Monday, May 18, 2020

20 albums in 20 days Miserere by Allegri and Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli performed by The Tallis Schollars

I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. However, this seems a suitable distraction. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentary is expected. However, this blog seems a suitable place to make a few comments and explanations on the album.



Allegri's Miserere

The first time I heard this piece of music I was driving over Kingston bridge. I had the radio on. The programme was Desert Island Discs. It was chosen by one of the guests. When I heard that boy soprano climbing to the high C I lost concentration and almost veered off the bridge. 
I'd never heard anything like that before. The voice climbs to a plateau. Or like a bow pulling back a bowstring, holding an arrow - ready to release.  And then the sudden release. Every time I play it, it takes my breath away.


Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli

The first time I heard this piece of music was at a party my mother threw in 1974 or 1975. Click here for a post that makes a passing reference to it.

In 1976 I became seriously ill with a rare autoimmune disease. Eventually, I was admitted to hospital for six weeks. There I was diagnosed, treated and returned home. Over the following few years, I experienced ever diminishing waves of the disease. Sometimes this required hospitalisation, sometimes I was sick at home - often for long periods of time. This meant I had to start and re-start college courses I was trying to complete. These years were unsettling and at times very stressful. One significant feature of this time was intermittent bouts of insomnia. It was pretty awful and I tried different ways to get off to sleep. None of them worked. Then one day I started listening to music all through the night. I was trying some way to distract my attention and release me into sleep. Eventually, one night, I played Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. I must have bought it after hearing it at the party I've referred to earlier. And I fell asleep while it was playing. I slept most of that night. 
The playing of the record when I went to bed became a regular habit, a routine, even a ritual. It worked every time I needed it. It was wonderful. But after awhile its power over me diminished. 
I stopped playing Missa Papae Marcelli. Its hypnotic choral polyphony became too elaborate and the multitude of voices began to stimulate me rather than lull me off to sleep. 
I didn't hear the name of Palestrina again until I went to Hatfield Polytechnique. That first year I shared a kitchen with Keith. And quickly we got on to talking about music. Click here for a link to a post where he's mentioned again.

Over the years I've realised I used music as a form of self-hypnosis. I've suffered from various bouts of insomnia and have found various pieces of music to help me and Katy to sleep. Click here for a post about my Sleep Music.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Simon Armitage on Desert Island Discs

So as I put the finishing touches to my last post, I hear this episode of Desert Island Discs. I have to post a link to it. Click here for the link.


20 albums in 20 days plus - Dave Stanley

So I've posted about a cousin - my own age - who introduced me to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. She also helped me get to know a little more about David Bowie. Click here for a link to that post. 
I've also told you about another cousin, six years older than me. He introduced me to Planxty and folk music, John Dowland and Early Music. He also played me Vaughan Williams, an introduction to classical and devotional music. Click here for a link to that post. 

But now I have to tell you about Dave Stanley. 

I remember the first time we met. It was at the Coffee Bar in 1974. 

The Coffee Bar was a youth club. 

My mother worked full time for Kilburn's Child Guidance Centre. She was a secretary to the team of Educational Psychologists that worked at the centre. At some point in the early 70s, she decided to change her career. I don't know if she wanted to earn more money or she felt dissatisfied by her work as a secretary. With her three children growing up I think she craved a more stimulating life. At first, she became a youth worker. I think this work was voluntary at first. Then she did an evening course run by the local authority. Suddenly she was a student again, surrounded by a bunch of people, young, engaged and interested in the world. They were people that had an interest in young people. They were all going into youth work.

Studying with these people must have felt like a breath of fresh air in the dull and static life she had been living up to this point. Her move into youth work would eventually completely change her career trajectory and her life.

At the end of the course, she threw a party or a gathering at our little house in Wealdstone. They all came. There must have been about ten of them. She must have asked them to bring music to play. Someone bought a guitar. Someone else bought Palestrina. Though that sounds really weird. Why would anyone bring Palestrina to a party? Click here for a post that expands on that short musical encounter.

We were quite an isolated family. We didn't have many friends. Our family life was mostly dull and uneventful. Then suddenly there was this party. Mum had mentioned she wanted music and I, of course, volunteered to play the music I had. I dread to think what I must have played them. The Pink Floyd would have been okay. Even cool.  But I cringe now at the thought of playing the Black Sabbath or the Hawkwind. Someone came to rescue the music. But suddenly I found myself briefly invited into the room. I wasn't a host or a guest. But I felt I belonged. I didn't stay too long.
Soon after the party mum told us she was going to work a couple of evenings a week at a youth club just opening up nearby. In fact, it opened just opposite my sister's school in Wealdstone. Whitefriars. The school was considered a real dump back then but it still exists and seems to be thriving. It's in Whitefriars Avenue in Harrow. There a couple of factories close by - Windsor and Newton and Hamilton Brushes. Apparently, most pupils ended up working at one or the other after they left school, aged 15 or 16. 

So mum went to work at the youth club on Wednesday evenings.

When she started there she invited the three of us to come down to the youth club.  Let's say I was 15, my sister's were 13 and 11. I think my sisters were quite young to be going there. Although I was the right age I was incredibly nieve. We had lived a sheltered and very protected life. We weren't really prepared for what we discovered there at the coffee bar. 

I imagine the youth club was set up to cater to the local secondary school children in the area. But the club was dominated by bikers. The majority of them were of working age. There were a lot of them. They wore black leather jackets and drove motorbikes. Thinking about them now I reckon they were skilled or semi-skilled workers. I imagine some of them were car or bike mechanics, some of them in retail, some factory workers. 
I think some still lived with their parents, some were lodgers, renting rooms in family homes or sharing flats.

One really important aspect of the coffee bar was the music. Rock 'n' Roll reigned supreme. The music was totally linked to 1950s-1960s, American Rock 'n' Roll. The music system in the coffee bar continually played music from that era. Everything from Bill Hayley to Elvis Presley to British Rock 'n' Rollers including, John Leyton who sang, "Johnny Remember Me" and the Tornados" Telstar." When the film, "That'll Be the Day" was released in 1973, that must have been a huge boost to some of the older bikers at the club. Perhaps the film and its fantastic soundtrack maybe inspired some of the younger ones to follow the lifestyle it chronicled. But 1962 was about as recent as the music went, "Shakin Stevens," "Alvin Stardust" - despite his earlier career as Shane Fenton - and "Showaddywaddy" were totally off the playlists. 

I suppose if there was one song that summed up that place for me it must have been The Shangri-Las, singing, "Leader of the Pack."


Dave Stanley

So we started going to the coffee bar. My sister was quite excited by the place. She seemed to fit in very quickly. She made friends with some of the bikers and a girl about my age, two years older than her. The girl went to the sister school to mine. It was right next door. 
I use to go down to the coffee bar at lunchtime. It was a bit of a walk but I was an outsider at the school. I didn't have any friends there. To be honest, I didn't have any friends at all. Although I didn't fit into the coffee bar like my sister, at least I wasn't being bullied there and perhaps here was an opportunity to start fresh and begin to make friends.
So on this particular lunch-time, I was sitting up at the counter and was eating a burger or a hot dog. The girl, my sister's friend, was standing next to me, with her boyfriend who had his arm around her waist. She had her back to me. But he must have been facing me. He said, "Can I have a bite of your burger?" and of course I said, "Yes." And that was it. We were friends. 

It all happened very quickly. He took me to my first pub. It was either the Railway Hotel or The Queens Head. He bought me my first pint. It was a pint of lager. I couldn't drink it. It must have been a Saturday afternoon. There was a whole group. They kept buying the drinks. There were 4 or 5 pints all stacked up on the table. They were all mine. 

I can't be sure how old he was. But we think he may have been five years older than me. I met him when I was either 14 or 15 years old. So he was probably 19 or 20. Thinking back to that time I think he was pretty messed up emotionally or psychologically. I don't think he had any friends his own age. He was an outsider. Like me.
He said he was an ex Hell's Angel. I wanted to believe him then. I don't believe it now. He didn't have a motorbike. Later, I remember, he drove a car. He had a black leather jacket. His hair was short. 
I can't remember much about what we did or where we went but music played an important part in our time together. 
He introduced me to The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Click here to read about that experience. And click here to hear the album


Then sometimes we'd go back to his home. He lived in Stanmore with his mother and older brother. For some reason, I think she had re-married. I never met her husband, Dave's father or stepfather, but I met, once or twice, Dave's older brother or stepbrother. Dave played me his brother's music. He was older. A serious adult. He played "In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson. I adored that album.


One night he played, Rick Wakeman's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth." I absolutely loved that record.  


Click here for a link to a YouTube to hear the whole album. 

I was like a sponge. I just soaked up everything he played me. I bought a few albums by Hawkwind. In Search of Space was the first one. I played it a lot. My interest in them - long gone. Thinking about it now Hawkwind seemed to embody the same values I had. But at some point, I realised, the music and the scene they represented wasn't for me. 


I also bought a few Black Sabbath albums. I played them a lot. It took some time to realise this music wasn't for me. The music seemed dangerous. Some of the lyrics seemed to feed my growing interest in the occult. This was Dave's music and I didn't feel the same about it as he did.


He became my best friend. We did everything together. He often came round to the house. Our friendship was intense. He became a family friend. 

But it was short-lived. Perhaps at the end of 1975 or the beginning of 1976, he became a Christian. We'd drifted apart a bit. He went away for a while. I think it was Scotland and when he came back he was a Christian. He was different. Whenever we met he went on about Jesus being my saviour. He kept telling me to invite Jesus into my life. He said Jesus would make everything alright. I had absolutely no idea what he was on about. It felt completely alien to me.

One day he invited my sister and me to a big Christian meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. I think it was a Pentecostal gathering. It felt alien and unfamiliar. The place was absolutely packed. There was a lot of dancing and waving of hands. The music was loud and repetitive. There was a lot of audience participation. People were praising God and shouting "hallelujahs!"

Then one night after this meeting I knelt down by my bed and prayed to Jesus. I asked him to come into my life. There it was done. I told Dave what I'd done. That shut him up. That was in early 1975. Nothing changed. But 10 years later in 1985 I did become a Christian. 

For a time Dave was my only friend. But things were beginning to change. In my last year of secondary school, I began to make friends. There were one or two lads in my class I began to talk to. And again music became the currency of our friendship. I remember we met up once in the record shop. They wanted me to hear this album. 

In the final year, the girl's school next door to our boy's school merged. We became Mountview High school. I began to make friends with one or two of the girl's. My loneliness was beginning to end. Slowly. 
The school doesn't exist now. They knocked down the 1930's buildings and the breeze block temporary huts, probably built during World War II and were still serving as classrooms in the 1970s.

In April 1976 we moved from Wealdstone to Kenton. I started work in Bond Street London. We'd stopped going to the coffee bar sometime before we moved. And Dave Stanley just seemed to fade away into adolescence. The past. 

20 albums in 20 days Blue by Joni Mitchell edited and updated

This is an updated and edited post originally published to this blog on 1 April. I've not been able to update the original post.

I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentaries are expected on Facebook. However, in these difficult times, it seems writing about these albums is a suitable distraction. I thought this blog seemed a suitable place to write a comment or two about the albums.


A long, long time ago we visited a cousin of my mother's. It was 1973. I was 14 years old. I had bought Starman and John I'm Only Dancing. So I was a committed fan of Bowie. But I think this story took place before Aladdin Sane was released. They had two daughters. One was a couple of years older than me. One about my own age.
I reckon her sister - maybe two years older - shared her music with her younger sister. 
I have an even older memory of visiting this family. We visited their house. I think in Kent. I remember hearing Down Town by Petula Clarke on the radio. And someone played - I assumed the older sister played Revolution Number 9 by The Beatles. That earlier memory might have taken place late 1968 but most probably 1969 when I was 9 or 10. 
Anyway, back to my later memory in 1973. At some point, we must have escaped the parents. And somehow lost my two younger sisters. Just the two of us, my cousin and me and a record player, a radio and a cassette recorder between us. This was probably the first genuine conversation I ever had with her. Quickly we found music to talk about. It's possible I'd brought with me my radio - a present from this very family for my Barmitzvah - a cassette recorder and a lead that let me connect cassette and radio. I remember setting it up to record the top 20 on Radio 1. That's possibly how we got talking about music. I remember recording, Roberta Flack singing, Killing Me Softly. After the programme, we carried on talking. She mentioned three names to me. Firstly, she said David Bowie. She told me about Ziggy Stardust. I expect she played some of the album to me. I recognized the song Ziggy Stardust. It was the B side to Starman. 



Then she mentioned Neil Young. Perhaps she played a bit of After the Gold Rush. Did I know the song before she played it?  And almost in the same breath, she mentioned Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and their album Deja Vu. Then finally, she said the name Joni Mitchel and I'm pretty sure she played me a bit of Blue.
A little time after that visit I bought, After the Gold Rush and possibly Deja Vu. But for some reason, I didn't buy Blue. I bought instead, For the Roses. Perhaps I'd forgotten the name. Perhaps it wasn't in the record shop - definitely Discoveries in Harrow. I played it a bit. I wasn't hooked then. It gradually collected dust in my collection. 
To be honest I can't remember when or why I bought Blue. Perhaps I went back to Discoveries when I had a little money. Or maybe I found it after they'd restocked it. Maybe I couldn't get the songs out of my head and just had to buy it. 
It feels like it's been with me forever. I love it.



So, I feel a little awkward about admitting this but I owe a significant proportion of my musical history to a cousin I've met less than half a dozen times. It's awkward because it was so random. The seeds of part of my musical history are rooted in someone I barely know. I haven't been in contact with her probably since 1978 or 1979. I don't think she really liked me. I think my mother's cousin looked down on my mum. Maybe they thought they were better than us. They certainly had more money. That can create a lot of tension within families. 
The older cousins - my mother and her cousin - lost touch with each other years ago. And so did the younger ones - me and my cousin. I think she carried a box of fruit to my hospital bed once. That might have been in 1981. That's the last time I saw her. There's something so insignificant and banal about our dead relationship. But there is this music that stays with me. It reminds me of her now.

I think Joni Mitchell is a musical genius. I love For the Roses now. She has that extraordinary voice, it wanders around fast and slow, high and higher. It often seems to follow its own course. You can hear in throughout Blue, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. And sometimes she has playing with her Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. Musicians from Weather Report and Miles Davis.