Reflections on Music

I have always been tremendously influenced by music from my early childhood. For me there was always the experience of being taken out of myself into someone else’s head. What could be better than learning a song and trying to sing it? Well, to those around me, probably anything! My voice wasn’t the best but what I lacked in ability I made up for with enthusiasm.

Storytelling in song was always my real passion. The first story song I remember was Two Little Boys, a song about two brothers who, for some reason, ended up on opposite sides in a battle. It had a full narrative from their days as children to their days as soldiers and I really reacted to it. A couple of years later Vincent by Don McLean took me into the life of Vincent Van Gogh with a story which definitely went above my head at the time but which captivated me especially when I found out it was about a real person. Story songs were really big in the 70s but there was one that really changed me. It was Streets of London by Ralph McTell.

I was brought up in comfortable surroundings and the more precarious parts of life were hidden from me as from most children. If we read about tramps in a book they were either bad people or strange people whose predicament was either through choice or bad behaviour. If we saw them on occasional trips into London, we either ignored them or were ushered away. Streets of London asked me as a 9 year old to think about them from a completely different viewpoint.

The people on the streets were there through ill fortune and a lack of compassion that came from the very top of society. I know it sounds like I am imposing adult thinking on my childhood self but it’s honestly how I felt. The verse that really got to me, and still does, was the old man outside the seaman’s mission. He fought for his country and ended up being ignored by it. As the song puts it, ‘One more forgotten hero in a world that doesn’t care’. It was the moment when I realised that these people were just like me, just not so lucky. It’s an insight I have always tried to carry with me with some success but probably not as much as I should have done. However, that was definitely a song that affected me then at an impressionable age and I am really glad it did. Years later I was with my family in London. We had just come out of a pizza restaurant with a box of pizza slices we hadn’t been able to finish. My younger son, who was about 9 years old saw this man with his dog a few yards away and asked if we could give him the pizza. I was really proud of his compassion and the fact that he had even noticed someone who the rest of society all too often ignores, and Ralph McTell’s song came to mind straight away.