Song 1: Vincent by Don McLean
I was seven years old when this song came out in the UK, and in retrospect it seems to be a very unusual song for a young child to become obsessed with. So what was it about this track that made it the first song that just made me stop, listen and think, ‘Wow!’? First and foremost, it is the ethereal, otherworldly sound that McLean conjures up from that first note. All you can hear is that unique voice, with no embellishments and no intros. It is pure, arresting and instantly recognisable, and instantly drew me in. Once you get into the song itself, the lyrics are designed to weave a story, sometimes factual, sometimes fantastical that makes you want to learn more about the person he is singing about. What is the Starry Night? Who is Vincent? Why did people not listen to him? I seem to remember that the Starry Night painting was used in an episode of Top of the Pops, although I might be confusing that with another programme. Just as this song immediately captivated me, so did the painting itself, the artist and the whole impressionist movement. I fell in love with the fire and passion of the painting before I had the slightest idea what it was about. It was many, many years afterwards that I finally saw Van Gogh’s work in the excellent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which I highly recommend, but Starry Night was very conspicuous by its absence. It is still a painting I would love to see close up. My Nana, who also loved this song, did tell me a little about the artist, and I got more information from my grandparents’ set of encyclopaedias. One of my clearest memories of this song is sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table in their small cottage listening to it on their radio. Like many childhood memories, it may be a combination of more than one event, or a misremembered event which became the real memory, but I know for sure that this was a song I shared with my Nana who loved all kinds of music.
So, how did this song change me, and what other songs did this lead me to? Well, it gave me a lifelong focus on the lyrics of a song as my way in to the music. My wife, by contrast is initially attracted by the music itself. I can, of course be captivated by music that is wholly or largely instrumental, and although I love ‘story songs’ I can find one word or phrase that gives me an entry into the song. However, ever since I heard Vincent at the age of seven, I have found myself listening to the lyrics first and foremost.
The next ‘story song’ I remember very clearly came along a couple of years later, in May 1974 when Alan Price reached the Top 10 with another track based on real life, ‘The Jarrow Song’. Yet again, the lyrics sent me off to the encyclopaedia to find out when the march was, and what it was about. For those who have not come across it, the song is a retelling of the Jarrow March of 1936 which took place in October of that year, and involved 200 men from the town of Jarrow in the North East of England marching from there to Westminster to raise awareness of the dreadful situation in their town after the main employer, the Jarrow Shipyard was closed down. The poverty in that town was grinding even by the standards of the 1930s and the march was designed to spread the message to other communities that the time had come to protest to the highest in the land. Despite being brought up in a staunchly Conservative household, and attending a private junior school at the time, it fanned the ember of a social conscience that eventually burst into flames in my 20s and 30s.
Just over 6 months later came the song that, to a very small extent, opened my eyes to poverty in the here and now. December 1974 saw Ralph McTell’s Streets of London rise quickly up the charts to Number 2. The verses painted portraits of people at their lowest ebb, but it did so with compassion and respect. It made me wonder in my own immature way what had caused those people to end up on the streets, and I remember being more aware of people living on the streets on the odd occasion I visited the capital. Sadly, the lyrics are just as relevant today, nearly five decades on.
You can draw a fairly straight line from the gentle but pointed lyrics in Streets of London to the more strident social commentary of the early 80s. That line, I think is all about discomfiting the listener and making them aware of their own prejudices and blind spots. I was not sure which of the socially aware songs to include, but there were two that really spoke to me at the time. First of all was Ghost Town by The Specials which has been a constant reminder of ongoing social decay and the way that the youth of the country almost invariably get the worst deal in any situation. It has been endlessly analysed, so suffice to say my interest in this track has grown over the years and it is one that speaks to each new generation. Second was Paul Weller’s second group, The Style Council with the outstanding Walls Come Tumbling Down. The track was urgent, visceral and fist pumping, and what a tune! The targets were timely and the barbs well aimed. It was a protest song that had more in common with late punk/early new wave than 70s social commentary, but frustration at the plight of people that had no access to the levers of power underpinned both. However, where McTell wanted to change minds, Weller wanted nothing less than to change regimes! I suppose that reflects different generations and different times, with the 70s being more about incremental improvements and the 80s being more about instant results.
My final song is by another 80s singer/songwriter famous for protest songs, but this is not one of those. It is the most beautiful and sympathetic love song I have ever heard, and one that always brings me to the point of tears with its beautiful chorus. As an aside, it only got to Number 37 in the UK charts, proving once and for all that the record buying public cannot be trusted! I bought it on our fourth anniversary in September 1994, but it has become more relevant to me and my wife as we have aged and reached the time that the fantastic Paul Heaton wrote about in this song. I said at the beginning of this post that I use lyrics as my way in to a song, and I instantly saw our relationship in the early years where we were young and wrapped up in each other. Then, this young man, barely any older than we were moved forward to the same couple decades later where the memories were brought into sharp focus by the awareness of mortality. This song speaks to me as perhaps no other does with 32 years of marriage behind us. If Vincent was a song about thwarted love, Prettiest Eyes is a song about lasting and deepening love and it really cannot be bettered as a portrait of lifelong affection. It is the perfect finish to this travel through the song writing loves of my past.
Welcome to 2023 and a Happy New Year to all of you. Last year was a year of growth for my blog, albeit from a low base to a very slightly higher base! I got a huge amount of satisfaction from completing #Blogmas and some of you were nice enough to let me know that they got something by way of interest and entertainment from some of those entries.
So, what lies ahead for 2023?
Well, I am going to review more vinyl, in my re-play series, more books both old and new, and more DVDS/Blu-Rays in my re-view series. Alongside this I intend to look back over my musical history, but this time taking a different approach into a project that I will call 10 Songs that changed me. In it, I will go chronologically, as I did with my Musical History entries, but each entry will be one single song that set me on a new musical path. I will try to explain what it is about the song that had such an effect, and to show how it led me to discover different artists.
I hope you enjoy the next 12 months on this blog. See you on here (I hope) during 2023.
We are close to the end of 2022, and, as always, our thoughts turn to what the next year might hold. Why do many people decide to use this time of year to reflect on what they have done and how they might want to change in the following twelve months? Has January 1 historically been the date of New Year? Why is New Year more important in some cultures? Why do we make resolutions? I decided to look at this phenomenon because I have researched Christmas exhaustively but never even looked at New Year in any depth. Follow me as I make my own voyage of discovery and find some answers to the questions above and some others that will arise.
The development of New Year celebrations
As with many things that have their origins in the era before recorded history, we can only guess at how people millennia ago even marked the year. Take Stonehenge, for example. We know that at the Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice, the large central stones frame the rising sun. In that sense it was like a giant calendar, but we don’t know if the Summer Solstice or the Winter Solstice marked the start of their year, if they even had a concept of the rolling year outside of the two Solstice days. Did the Solstice come as a surprise to them every year when it arrived, or did the priests have some way of tracking the course of the sun? It seems likely from the rituals passed down, presumably in the oral tradition, that the Winter Solstice marked the rebirth of the Sun god, but who knows if that was the way that druidic cultures viewed that time of the year? The rituals in cultures who adopted a calendar based on the sun focused their festivals on the Winter Solstice with decorations, feasting, social bonding and fire. By contrast, the Babylonian calendar set New Year’s Day in March, sometime around the Spring Equinox, whilst the Romans, who initially had a year consisting of 10 months, set March 1 as their New Year’s Day. That changed when Ianarius (January) and Februarius (February) were added to the calendar and, despite initially being considered to be the last two months of the year, they became the start of the year and January 1 became the ‘New Year’ as this was when Consuls were elected. Most European nations accepted January 1 as the New Year in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The UK, who had previously designated March 25 as New Year’s Day, held out against this until 1752, when they finally accepted it for business reasons. With everyone else on holiday, trade could not effectively take place on that day! Why was March 25 originally set as New Year’s Day? Well, the church set March 25 as the date of the Feast of the Annunciation when the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, because 9 months later was the date set as Christmas Day. As such, this was the start of the religious year for many people. New Year’s Day in Georgian and Victorian times, long since set as January 1, was the time when presents were most likely to be exchanged. It was 1974 when the final step was taken and New Year’s Day, like Christmas Day and Boxing Day became a public holiday.
In a number of countries, New Year is based on the lunar calendar rather than a solar one. For example, the Chinese New Year can occur on any date between January 12 to February 20. In Hong Kong, both the lunar and solar New Years are celebrated, but January 1 is definitely the minor festival. The Islamic tradition has an even more mobile New Year, given that the lunar year is 12 days shorter than the Gregorian Calendar used in setting the solar New Year. As a result, the date typically moves back 11 or 12 days each year, so the 2023 date is 19 July and the 2024 date is set as 7 July. However, for the purposes of this entry, I will concentrate on the celebration of New Year on January 1.
New Year in England
The celebration of New Year’s Eve in England is a relatively recent phenomenon that has become increasingly popular since 1974 when the newly instituted public holiday allowed a day of recovery from the previous night’s excesses! In general, New Year’s Eve is seen as a time for people to see their friends, having spent Christmas Day with their family. The parties that see the New Year in, tend to be alcohol and dance filled as people take a final chance to let their hair down before returning to work. In my teens and early 20s, prior to having a family, I never missed a New Year’s Eve party, but since having a family the events we have gone to, if indeed I have gone anywhere, have been in child friendly situations and at child friendly times. When I was in the RAF, Christmas Day leave was generally given to those with children whilst New Year’s Day leave was generally given to those without. I remember thinking at the time that this was absolutely right despite my love for Christmas. Where institutions are required to give a service covering every day of the year, that is often the model still used by those planning leave.
It wasn’t completely unheard of for some people to celebrate New Year’s Day with fireworks at midnight. However, it was the advent of the year 2000 which was perhaps the first one that had a fireworks display at its centre in England. Fireworks were more common in warmer climes, for example Australia, but since then the idea of a big fireworks display has gained traction. Many people welcome this development, but a large number do not, for the same reasons as they do not welcome fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, but it seems as though they are here to stay. For my part, I feel that the sounding of horns by all the boats on a river, a New Year’s tradition my wife, who lived near to the River Medway, loved, is a far more evocative and pleasant way to usher in another 12 months.
New Year in Scotland
Hogmanay is the celebration that takes pride of place in Scotland, over and above Christmas Day as it is of far longer standing. There are a number of festivals that have contributed to the development of Hogmanay, including the Pagan Winter Solstice, the Gaelic festival of Samhain and the Viking Yule. There are various Hogmanay celebrations across Scotland with the most internationally recognised being that in the city of Edinburgh.
There are some Scottish traditions that add a lot of flavour to the Hogmanay celebrations. My favourite custom is that of first footing. This involves the first person from outside your family unit to cross the threshold on New Year’s Day. They should carry items such as coal, shortbread, whisky and a rich fruit cake, often a Clootie dumpling. Good luck will visit the household if your first footer carries some or all of these items, and if that person is tall and dark haired. Why dark haired? Well, the explanation I heard is that if the person appearing on your threshold in the days of Yule was fair haired they would probably be a Viking raider whose appearance at your door would be the worst possible start to what could be a very short New Year for you!
New Year in Japan
The New Year is an incredibly important time in Japan, in a cultural, religious, and social sense. Christmas is seen as a fun festival for young children, but has no importance in anything other than a commercial sense. New Year, on the other hand, is based around visits to Buddhist Temples, family meals and a series of rituals designed to clean the house and its inhabitants both externally and internally. It is called Omisoka, and up until 1873 was a lunar New Year which occurred at different times based on the phases of the moon. However, at the start of the Meiji era, the Gregorian calendar was adopted to set the date of New Year’s Day as January 1. People clean their houses, bathe and pay their debts on December 31 in order to start the New Year completely fresh. Families eat soba noodles, typically about an hour before New Year arrives, which are long and associated with good health and longeivity. Temples ring their bells 108 times to represent the 108 ways in which people can fall short of the model behaviour required by Buddhist teaching. Japanese families will go to the temples together to see in the New Year in the most auspicious place possible. The Grand Shrine at Ise, the central shrine of Buddhism in Japan, is crowded with thousands of worshippers, as are the temples throughout Japan. I found the Japanese New Year meaningful, fascinating and thought provoking, everything the Western New Year lacked.
New Year in Australia
This was the most fun I have ever had as one year ticked over into the next. On three occasions I watched the fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, and on each occasion I loved it, which may surprise people who think of me as a curmudgeon when it comes to pyrotechnics! The atmosphere, like the Australian Christmas I described for Blogmas is completely different because it is the summer. We would head down to a viewing point, or stay in the parks where we could see the display unfold amongst people, like us, in shorts, t-shirts and hats. There was a real carnival atmosphere in the air and very little trouble despite the amount of drink being imbibed. If you were worried about your younger children’s bedtime, there was a slightly truncated display at 8.30 in the evening, allowing you to get them home for a slightly later, rather than a much later, bedtime. When I think of New Year’s Eve, this is the country I think of.
New Year’s Resolutions
These have a religious origin, and appear in many religions, most commonly around New Year. They used to be focused on avoiding sins, becoming more chivalrous or charitable or reaffirming their commitment to God. Nowadays, they focus, especially in the West, on becoming a more complete person. It is a very clear move from an outward looking process to an inward looking process, which makes resolutions accessible to those who have no religious belief. Many of us will try to give up bad habits and adopt good ones, but these resolutions often last for only a short time! A 2007 study carried out by the University of Bristol suggested that 88% of people fail to keep their resolutions, which is actually lower than I expected! What about me? Well, I still make resolutions but they tend to be open ended aims which might make them easier to keep. Mine are below so I might keep you posted as to my progress in 2023!
Happy New Year to all of you and may 2023 be full of fortune, love and success.
Hi everyone. This post is a #Blogmas bonus of sorts! Although my 25 day challenge ended on Christmas Day itself, I felt that a follow up was itching to be written. As it made sense to add the post to my Blogmas section I see this as Post 26.
Blogmas and its effects
When I put my list of Blogmas posts together, I thought that it would be a fairly straightforward set of articles. I mean, I was writing about my favourite time of the year and I pride myself on being something of an expert. What I ended up experiencing was a more emotional effect than I ever imagined. Some of the articles went into my personal history and the way that I have tried to make Christmas as good as possible for my children. I realised in a way that I perhaps had never realised before, quite how important it has become over the 30 years and more of family life. These occasionally silly things have become closely attached to how I see myself and perhaps how I am seen by others. Over the 25 days I revisited books, films and music that have had a huge impact on me.
My favourite Blogmas effect, however, came courtesy of my long term crush Isla St Clair, who told me how much she had enjoyed my post about her fantastic Christmas album! My 14 year old self would have been over the moon with that, and my much older self experienced a definite quickening of the pulse so the crush is still present and correct!
Christmas 2022
This year has been a lovely, relaxing time with my family around. I never take the time with them for granted, or at least I hope I don’t, but this year definitely seemed to affect me a little more than usual. By looking back at the amount my times with my wife and children has meant to me, I was reminded to live in the moment just a little bit more.
Thanks for the comments, the support and the interest. Happy New Year one and all.
So, welcome to the final day of #Blogmas 2022. Thank you to the readers who have read every article and thank you to the readers who have dipped in once or twice. It has been a very good challenge for me, as it has forced me to write consistently over the course of a month and it has allowed me to indulge my passion for Christmas. If you will allow me, though, I will add some personal reflections and my wishes to all of you.
This year, and indeed the preceding few, have been very tough for many people.
- If this means that you are struggling then I hope this day, week and year ahead bring you a measure of ease that you need.
- If this means that you have found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit, however you see that phrase, be gentle with yourself. This year, I too have found it very difficult at times to feel Christmassy, after an incredibly stressful year at work. Use this time to escape from daily challenges and rest up if you can.
- If this means ignoring Christmas, then do so. Social pressure should not be the reason you reluctantly take part.
- If you have become estranged from family and friends, don’t put pressure on yourself to rebuild bridges, as this is very pressure filled, but try to be open to any improvements in your relationship.
However you celebrate or don’t celebrate, my good wishes go with you today and in the future. Look forward with hope and look back at what has been good with gratitude.
And so, as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God Bless Us Everyone’.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 