? Especially as a teenager. Then again later, in therapy in my late twenties/early 30s. They fuck you up your mum and dad they do not want to but they do… Mine sure did. Jeez, didn’t yours ? Mine were a) mentally ill and b) absent. A badge I wore for years, a cross I carried up the hill from Gethsemane. Hi, I’m fucked-up, how are you? Then I grew out of all that and made friends with my parents again. Took responsibility for my own life and stopped feeling so hard done by. Then I forgave them for making mistakes, for being young. For separating. And for everything. If they annoy me now, I still get annoyed – of course. But there’s no residual anger. I don’t think. Now I feel lucky that they’re both still alive (Feb 20th 2016). And that they are both my friends.
Peacocks
In 1968 my Dad was in Eastbourne in a bedsit flat off Terminus Road. We’d visit on Saturdays, have lunch at Ceres Salad Bar and then walk to Beachy Head, be back for the James Alexander Gordon football results and Sports Report. We’d never talk about Mum. Back in Selmeston Mum would talk about Dad now and again, or John Brown as she called him, we all called him that in fact. Later he became JB for me and my brothers. Mum would tell me things I didn’t want to know about, why they split up and so on. Lurid details of conversations and incidents that eleven year-old boys don’t need to know about. My memory of those years is blurred naturally, but Mum wasn’t entirely alone bringing up three boys in a Sussex village – she had Stan at one point, (see My Pop Life #63) and her friend Heather at another point, both in 1968/69.
Small Tortoiseshell
Stan was Australian and worked at Arlington Reservoir, digging out a huge hole in the Weald where water would be stored for the surrounding farms and villages. He was our lodger, and Mum’s lover. Later on, when he went back to Australia and left Mum with a broken heart, she bought a single called Part Of My Past by Simon Dupree & the Big Sound and wept while listening to it. Even more powerful was a song called Skyline Pigeon by Guy Darrell : “fly away…” She took all of these records deadly seriously, and we respected that. They were treated like living breathing things with immense power. Emotional bombs. They were her and our soundtrack.
Marbled White
On sunny days we would make a picnic up, take a tablecloth and cups and crisps and buckets and spades and walk up the village – Mum and three boys – then take a rambling left through the churchyard and head down the path and overhanging trees to the most sacred spot of my youth – the sandpit.
Paul, Andrew & cousin Wendy at the sand pit 1968
Mum at the sand pit, 1968
Mum later confessed that she felt secretly ashamed that we weren’t getting on a bus and going to the beach somewhere, but to us the sandpit was simply a magical place.
Comma
The path carried on towards Berwick across the fields, but there on the right, tucked away, was a small path of trodden grass which led to a clearing – an area completely overgrown and wild. A half-dozen acres probably with patches of exposed sand in cliffs and banks, other areas of marsh, other densely wooded parts and some open space with short tufts of grass where we settled and laid the tablecloth and ate our sandwiches. Mum would bring the transistor radio, but wouldn’t always play it because the rustling of the leaves, the birdsong and the silence was better.
Adonis Blue f & m
There were butterflies everywhere – the usual Small Tortoiseshells, Peacocks, Gatekeepers, Speckled Woods, Red Admirals and Common Blues all in abundance, and more unusual ones too – Clouded Yellows, Small Coppers, Adonis Blues, Brimstones and Orange Tips. Marbled Whites! We spent hours identifying them from a book – the Observer Book of British Butterflies, which always got packed along with the paste sandwiches. Shippams. Or Marmite. Peanut Butter. Delicious. White sliced bread. Of course !
Brimstone
We were always alone in the sandpit, never once did we sight anyone else, or even hear them. It was our place. It was always a sunny afternoon. It was always peaceful. Some days Paul and I would go there on our own, and one day with my friend Martin Coleman we found a grass snake, also unusual. The slow-worms were pretty common – actually not snakes but legless lizards whose tails fell off if you picked them up the wrong way. There were plenty of actual lizards there too. Sometimes we would bring back a skull of a small mammal – a squirrel perhaps, a fox, a weasel. And the bird-life was also rich.
Clouded Yellow
It was the butterflies though that captured our imaginations. And we in turn captured them. As we got older and learned about methods of capture we suddenly had nets, jars, and at home, chloroform to put them to sleep. Two in particular were pinned under glass – a Small Tortoiseshell and a magnificent Clouded Yellow. Treasure. Near us in Alfriston was Drusillas, a mini-zoo with toy railway and a butterfly house, with an exhibit of every single species of British Butterfly – there are 63 altogether – and some foreign ones too including the spectacular irridescent Morpho.
Wall
Of course grown-up Ralph finds this behaviour abhorrent now – the decline in butterfly numbers in the UK is truly alarming, mainly thanks to farming chemicals and loss of habitat – hedgerows and meadows, but the collecting didn’t help and no one does this now. We have all learned to cherish our world in a different way. It only serves to reinforce the innocence of those days in the sandpit. Whatever misery was upon us, whether financial, emotional, mental or spiritual, those trips down that secret path past the church to the sandpit healed us, nourished us, gave us a reason to be. A reason to believe.
Days was released at the end of June 1968. I’d just turned 11, and I wouldn’t be going back to the village school. I’d passed the eleven plus (at the age of ten!) and was on my way to Lewes Grammar – a long bus journey away. Things were changing. It was exciting. I was about to outgrow the village, and my friends. The Kinks were very popular in our house, we loved everything they did. Songwriter and singer Ray Davies was like a raconteur troubadour speaking to us of England. On 45 rpm of course – the singles market was all we consumed in those days. I had absolutely no idea that The Kinks‘ LP The Village Green Preservation Society had been released, just as I didn’t have a clue what The White Album was – we had Lady Madonna and Hey Jude and The Marmalade singing Obla-di Obla-da instead. Leapy Lee singing Little Arrows. Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin. I Can’t Let Maggie Go – an advert for Nimble. Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations.
The best thing about The Kinks ‘Days‘ were the harmonies. Our cousin Wendy used to come up from Portsmouth to visit Mum and they’d go into Eastbourne to get kissed (see My Pop Life #102). They would also sing together – they’d done it for years in church. Mum would always sing “thirds” as she called it, in other words two tones above the melody, or Doh-Re-Me. In fact Days has a suspended 4th – “Thank you for the Days…” – on the word days, which resolves onto the third at the end of the phrase. I didn’t know that at the time, but I knew how to sing it thanks to Mum and Wendy. And thus I was really brought up singing in harmony, to The Seekers (Morningtown Ride, Georgy Girl), The Beatles, Motown, Beach Boys and The Kinks and many others. It was the most natural thing in the world. So Mum – Thank You for the thirds, the suspended 4ths, the butterflies, the sand-pit and all of the music. It’s still what makes me happiest. And yes, thank you for the days.
“Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la Check-a-la romey in a banonika Bollika, wollika, can’t you see Chickery chick is me? “
My mother, Heather Ruby Laming, was born in June 1935 in Portsmouth to mother Ruby née Price and father Horace Laming. Ruby had come down to Pompey from Abergavenny in her teens and worked ‘in service’ until the birth of my mum. Below stairs in a rich families’ house in other words. Cleaning, cooking, laundry. Something happened there that she almost told me once, then changed her mind. I’ll never know what that is. I’d travelled down to Copnor in North Portsmouth in the 1980s to talk to her about her life. My Nan would have been late 80s by then, still painting occasionally-interesting abstracts, no that’s not fair, she had a certain darkness to her images and there will be a good reason for that, but I don’t know what it is, all I know is that she passed some version of it down to my mother. She painted still lives, strange scenes from road accidents or desolate sea shores. And I liked some of them. Two are below. If you said you liked a painting you got given it immediately. We all have some, by which I mean, Becky, Andrew, Paul. I can tolerate these two, even admire them. But really they’re like scars.
Abstract – Ruby Laming, 1966
Countryside – Ruby Laming, 1983
The house was full of her paintings. She appeared to be fond of me, regarding me with a tolerant, knowing chuckle as if I couldn’t put one over on her. She came out with some odd things regarding my Mum –
“Heather was always difficult – she wouldn’t even take the nipple as a baby”.
That’s a bit dark, I thought.
Unknown young man with legendary Welshman Fred Price
Her dad Fred Price – my great grandfather – was a lovely old geezer who used to write funny letters to my Mum when she married my Dad and moved away from Portsmouth, first to Cambridge, then to Sussex.
“Winter – drawers – on“
he wrote as we entered December. Clever old stick. Ruby would have us believe that she was the eternally long-suffering wife of a dreadful husband – Horace, and I wrote about the strange atmosphere pervading his funeral in the late 1960s in My Pop Life #49.
Nan, 1980s
Almost all of the stories I heard about my Nan were bad, and my own experience talking to her often backed them up. She favoured Mum’s sister, Aunty Valerie, deeply favoured her. She used to drink heavily when Heather was growing up and going out with my Dad, and once or twice he intervened to stop Horace and Ruby coming to blows. Or to stop Ruby beating on my Mum. In any event it didn’t sound like the most closely-knit family. Impressions. Memories. I remember one Christmas round there when I was about five – where we had to behave. Keep quiet. Seen and not heard. Ssshhh.
Nanny Laming, Ralph, Paul & Andrew : Selmeston Village Fete 1966
When Mum had her first nervous breakdown (that I was aware of) in 1965 (see My Pop Life #54), Nan came up from Portsmouth to look after us while Dad went to work teaching. She must have lived with us in 2 Manor Cottages, Selmeston, for nine months, for that was how long Mum stayed in the hospital in the end. The Mental Hospital it was called. I can’t remember much about that period, having successfully wiped it out of my memory and grown up without its haunting disabilities at the front of my brain. Buried so deep that it rots my soul from within. But Nan must have been alternately strict and loving with us – me, Paul and Andrew. Thinking about it, this was when Andrew was disappeared to Portsmouth to stay with her other daughter Aunty Valerie (& Uncle Keith), so Nan was only looking after Paul and I. We shared a bedroom. We talked before we fell asleep, after the light was turned off. It kept us sane. Kind of.
Ruby, Heather and Andrew 1966
Later on, when Nan sold the house in Copnor and moved into a nursing home in Southsea, Mum travelled down to see the house for one last time. the same one we’d gathered in for Horace’s funeral, for Christmas, for strange visits which I dreaded. When Mum got there the house was empty. Literally. No art. No china. No furniture. “Oh“, she said to Ruby, “I thought I could have taken one thing to remember this house by, a saucer or a vase or something“. Ruby then answered with one of her chilling classics :
“I gave it all to the woman over the road. She’s been like a daughter to me.”
When my Mum told me this story I was horrified. I said “You can’t go on taking this shit, it’s abusive, designed to hurt you.” Nan was still alive, we were still visiting her in the nursing home. She was in her 90s now. “No,” said Mum, “I don’t want to upset her.” I had another clue to the cause of the mental illnesses mum had been plagued with for what seemed like the bulk of her life. Not to mention my own bipolarity.
Bollika Wollika can’t you see? Chickery Chick is me!
My friend Richard (Lady G) went to see her one day with Paul and we had an interesting chat about it later. He thought there was a possibility that she was a lesbian who’d never owned it, let alone come out. Pretty charitable I thought.
Nan & Mum in Southsea, 1960s?
*
This song may well be the happiest memory I can retrieve of my Nan (although see My Pop Life #183 Rocket Man – Elton John) …and perhaps may have been the first pop song I ever heard, although it would have been from my Mother’s lips. She remembers it from World War Two when Ruby sang it to her, enjoying the nonsense words. I remember Mum singing this all through the 1960s. She actually sang “Wollika Wollika can’t you see” rather than the actual words “Bollika Wollika” which clearly don’t have the same connotation in America and which were carefully screened from our young English ears. I never did know what she was talking about until one day looking through some old sheet music in a shop, I found this.
So it had been a Number #1 hit song in the U.S. and in the charts for over 4 months, played by the Sammy Kaye Orchestra. The odd words were written by Sylvia Dee, and the music by her regular songwriting partner Sidney Lippman. Sammy Kaye had over 30 hit songs in the swing era, and six number ones. “Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye“offered the tag-line, and young Nancy Norman auditioned aged 16 and 4’11” high and got the job of female vocalist. Her mother would chaperone her all over the United States to sing Chickery Chick. The man’s voice is country singer Billy Williams. Many other stars covered the song, including The Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, Gene Krupa & Anita O’Day, and Evelyn Knight and The Jesters, which is my actual favourite.
The word banonika is still in use in our house here in Brooklyn. It is used to denote a wrapping into which the special needs cat Roxy will position herself, enjoying the cosy created therein.
Not a banonika
Not a banonika, strictly speaking
a cardboard box I’d call that
When she is under the duvet or inside some clothing then : “Are you in your banonika darling?“we will ask in slightly high-pitched voices as if talking to a child. Which we are really. A furry child substitute. Maybe we should sing Chickery Chick to our cat. I’m sure people have.
Roxy and I agree that we have no banonika pictures
*
Sammy Kaye, featuring Nancy Norman & Billy Williams :
Unmistakable, gentle, playful vibraphone jazz shuffle which evokes immediate memories for my generation of a BBCtv show called Vision On which ran from 1964 to 1976 thus neatly encapsulating my entire life in East Sussex as a youth. My family moved from Portsmouth in 1964 when I was just seven, Dad having scored a teaching job at Falmer School just outside of Brighton. We moved into a semi-detached house in Selmeston, a small village of some 200 people, bordered by a railway line at one end and the A27 at the other.
Selmeston Church
That one-mile stretch of road was my universe until the age of eleven by which time my dad and mum had divorced, mum had spent nine months in a mental hospital and I’d passed my eleven-plus exam and would take a bus into Lewes every day. Two years later we would all be separated as a family as the landlords – horsey toffs from Sherrington Manor – made us homeless and wiped our debt to them at one stroke. For the remainder of the 1970s we were in a council house in Hailsham, although I left for Laughton Lodge in 1975, and London in 1976.
Pat Keysell, Tony Hart
Throughout this period Vision On was on BBC TV. It was a programme for deaf children, and had almost no spoken words. It was watched by all children. Filled with speech bubbles and mime it was largely a visual show. Presented by Tony Hart and Pat Keysell, who spoke in sign language and spoke, with Tony spending much of the show (so it seemed to me) drawing things. Encouraging children to create. Awakening our latent interest in expression. The centrepiece of each show was The Gallery where the camera lingered over pictures that viewers – ie children – had sent in, with their name and age displayed, and a notice explaining and apologising that pictures could not be returned but that a prize would be given for those shown. What that prize was we never found out. We never sent one in, but were transfixed, at least partly by the music. For this section of the programme was played out to a piece of music which, with its dreamy melody and nimble simplicity appeared to come from another planet. In fact it came from Holland.
Left Bank Two was a piece of Library Music originally. Library Music is licensed differently than other music and is often used for TV shows. It is much cheaper for producers to use, as the broadcaster in general will pay the royalties, maybe a dollar each time it is played. If it is a long-running series, over the years this can add up. If it is a commercial, you could be, as composer, quids in. I found out a little about Library Music when I was directing an aborted documentary (called Red Light Fever) on British Session Musicians in 2012, inspired by the great doc Standing In The Shadows Of Motown. I was assisted by local musician and photographer Diana Frangi who has written a few albums of South American library music since she is from Argentina. I’m still learning about the whole scene. But all of the people I interviewed – singer and composer Barbara Moore, guitarists Chris Spedding & Alan Parker, bass players Herbie Flowers and Les Hurdle, drummer Clem Cattini, singer Madeline Bell – all of them great session musicians, arrangers, songwriters, all exceptional musicians as session players have to be – (deep breath it’s a long sentence) – all of them have played Library Music on a regular basis. How to explain it? There are some production houses which specialise in this kind of music. De Wolfe Music is the big one, started in 1927 to provide cheap music for the talkies.
They hire a composer to write : seascapes, exciting car chase, a creepy scene, ghostly atmospheres, romantic swoons, mood music of various types. The Composer will hire a group of session musicians to come and read the dots and they will be paid a session fee. The pieces of music will be grouped together and issued to TV production companies who can use a short piece – eg Grange Hill written by Alan Hawkshaw – and the broadcaster will cover the royalties. All the musicians who played on the piece will get a cut, unless they signed that percentage away, in the deal – a “buy-out”. And if you’re a session musician you never know which piece will suddenly get picked up. Indeed these days when hip-hop producers and DJs are constantly looking for new samples, obscure beats and licks that other producers haven’t used yet, Library Music is now being plundered like every other form of music. Barbara Moore provided the marvellous wordless vocal on the theme tune to The Saint. Les Hurdle ended up playing with Giorgio Moroder‘s band in Munich when Donna Summer turned up and disco was born. And this particular piece – called Left Bank Two – was an afterthought on one of those De Wolfe sessions in 1963, at the end of the day with half an hour still on the clock – I love these stories, this one reminiscent of Otis Redding’s big break – “has anyone got anything we can play here?”
It was young vibes player Wayne Hill who offered ‘a thing he’d been playing around with’. The group of Dutch musicians with whom he was playing (who called themselves The Noveltones) quickly learned it and recorded the vibraphone-led piece. Carefully listening musos will hear the guitarist having a slight crisis over chords towards the end, the only clue to the tune’s end-of-session nativity. TV viewers would never get to hear that anyway since The Gallery would only last a minute usually. Seemed longer though didn’t it ? A minute is a long time on television…
I bought a vibraphone in 2004 once The Brighton Beach Boys had decided to perform Pet Sounds live. There is one tune on that LP which requires vibes, and although my keyboard has a good vibes sample, the visual of seeing someone strike the keys with beaters as Darian Sahanaja had done with the Brian WilsonBand earlier that year had stuck with me. I want to be him, I thought. I wanted to play vibes on Let’s Go Away For A While. I’ll save it for another post. But the first tune I attempted to play, once I’d set it up and worked out how to use the foot-pedal, was the Vision On Gallery Theme. Of course ! And wheeling it into rehearsal with the Brighton Beach Boys, everyone wanted a go, and I think almost everyone wanted to play that tune. Maybe it was just me ;-0
Live in St George’s – my Penny Lane vibes – concentration is key !
My vibraphone currently resides in the Charlotte Glasson Musical Museum of Earthly Recollections in Brighton’s sexy Surrey Street, being carefully nurtured and oiled.
Morph
Tony Hart is a children’s TV legend. An early (ie before my time) Blue Peter presenter, he designed the logo for the Blue Peter badge, and took a buy-out rather than the requested 1d per badge. After Vision On was discontinued in 1976 would go on to use Left Bank Two as the theme music for his next show Take Hart, and John Williams‘ Deer Hunter Theme Cavatina would take over as the Gallery Music. He often appeared alongside Aardman Animations creation Morph in the late 70s and 80s until he retired with two Baftas in 2001. Tony Hart died in 2006, his reputation unbesmirched like others of his generation.
Left Bank Two – the Vision On Gallery Theme – is often referred to as ‘easy-listening music’ or even ‘elevator music’. It’s library music. It’s TV theme music. And – yes – it’s jazz.
Actually I was wrong – it wasn’t Al Green, it was Desmond Dekker surely. We didn’t really know what he was on about ’til we were older, but Israelites reached Number One in the hit parade in Britain in May 1969, the first Jamaican ska song to reach that lofty pinnacle. (Milly Small‘s cover of My Boy Lollipop reached Number Two in 1964). Desmond Dekker had irresistible syncopated rhythms and cool rude boy threads – and an extremely visceral way of shaping his words (whatever they were!) – I was eleven years old and transfixed. So was my mum. We were living in a house in the deep Sussex countryside between Lewes & Eastbourne just north of Bo-Peep Hill in Selmeston.
view from Bo-Peep Hill towards Selmeston
Dad had left some 3 years previously and was living in Eastbourne, we saw him once a week – I think – maybe once a fortnight – on Saturdays, walking up to Beachy Head, coming back in time for the football results. Paul and I did anyway, Andrew was only 3 years old then. The whole country went Desmond Dekker crazy though. It was a phenomenon.
Ska had been around in Jamaica since at least 1961, some say earlier. Prince Buster, Ernest Ranglin, Laurel Aitken, Jimmy Ciff, Duke Reid, Derrick Morgan, Toots & The Maytals, The Skatalites were all there at the beginnings. Laurel Aitken had the UK’s first single release on Blue Beat Records, a song called Boogie Beat which was a kind of loose R&B shuffle with the guitar on the off-beat, embryonic ska. The more choppy sound we associate with classic Jamaican ska came later with singles like Guns Of Navarone by The Skatalites and Al Capone by Prince Buster.
Desmond Dekker signed with Leslie Kong‘s Beverley label in Kingston Jamaica in 1961 but didn’t release his first single Honour Your Father and Mother until two years later, and a string of hits followed – all morally and culturally decent christian songs – until he recorded a song with Derrick Morgan.Tougher Than Tough was part of the rude boy trend – the court was in session, judgement was being passed, but Rudies Don’t Fear. This was ghetto life in Kingston writ large – and Dekker’s next song 007 (Shanty Town) made him an icon in Jamaica, was a hit in England in 1967 amongst the mod crowd as well as the West Indian population, and is rightly considered a classic. Despite it reaching #14 on the charts (the first Jamaican-produced song to reach the top 15) it wasn’t until 1969 that the mighty Israelites took the country by storm.
We had a cousin, Wendy, who was older than us and who would come and stay now and again. She must have been seventeen or eighteen when Mum invited her up from Portsmouth for a week, and they decided to go into Eastbourne one night to see Desmond Dekker & The Aces live on the Pier. Mum only told me about this quite recently. Amazing what you find out if you actually ask.. !
Mum had also decided that it was high time that Wendy made out with a man – she claims now that Wendy had never been kissed. I think they took the bus into Eastbourne along the A27, had a few drinks, then got onto the pier and saw the electric Desmond Dekker & The Aces in the flesh (I never did manage to see him!) then danced the night away to all the latest hits. I think they both found some willing snogging partners and stayed out so late that they had to take the milk train back to Berwick – about 3 miles from Selmeston. It was dawn when they started walking back, hitching a lift from the hugely embarrassed milkman, and getting a discreet worldly wink from Cedric the postman as they finally reached home. We were all asleep upstairs, none the wiser. I think Mum remembers that night now as one of the great nights of the 1960s for her, and I’m rather hoping that Wendy does too.
*
It was many years later when I finally truly established what the actual lyrics to the song really were :
Wife and a kids they buck up an a leave me
Darlin’ she said I was yours to receive
Look – me shirt dem a tear up, trousers a go
I don’t want to end up like Bonnie & Clyde
After a storm there must be a calm
if they catch me in the farm you sound your alarm….
Poor Me Israelites
It became like a magical spell cast across the radio, across the dance floor, bouncing out of car radios, in shops, a mantra of phrases that ring around your head. The rest of 1969 found us listening to The Liquidator by Harry J & The All-Stars, Return Of Django by The Upsetters (Lee Perry) and apparently (I never heard it at the time but older kids did ) Wet Dream by Max Romeo. When The Brighton Beach Boys played The 1969 Show as the opening set to Abbey Road in 2009, we did a ska medley of Liquidator, Return of Django and Israelites. Marvellous stuff. I played the keyboard riff on the first song which took me ages to get right, saxophone on the second, and danced like a rude boy on the third, thinking of early Chas Smash. Songs like Israelites reaching Number One in Britain is one of the reasons why I love the UK. You have to find these reasons.
Now Delaney had a donkey that everyone admired Temporarily lazy and permanently tired A leg at every corner balancing his head And a tail to let you know which end he wanted to be fed…
RIP Val Doonican. If you grew up in Britain between the 1960s – 1980s, he was a fixture on Saturday night TV. He had a crinkly smile and perfect teeth and the warmest smile on television. His daughter said today (2nd July 2015) that she thought no one had a bad word to say about him, that he was as lovely in real life as he appeared on television. Can this be possible ? I’d love to think so.
My own relationship with Val Doonican went from deep joy and abiding affection through to teenaged embarrassment that I ever liked him. Then growing ever older, childhood’s innocent honesty about what is good and what isn’t trumps the teenager, and just because 13 was when I discovered groovy music doesn’t mean that that I knew anything. Val Doonican belonged in that easy-listening Saturday night TV world, he sat on a rocking chair, he wore a cardigan, he was simply uncool. He was too nice. His songs were childish. Your nan liked him. He just wasn’t groovy !
But he was of course. First and foremost he was a musician. He worked for years on the Irish live circuit before eventually joining The Four Ramblers in 1951. UK tours followed, supporting the great Anthony Newley (who inspired a young David Bowie among others) and who introduced Val to his future wife Lynette. Newley also suggested that Michael Valentine Doonican go solo, so he did, performing for the BBC on the radio until fate offered him The Royal Variety Performance in 1963, aged 36. Billy Cotton offered him his own show at the BBC on the strength of that performance and he was – after seventeen years in showbiz – an overnight success. It was a story he liked to tell, and does so in the clip below, where I searched for an element of steel beneath the warm fuzzy smile. It’s there all right, look out for the moment when he silences the clap-along audience at the end of the song. Followed by that killer smile, crinkly eyes. The Irish charm goes a long way in England, and Valentine made a career of it.
His big hit was Walk Tallin 1964 – a song with a word of advice for everyone – be proud – look the world right in the eye – and Val sings in in a straight-ahead english accent with a slight Irish twang, barely discernible. It was a country song really, but I don’t think it was ever released in the USA. I remember it very well indeed – I was seven years old, my parents were together, we lived in a small village in East sussex called Selmeston, I had a younger brother Paul and a new baby brother Andrew, a cat and a dog and life was big and new. We lived opposite a farm and we could smell a strong mixture of creosote and cow dung that summer as the farmer painted his barn which was exactly opposite our garden, standing on a huge wooden ladder with a bucket of black goo which dripped everywhere and smelled like pungent tar. I loved that smell. The cow dung smell I got used to – country people will understand. What rose-tinted specs I have on as I remember being seven. Wow.
Val Doonican will do that to a memory, even the cow dung is coated is in roses. Later on in 1966 he had a hit with that great crooners’ song Elusive Butterly, written by Bob Lind. But perhaps he’ll be remembered most affectionately for the trio of humourous Irish songs which he regularly sang on his show – Paddy McGinty’s Goat, Rafferty’s Motor Car and Delaney’s Donkey. These were something else entirely – also in a country style, but sung in an unmistakable Irish twang that emanated from Waterford, his home down in the south of Ireland. These three songs undoubtedly contributed to the cultural English meme of the funny Irishman.
Briefly – Paddy McGinty’s Goat was written in 1917 by Bert Lee and R.P. Weston with two American songwriters called the Two Bobs. A song about a randy goat it was a favourite of Val’s and he put it on the B-side of Delaney’s Donkey in 1964. O’Rafferty’s Motor Car was written by Tommy Connor (an Englishman) in the 1920s and describes a car (a model T- Ford apparently?) which “used to be black as me father’s hat, now its 40 shades of green”. It appears to have inspired “Driving In My Car” by Madness…
Delaney’s Donkey is my personal favourite and complete with lyrical mishearings, despite Val’s perfect enunciation. Like the other two he affects a more Irish accent than he did for Walk Tall and gets the full humour out of the brilliant rhyming couplets and internal rhymes – in fact this song comes across as much like a rap than a song, a talking song, although there is a very strong melody line too. Music hall rap perhaps…
There’s a line towards the end : “Hogan, Logan and all the bally crew…” which seared deep into my subconscious, probably because of the other words I might choose to use instead of “bally“. Another line : “A grip like a Scotsman on a five pound note” – oh how we laughed at kindly smiley Val as he allowed us to enjoy these stereotypes! A different time…
I also always thought it was called “The Lady’s Donkey”. Still sounds like that !
But the song is pure joy, the love of language, the story that the whole town is trying to get this donkey to run, “they might as well have tried to push the Town Hall down”. Enjoy this clip – it was on The Guardian obituary today, but much as I hate to be fashionable or repeat someone else’s choices, it’s a brilliant clip. Enjoy, and Val – rest in peace. We loved you.
He was a cowboy in a black hat and a black shirt. He didn’t have a name. Played by James Drury for nine years between 1962 and 1971 he was The Virginian. Blond blue-eyed Doug McClure playing Trampas became the star of the show with more back-story and affection than the mysterious Virginian. We tuned in like clockwork. This was the imprinting of young minds with propaganda – how the west was won, with hard work and punch-ups, no black people or chinese, a few dodgy characters here and there, but The Virginian always won the day, tidied them away and restored calm and peace on the ranch. How we longed for the world to be like that. A key show in my village youth, both in black and white and later in colour.
And of course the show became the fertiliser for my cowboy games with Steven Criddle in the village fields and barns, using bits of wood as rifles and shotguns, running behind bales of straw and hay to avoid those pesky arrows being fired from the Comanche or Sioux raiders. Peeeow ! went the imaginary bullets. We ducked, scrambled, shimmied along on our bellies, made frantic hand signals from behind tractors and hedges. Steven Criddle’s house was full of dogs. He lived nearest to the railway at the bottom end of the village. It was a busy house, full of people, his mum, his dad, other kids, and pugs, loads of pugs and puppies. We would cycle from his house over the railway line and into the far-flung territory of Chalvington and Ripe, finding streams to fish in, learning the network of country roads. The more complex army games would be in Selmeston itself, and probably took over from cowboy games when we were about 9 years old. Against The Germans of course. Still fighting World War 2 in my village in 1966.
Now I’m a grown up cowboy I can see what a one-sided view we were all given. In 1971 Soldier Blue came out but I’ve never seen it. Buffy Saint Marie did the haunting song. We all became aware of the story of the United States being drenched in blood. And it was a story that we had started back in 1504, in Virginia, a story re-told in Terrence Malick’s outstanding film The New World. Growing up, we had Bonanza, Rawhide and The Virginian. Films like The Big Country, High Noon, My Darling Clementine, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, Cat Ballou. All had these sweeping soundtracks which seem to my untrained ear to be linked in some vague musical way. Stephen Wrigley would know the answer to this – maybe they’re all major chords with 6ths or something, anyway, by the late 60s and 1970s the spaghetti western took over, darker stories with darker characters, with outstanding soundtracks by Ennio Morricone. The Wild Bunch directed by the great Sam Peckinpah, McCabe and Mrs Miller directed by Robert Altman, The Outlaw Josey Wales directed by Clint Eastwood are all among my favourite films. The western always had a basic appeal to me, the scenery, the scenario.
Percy Faith wrote the music for The Virginian. A Canadian bandleader and orchestrator, he became known as the king of easy-listening, softening the big-band arrangements of the swing era and heralding a new era of pipe-and-slippers lounge music. This music dominated “The Light Programme” on the BBC which pre-dated Radio 2 – the kind of music you simply have to hate when you’re a teenager – gentle light arrangements of famous tunes, elevator music, stuff that Brian Eno would be getting into by the mid 1970s, but which Percy Faith was exploring in the 1950s. Theme From A Summer Place was his big hit in 1960, but there are many many great tunes including this evergreen theme song from the hit TV show The Virginian. I could write at least a dozen different pages for TV theme songs for some of them are simply outstanding, but this one I believe is head and shoulders above the rest.
Percy Faith wrote the music for The Virginian. A Canadian bandleader and orchestrator, he became known as the king of easy-listening, softening the big-band arrangements of the swing era and heralding a new era of pipe-and-slippers lounge music. This music dominated “The Light Programme” on the BBC which pre-dated Radio 2 – the kind of music you simply have to hate when you’re a teenager – gentle light arrangements of famous tunes, elevator music, stuff that Brian Eno would be getting into by the mid 1970s, but which Percy Faith was exploring in the 1950s. Theme From A Summer Place was his big hit in 1960, but there are many many great tunes including this evergreen theme song from the hit TV show The Virginian. I could write at least a dozen different pages for TV theme songs for some of them are simply outstanding, but this one I believe is head and shoulders above the rest.
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