A Case of Proud Father Syndrome

(from 2019)

For a number of years Rachael was good enough to promote the work of Amy Goddard, a singer-songwriter from England. I say “good enough” because I was the one who introduced Rachael to Amy’s work – which up until now has totalled three CDs, live performances on YouTube, and now the prompt for this post – a brand new album out at the end of this month.

It was one of those in-jokes on several levels because Amy Goddard is my daughter. So I would write things like – “I was invited by the family to come and see Amy Goddard.” “I’m told Amy Goddard is a music teacher.”  And my personal favourite, “I’ve known Amy Goddard’s mother for some years…” Amy’s mother and I have our 45^th wedding anniversary later this year.

There were other in-jokes too. One of my favourite songwriters was named John Stewart. Amy was force-fed John Stewart material on the car cassette player each day going to and from school, and the result is her latest album, which is a tribute to his songs. There are around 700 of them that are known, and she had to whittle the list down to 17. But in Rachael’s extended family there was also a John Stewart; there was even a photograph of him in a kilt many years ago on this blog. So there were in-jokes about the John Stewart who sang. And the John Stewart who – well – didn’t.

So why didn’t I own up to who I was? I was concerned at the time to preserve my anonymity. If it were possible to trace who I was, then my pen-name for this blog could lead to other blogs where I used a different handle, but could at a stretch be traced. I didn’t want that. Now, I don’t really care. On the basis that a secret is something you tell everyone individually, most who know me, actually know ME. I can’t see anyone else being bothered, and anyhow, I’ve never written anything anywhere that I’m worried about being “found out.”  I might be a bit embarrassed perhaps, but that’s about all.

Amy’s latest CD has one tribute song to John Stewart that she has recorded before. This is a new arrangement but the rest are her selection of his songs.

Stewart wrote and wrote. He sang with the Kingston Trio, who were huge in America over 1958-1963, and wrote Daydream Believer for the Monkees (whose version changed one word and missed the whole point of the song but who listens to lyrics anyway?) and had one hit of his own with Fleetwood Mac, called Gold. By then he was in his early 40s, and finally having a hit, he sang it on national US TV. He was obviously ill at ease, miming away with a tribe of scantily clad girls cavorting behind him (they shook it to the east, they shook it to the west, and then they shook it down south). It was not his finest hour. He almost had a breakdown afterwards and went back to writing and the folk clubs, his real home.

For Amy this project has been a different ball game. If you are a singer-songwriter, generally the project stands or falls by the songs. A brilliant songwriter with a voice like bathwater escaping down the drain (think Bob Dylan) can get away with it. Also, the fledgling singer-songwriter provides songs that no-one else has sung, so there are no terms of reference for comparison. But if you sing someone else’s material, then you can either sing it, or you can’t.

Amy can. Yes, I know I’m prejudiced – both in favour of her singing and the choice of material. So why not click the link below and try it? You can hear a single Bringing Down the Moon and a preview of the tribute album. In the preview you can even hear Occasional in there somewhere, but only a correspondent like the recent Boyo would recognise it and make rude remarks.

https://www.amygoddardmusic.co.uk/music

The Occasionals in Spain

(from 2019)

When contemplating this essay I decided to take a leaf out of Mr Arrowsmith’s book. Who? James Arrowsmith was a publisher. In the late 1880s he received a manuscript on the history of the River Thames. It was a boring travelog incorporating the history of England’s most famous river. The writer had thrown in a few anecdotes among the serious bits, and Arrowsmith ruthlessly cut out the serious stuff and kept the anecdotes. The result was the British classic Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. It helped Jerome pay his gas bill for nearly forty years.

I can’t rise to the heights of Jerome K Jerome, but I can avoid his original mistake. Because unless it is something historical (George Borrow’s Wild Wales comes to mind) no-one wants to read about places they can visit every day on their TV. Nothing turns a page quicker than a flowery description of ancient architecture. The Occasionals went to Spain and saw lots of it; but if you’ve seen one Moorish arch you’ve seen a thousand, and that’s about it.

For years we were not able to travel far because of family responsibilities. Mrs O lived some years in Spain in a previous life, working for a banned religious group in the days of General Franco. Yes, she is THAT old. Which means that Occasional is EVEN OLDER. But she had rarely ventured down to the south of Spain, so we did this special trip, six nights, three hotels, four cities, vino, paella, flamenco, more vino – to coin the title of a long forgotten film – if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium…

Mrs O was able to use her Spanish again, and I amazed myself how much Spanish I could remember from those heady days when I would use cheap holiday flights to get to visit her when we were courting. I was able to order drinks in a bar, point at things in the supermarket and ask how much, and even ask directions. The ability to remember the words for left and right and a few numbers meant I could even understand the answers sometimes.

Of course, now I am in my dotage I am trying to learn Welsh. But there is only so much of my brain that can cope with “foreign language”- and I’d start off with Spanglish and Wenglish and end up some horrible hybrid that no-one could understand – Welshspan perhaps? Or was it Spanelsh?

Our first night I confidently walked Mrs O into the restaurant to be shown to a table. The Spanish for thank you is “gracias” (and the pronunciation will give away whether you are from Spain or America). The Welsh for thank you is “diolch” (pronounced dee-ock). Somehow my Welsh-wired brain came up with the perfect combination “Dee-ass” – which when bawled at the waiter came over as “Dios” – the title of the Deity, usually used as an expletive. It was not Occasional’s finest hour…

Spain has changed since I was last there. Mrs O had taken school parties over on cultural exchanges when working, which was mainly a case of trying to keep the sexes apart and stopping the students getting blotto. But I was last there over 40 years ago and went on a train journey from Valencia to Barcelona, which I still remember as the journey from hell. But Spain now has decent railroads, decent highways, and a cost of living to match.

So – the touristy bit – we saw the one surviving Moorish baths in southern Spain – the Christians re-conquered the country and flattened all the others, since apparently Christians didn’t wash. (One is mindful of the famous quotation about Queen Elizabeth I of Britain – she bathed once a month, whether she needed it or not…) Moslems and Jews had actually co-existed quite happily for centuries, but when the Christians got the land back they gave them three choices – leave, convert – or die. We saw the Alhambra Palace where a strange hybrid of Christian and Islamic art nudged each other along with ancient graffiti.

Of the places we visited, Ronda, Cordoba, Seville and Granada, probably Seville stand out best, and actually for something from the 20^th century. They had a huge world class exhibition planned for 1919 to try and generate trade with their former colonies in the Americas. World War 1 put paid to that, so they worked on it until 1929. The Wall Street crash torpedoed it again, but at least the site was created. Huge parkland, beautiful buildings in various styles – still used by government and education bodies today – and of course by film companies. One – the Plaza de España - has appeared in Laurence of Arabia, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Its curved frontage tells the story of Spain with all the key players sculptured. People like Ferdinand Magellan (who was Portuguese) and Christopher Columbus (who was Italian) but don’t say it too loud…

So the time went very quickly. When you work hard and are on call constantly you often don’t realise the stress levels – until you stop. But we stopped in Spain. We had no real internet connection to distract us. A glass or three of vino and we were zonked. We piled in the tours, and came home absolutely shattered.

It was a memorable vacation. We just need another one now to get over it.

An Occasional Tribute

(from 2019)

I will always retain fond memories of Rachael. We corresponded regularly for ten years, both on history matters and other matters too. We emailed, we shared blog comments, and tweeted too.

One of my correspondents who contacted me back-channel could not believe she was only 41. He thought, from her insights and comments, that she was much older. She was a tenacious researcher who argued her point of view passionately. I must confess that I didn’t always agree with her point of view, but that’s human life for you, and I couldn’t fault her conviction and turn of phrase to express it.

In fact my alter ego, Occasional Reader, came about through disagreement. It was friendly disagreement, but disagreement none the less. Many years ago on this blog, Rachael wrote a long piece about how she viewed certain members of a religious group. She’d had some bad personal experiences. I couldn’t argue about her experiences because I wasn’t there and I felt for her, because what happened just wasn’t right. However, I did feel that others were being “tarred with the same brush.” I broke one of my own rules and decided to respond online and on the defensive. I was an “occasional reader” of her blog, so to preserve my anonymity, that’s what I called myself. Back came a lengthy well-written response on the blog. I still didn’t agree with her I must confess, but almost immediately. I decided that an open forum was not the place to discuss such matters and the conversation went back-channel.

Not very long after I was invited to submit something for her blog, as far away from religious history as could be. So I started writing – sometimes occasionally, sometimes frequently. Rachael had soon worked out who I was, and that was OK, and actually – being fairly adept at sleuthing – I soon found out her real name too. But I never told her or anyone else for that matter. She had a right to her privacy.

So the years went by. I wrote and researched for Rachael and Bruce and also followed up the quirks of history that appealed to me. I’d written on this subject for many years in different contexts, and had a wide range of contacts, but this project provided me some regular focus and continuity. We shared resources and Bruce and Rachael entrusted me with rare materials that needed checking.

On the pixie blog I learned about Rachael’s family, and their nicknames. I learned about her book collecting and library – a passion I shared. I learned about her holding down several jobs while seriously ill, being determined not to give in to the adversity of her medical condition until it was absolutely forced upon her. I learned about the goats, the family history back in the old country, and all the artwork of pixies and children. I learned about her eclectic music tastes, from swing to hymns to country and western (come back Marty Robbins, all is forgiven). I received and enjoyed Pixie Warrior. In return I told slightly exaggerated tales of our family’s doings, with an occasional serious rant on something interspersed. So Rachael knew of Mrs O, my wife Lyn, and also had her own correspondence with my daughter, Amy, who sings and records. We sing too, after a fashion, but Amy REALLY sings.

So it is the end of an era. I am sorry never to have met her in person, but the global village of today means that most of our contacts are probably people we will never actually meet. I put that right with some when I visited historic sites in America in 2014, and who knows, one day maybe a book will come out of that. But Washington State was just too far away, and anyway, I think the distance and anonymity suited Rachael still. We will all miss her.

O.R's Trip

(from 2019)

So the Occasionals went away for the weekend. Within Wales. Since they actually live in Wales that may not seem too adventurous, but the weekend involved a day-long religious conference that we normally attend twice a year. It has been fraught with difficulty in the past. For the last event we had torrential rain and many had to turn back before reaching the venue. We had come up the day before and were staying in the hills above the place, unlike those who were swimming in the valleys below. The time before, a year ago, it snowed. That was in March. We were stranded in a hotel in a borders town called Welshpool, eating expensive food and drinking expensive drink, and the whole event was cancelled.

This time, in February, we have been in the midst of a highly unseasonal heat wave, which made a welcome change.  The event was highly successful and we were exposed to total Welsh all day. My favourite Welsh expression has been “Fy pen tost.” Translated it means “My head hurts.” Even Mrs O was flagging by the end of day and she is a retired language teacher. Although her specialities, Spanish, French and Portuguese bear no relation to Welsh.

The conference was all day Saturday, so Sunday we left our farm house accommodation and headed for Aberyswyth, an old Victorian era seaside town with a brilliant University library, which of course wasn’t open on Sunday. So instead it was Sunday lunch on the pier. Dodging the waves that crashed on the seafront and which have trashed the town in years gone by. Then a visit to a Red Kite Center. Red kites became extinct in England and Scotland in the last century, and were down to about five pairs in one known valley in Wales. A special feeding and breeding campaign has restored the breed and there are three Welsh feeding stations that come into their own in winter. We visited the one at Bwlch Nant yr Arian near Aberystwyth and watched over a hundred birds hover overhead – making one uneasily think of Alfred Hitchcock and The Birds – before swooping down in formation, grabbing food and making off with it.

It was nice to hear all the families with small children speaking Welsh at the Kite center. When kids whine and demand food and the potty and parents bawl them out – all in Welsh – I can actually understand every word. It probably stems from my first experience of Welsh – my future mother-in-law bawling out her dog. So “sit down” and “shut your mouth” are Welsh phrases ingrained in my psyche. I tend not to use them with Mrs O though.

The Kite Center was in a nature reserve that was originally a site for lead mining. North Wales has its slate and South Wales its coal, whereas mid-Wales added lead to the mix. (Celtic Cornwall to the south adds arsenic and tin). All long gone, and nature – with a bit of help from European money – has transformed them. Out the back of my home is a huge nature reserve where once three coal mines stood. I’ve lived through the transformation. But Wales deserves it. All those years when the British Empire grew rich on the back of Welsh resources – and the native Welsh had to make do with pneumoconiosis and silicosis as their share. And their language stamped on with kids punished in school for using their own native tongue. It wasn’t surprising that so many of them took off for Pennsylvania.

So it’s been a good weekend. Now it is a mellow evening with Endeavour on the TV, a glass of red in the hand and a leisurely drive home tomorrow.

If Music be the Food of Love (again)

(from 2018)

We are currently in the process of slimming down. Not our figures but our possessions. But it seems never ending and no matter how much disappears on eBay, what is left still seems to overfill available space. But in my attic this week I came across some sizeable remnants of my record collection.

What were the first discs I bought?

They were on 78 rpm. It was a format usually produced on shellac that replaced cylinders and lasted for around sixty years.

Showing my penchant for high art from a tender age, my very first purchase from a piggy bank full of pocket money was the 78 rpm recording of Mel Blanc singing (?) “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat.” I read somewhere that he once mused that he wished he had done something worthwhile with his life, but being the voice of Sylvester and Bugs Bunny is not a bad epitaph.

Blanc was followed by such delights as “The Singing Dogs” and “The Runaway Train” – Vernon Dalhart’s version. When pop music started to intrude there was Buddy Holly burping and gargling his way through “Peggy Sue.”

But my real musical discovery with millions of other teenagers and pre-teens was the joys of skiffle.

In Britain skiffle sort of started with Ken Colyer. Colyer was a jazz musician who went to the States to play with the New Orleans greats, and promptly got arrested and then deported over visa problems. This gave him enormous street cred in the miserable monochrome Britain of the day. He started the trend for Jazz musicians to use a show’s interval for a brief foray into a very limited type of folk music which they called skiffle. It was usually borrowed from old American singers like Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and optimistically it involved all of three chords, a washboard and thimbles for percussion and a one-stringed tea chest for bass. If I were writing a thesis on skiffle I would hark back to the American jug bands of the early 20^th century. But I’m not. So I won’t.

I bought Colyer’s “Streamline Train”, then Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.” Donegan was an anachronism – he was old, nearly 30, and he wore a suit and a bow tie, but he did have a voice. Before he morphed into that most dreaded of performers (the-all-round-entertainer) he did some good stuff. Skiffle paved the way for the British pop invasion a few years later; the Beatles started out as the Quarrymen Skiffle Group. But coupled with hearing the Weavers on Radio Luxembourg during their McCarthy era blacklist, and then the Kingston Trio on the Capitol radio show – I was to be hooked forever on folk music in its various incarnations.

78s were phased out very quickly for vinyl 45s (although I seem to remember that Woolworth still briefly used shellac for the new speed) – so there was a very young Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Buddy Holly again, “Learning the Game,” Gene Vincent with “My Heart…” I was now in the era of having more of my own money and that is where it went. O the joys of teenage love songs and punk pop.

And of course vinyl Long Playing Discs at 33 rpm.

I still have my very first vinyl LP. Four Rossini overtures played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Eduard van Beinum. It was on a reissue cheapo label.

I liked Rossini. Most classical composers seemed to be so po-faced, so very serious, dying for their art and all that. Rossini was a hack. He pinched the best pieces from one opera and recycled them at the next place he went to. His overtures were regularly reused although they had no bearing on the new opera.

 I remember as a small child at school they showed us a short film of an orchestra playing the overture to “The Thieving Magpie.” It started sort of slow and ordinary, then built up a bit, and finally went ballistic at the end. I learned how Rossini wrote arias that certain singers couldn’t sing, just to annoy them. I almost added here that he was obviously a man after my own heart but actually I’m a pussy cat by comparison. Or as Mel would say – a puddy tat. When fashions started to change and he’d made his money he virtually retired and lived the sort of life for his last 40 years that you really wonder how on earth he managed to last that long.

So yes, my first LP, which is still there in the attic. I wouldn’t part with it. When I pop my clogs and they pore over my collection of junk this is going to be the Occasional version of Rosebud. If you have seen the film Citizen Kane that was Kane’s first prized possession, a wooden sled called Rosebud - the first word in the movie and also the final shot in the film as it goes up in flames.  (Orson Welles would later define this as an unkind joke at the expense of William Randolph Hurst but we will tiptoe away from that).

It all gets dead boring after that. Later were cassettes where you could make up your own playlists for the first time – I still have wall to wall radio drama preserved in this format – and then CDs. Our new car doesn’t even have a CD slot so that’s the start of a death knell for that format, so now it’s  a trusty iPod and streaming and downloads and all that.

But even now, nothing can replace the sound of bacon frying on a scratchy old 78 shellac record played with steel needles on a genuine wind-up phonograph.

Cambridge 2018

(from 2018)

So for the fourth year running the Occasional family behaved like superannuated hippies and attended the Cambridge Folk Festival along with 14,000 others. Last year it rained. This year it didn’t. The sun blazed down and we baked, cooked, roasted…

As always the festival for us started with a queue. The gates to the main center and campsite opened at 10 am – we got up at some unearthly hour to be in the queue from around 7 am to get our key spot, somewhere with shade but not too far from the rest rooms... So I sat on my camp chair in the queue for three hours and read my Times newspaper. There was an article on the front page that said that drinking four and half bottles of wine a week (about three times the recommended UK limit) will mean you are less likely to go down with Alzheimer’s disease than if you were teetotal. I read that again. It really did say that. So looking at the necessary provisions my fellow queuees had, it seems they were really taking that to heart, although the weather was more suitable for iced beer than red wine. Of course it could just mean that if you downed four and half bottles of wine each week, you might just die of something else before Alzheimer’s got you. Still it was a thought.

     What do we want?

     Better memory.

     When do we want it?

     Want what?

Or as no doubt I have said many times before; when you get to my age three things start to happen. First your memory starts to go. And the other two I can’t remember…

I always determine when I go away that I am going to catch up on so many things. So I took away a number of volumes that I had started, but not finished.

There was the detailed report of a conference on a religious group in which I have an interest. I assisted two of the authors with their chapters, but my particular interest was in what can only be called the lunatic-fringe. I did read some of that, shook my head slowly, laughed (sort of) before having another beer.

There was the latest biography of Jerome K Jerome. It was rather nice to find myself referenced in it, as I have written on this author on a number of occasions and supplied several chapters for a 150^th anniversary celebration book. (Pause to look smug). One of the first articles I ever wrote on this blog was about a school teacher, Mr V, in what the UK calls the juniors, who tried to read Three Men in a Boat and went red in the face and guffawed most of the time in front of a large class of bemused eight year olds. But that is how I started. There was a special second hand bookshop that I used to visit when returning to London and they put Jerome books away for me. Alas, like so many others, long gone. But I read a little.

What I really planned to do was to complete an article for a history blog on a fascinating character named John Adam Bohnet. He spanned crucial decades of a certain group’s history and whenever they (collectively or through individual members) found themselves in court, he would invariably turn up as a witness. But I lost my notes. When I am home they will turn up no doubt, but they didn’t turn up before we left for Cambridge, so John Adam is going to have to wait a bit longer.

What I did read at length, because it was on my eReader was Lying for Money by Dan Davies, subtitled How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of our World. It was both hilarious and sad in equal measures; from people being sold not-existent land in South America in the 19^th century, to the failed attempt of notorious London gangsters, the Kray Twins, to liquidate their book-keeper, to Ponzi schemes and huge business frauds of recent decades. One highlight was the American fraudster who used huge vats of salad oil as collateral for his wheeling and dealing. He was known as the salad oil king. However, since oil floats on water, the vats were actually full of sea water with about two inches of salad oil on the top. He got away with it for years. News of its crash and exposure was overshadowed by the assassination of John F Kennedy which happened on the same day. The subject matter was to be taken as “A WARNING” - or as a guide for future fraudsters.  Take your pick. I enjoyed it immensely.

Of course we came to listen to music and make music. As always, some was good, some was execrable. Perhaps the worst (and I won’t give a name) was someone who decades ago was a real wild child. More punk than folk, she used to cuss at the audience and spit. When you see the same person as a lady in her seventies with matted white hair, still cussing the audience and spitting – er, as the Sunday papers used to say when exposing “VICE” – we all made our excuses and left.

Of the good guys, we saw Darlingside again, who sing four part harmony with full instruments around just one mike – the technique for getting the balance spot on was amazing. Roseanne Cash (daughter of Johnny Cash) was a revelation. I knew her work because one of her biggest hits in the eighties was Runaway Train, written by John Stewart, although she didn’t include it in her set. But with one accompanying guitarist and harmony singer (her husband of 23 years) she made a fantastic sound. The CD tent was cleared of all her merchandise before I could get there, which tells its own story.

On a personal level I found myself roped in to sing on two different stages with Amy Goddard, and also to do a live interview and sing on Radio Cambridge 105 with her. I don’t know how many people actually tune in to Radio Cambridge, probably miniscule, but the program was to be beamed around the folk world on mix cloud. One weekend I am speaking to thousands in another context, the next weekend I am warbling folk songs into a radio mike. Weird. Positively weird. Ten years ago I would never have dreamed of singing at all. It is what is known as growing old (dis)gracefully.

So then it was “home James, and don’t spare the horses” which in our case was a five hour motorway drive with no air-con in tropical conditions for which the dehydrated Occasionals were just not prepared. Back to work, back to catch-up, and back to nearly keel over. I really must pace myself better. While carefully following the Times’ advice to ward off Alzheimer’s of course.

"Time"

(from 2018)

This is a very potted history of recorded sound, and the efforts made to produce a silk purse from many a sow’s ear. (Do they use that 16^th century British idiom in the States?)

At the start of the recording era, copies were produced from a master that didn’t last too long. So it was not uncommon for popular recordings for the artiste to sing the same tune more than once – and collectors to find tiny variations in different pressings from different masters. When the singer was someone professional like Caruso they could sound identical (or as good as) on every “take”. Things drastically improved when electrical amplification came in around 1925 and the process allowed for copies of masters for disc pressing. So alternative takes generally became out-takes and were unceremoniously dumped.

But moving forward in time some performers who had not been classically trained really struggled to get the finished product together – take after take after take. One tiny mistake would ruin the whole thing. You couldn’t change anything when the voice wobbled or the guitarist hit a bum note, or the percussionist fell over his cymbals. You were stuck with it or dumped it. With some forms of music like jazz it didn’t matter because no-one knew what was going to happen when they started – least of all the musicians - it was going to fly all over the place anyway. But for standard pop tunes, with amateur pretty boys and girls plucked from the street whose delights were purely visual rather than vocal, it must have been a recording engineer’s nightmare. There was a very funny parody of the music business at the end of the 1950s by American Stan Freeberg called The Old Payola Roll Blues, where a kid is plucked from the street, given a song to sing and prodded with a sharp stick at appropriate points to make him sound like Little Richard.

So for aging collectors and completionists, outtakes have surfaced showing the processes that should have been dumped but weren’t. Buddy Holly struggled to record the song Take Your Time. He was tired, he couldn’t see the words properly; he really didn’t want to be doing this. Several duff attempts at the song have survived on the end of other master tapes and released to fans. Then there is Gene Vincent, one of the most exciting performers in his heyday ever. He came to Britain as his career nosedived in the States, was dressed in black leather by Guru Jack Good (later responsible for the cult American pop show Shindig) and limped with a bad leg sustained in a motor cycle accident. He looked and sounded MEAN. I used to do an impersonation of him at parties in my misguided youth guaranteed to offend all the straight-laced parents. Anyhow, there are several songs – I can’t remember which now – where the number of takes ran into the 30s. Vincent used to down copious amounts of spirits each day, which eventually did for him from stomach ulcers at the age of 36, and that affected him in the studio (and on stage towards the end). Someone I studied scripture with (wearing another one of my hats) had been in Vincent’s backing band in “Rock across the Channel” – where a ferry boat went from Britain to France around 1961. It was full of teenagers dressed as Teddy Boys raving it up with Vincent in a full blast performance, then disgracing themselves in some French port and un-cementing Anglo-Franco relations. Vincent’s alcohol intake on that trip was legendary. And thirty odd takes to nail a song – a song that was rubbish anyway –became depressingly common.

So recording sessions could be long as increasingly tired, fractious, and probably drunk performers tried to nail down their latest track.

But then the whiz-kids got in on the act and multi-tracking took over. It meant that American guitarists like Les Paul could sound like an orchestra of sorts. It also meant eventually that you could record all the bits and pieces separately and if something went wrong, you just replaced the one bit. George Martin did this for the Beatles. And it advanced so that now you can just change one word in the middle of a line and no-one outside of the studio will ever know.

Which brings me – finally - to my own recording adventures and the word “Time.”

Now I confess that I am not a singer. But since that has never stopped anyone else, and since I appear under several pseudonyms and keep bits of my life compartmented, I have been emboldened to try. My daughter is a singer and musician and sometimes has this quirk of wanting the Von-Occasional Family Singers in on the act.

So, on her latest venture I was drafted in to drone an odd backing vocal and on one song to do a duet.

The song was written and recorded by John Stewart many years ago. I was a fan of Stewart and used to inflict bootleg cassette tapes of him on my daughter as I drove her to and from school, so I guess I only have myself to blame. 

The song is called Hung on the Heart of a Man Back Home, and is a real stinker to sing – even for a real singer. And over a very long career no tapes have emerged of Stewart singing it live. I wonder why?

It has the usual quirk of folk-style music (although this song is probably more country) of cramming too many syllables into a line. So the verse of the song that I had trouble with goes:

Spent our time mostly just laughing

Not enough time to name the day

ShouldhaveseenhereyeswhenIwasasking….

(gasp for breath)

Ever feel like running away

I had trouble with the word “time” in the first line. I was told it was a diphthong, so I diphthonged it – ti-eme – nah that was wrong. So time, teme, tahme, thyme, oh drat - polystyrene peanuts!.

So on a round trip of around 400 mile I have just re-recorded the one word, TIME, time, time…. Time and time again. The least-worse rendition has been plucked from the iPad, and sent via Dropbox to a whiz recording engineer in Detroit. He, I am told, will plop the word seamlessly into the rest of my line. The results will be amazing. You might even imagine that Occasional could sing.

Hmmm. Just don’t ever ask me to do it live.

Polystyrene Peanuts

(from 2018)

There are certain expressions that have been used by people when they stub their toe, drop a prized possession, or otherwise mess up. Not wishing to use the standard expletives, they find an alternative – devotees of creaky old movies may remember W C Fields and his “Godfrey Daniels” or on a slightly higher cultural level, Sylvester (when losing out to Tweety Pie) “Sufferin’ Succotash…”

Well, the Occasional household have just got their own, their very own - Polystyrene Peanuts.

It has a certain sound to it. And as with most of these things there is a ring of truth in it.

We recently bought some polystyrene peanuts. You might know them as loose fill chippings, void-fill, or something similar. Basically they are made from polystyrene off-cuts, and look like unshelled peanuts. They are used to surround and cushion fragile items when sent in the mail, so that the combined efforts of the postal system – store it upside-down, throw it across the room, crush it with huge weights and generally totally ignore signs like Fragile and Handle with Care – may still allow the contents to reach their destination relatively intact.

I have recently been selling a large collection of 78 rpm shellac recordings. This system took over from cylinders around the start of the 20^th century and lasted until around 1960, when vinyl and 45s and 33s took over. Interestingly, the old 78 revolutions per minute recordings – while they have the nostalgic background sound of bacon frying – have lasted a lot longer than modern electronic data storage systems are expected to last. But that is another story.

My 78 rpm recordings are religious in nature, from the days when an American preacher was regularly recorded and then taken around and played to people on their doorsteps. The message was not flavor of the month for everyone, and after a few acts of violence, there was even a famous American court case Cantwell v. Connecticut about it.

So these recordings are an acquired taste. But some collectors have this taste and who am I to deny them the privilege of paying me silly money to clear box-loads of them.

The problem is as noted above is that they were made using shellac, which cracks and breaks and warps in sunlight and is particularly susceptible to inferior packing. So – at great expense all these records have to be packed between layers of specially cut thick card, covered with bubble wrap and then suspended in a large double-walled cardboard with the aid of our old friend, polystyrene peanuts.

So far, it has worked a treat.

BUT – where do you get polystyrene peanuts from? There is obviously one answer – eBay. I started with small boxes, but they cost the earth and didn’t even fill one large box I was sending. But someone offered bulk supplies and for a ridiculously small figure, I could buy 30 cubic feet of the stuff. I did some rough calculations of volume and made the same mistake as the film Spinal Tap, but in reverse.

Devotes of Spinal Tap may remember the Stonehenge sequence – pronounced Stone’enge by purists. (Americans are usually rubbish at authentic British accents, but this time they got the flat Essex vowels off perfectly). This huge stadium rock number planned to have a huge model of Stonehenge descend from the sky at a given moment. Unfortunately the person who ordered it got his symbols for feet and inches mixed up and a tiny model came down to the stage and the “little children” (actually vertically-challenged adults) then fell over it during the instrumental break. I still laugh every time I see it, and Mrs O looks at me and sighs…

But in reverse, I had the vaguest of ideas as to how large 30 cubic feet were. I was either wrong, or the company just filled the largest bag available without worrying and sent off a removals van to deliver it.

I was out when it arrived. Mrs O was not. She opened the door to be greeted by what appeared at first site to be a scene from the original Steve McQueen film The Blob.

Just getting it into the house was interesting. Squeezing it along the hallway to then fill the downstairs rooms was an art she had unwillingly managed by the time I arrived home. The only thing you could say in the monstrosity’s favor was that the material was very light.

Where we were going to store all this stuff? The only logic place was the attic. Many years ago I built an enlarged trap door for the attic with folding stairs up to it. I know I have told this story before, but I am of an age where repeating myself is a given. Sawing away at ceiling timbers while balancing precariously on a ladder, working on my own in the house (which was both daft and dangerous) I actually brought the ceiling down. I watched in mesmerised horror as a small crack suddenly spread and with a huge thwack 120 years worth of lathe and plaster and accumulated coal dust came thundering down, taking me with it. My daughter came home from school to find her father sitting at the bottom of the stairs, doing an impersonation of Al Jolson, laughing hysterically. She joined me. We sat there rocking back and forth as if we were stark raving mad. Then Mrs O arrived home. She didn’t laugh.  I remember that very clearly. I also remember the grief of several weeks putting our Humpty Dumpty domicile back together again.

Anyhow, enough of past less-than-glorious moments, I now had an enlarged trap door to get through. But it was bad enough getting the stuff up the stairs in the actual house. We decanted huge quantities of polystyrene peanuts into the largest black bags we could find and a jolly time was spent getting them into the attic, snagging them on the folding stair mechanism, and watching as polystyrene peanuts in their millions wafted through the atmosphere to cover every available surface.

You now cannot get in the attic for huge bag loads of these things. Tools and suitcases and old guitars and forgotten books and the ghost of lesson-plans-past are all swamped by the stuff. And every time I sell another batch of records, I have to rescue a bag or two and make my way down the ladder to civilization without another burst bag and polystyrene peanuts everywhere.

The income from eBay is of course compensation. But Mrs O wants me to go back to selling badges – tiny little paper things, again going for amazing prices – but with not a polystyrene peanut in sight. I assure her that the 78s won’t last forever, but there were around two hundred of them to start with, plus multiple sets of some titles. And then there are transcription records which are 16 inches across… No matter how many I unload, at the moment the piles still look about the same. We may even have to send off for another U-Haul’s worth of void filling. But I haven’t dared telling her that… Yet.

Yeah – now wash your mouth out with soap d’y’all hear - polystyrene peanuts!

Josephine Tey

(from 2018)

In 1990 the British Crime Writers’ Association produced a list of the top 100 crime novels of all time. Obviously this was very subjective, and maybe the list would change considerably if revisited today. But top of the list, in their view the best crime novel of all time was one written by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time. Tey weighed in again at number 11 with The Franchise Affair. A sub-section The Whodunnit placed The Franchise Affair at number 1. And another sub-section, Romantic Suspense, had another Tey offering, Brat Farrar, at number 8.

Quite an achievement for someone who viewed her detective novels as “her knitting,” a hobby for when she was not concentrating on her real work as a dramatist under the masculine name of Gordon Daviot.

There have been several TV dramatizations of her work and at least three films – Hitchcock adapted A Shilling for Candles as Young and Innocent (1937), The Franchise Affair came out as that title in 1951 and Brat Farrar was given the Hammer horror film treatment as Paranoiac in 1963 (but wisely leaving her name off the credits).

But it is her command of language and dialog that makes the books special for me.

There was a biography finally produced for her in 2015 by Jennifer Morag Henderson. Going off onto one of my usual hobby-horses and tangents, the book could have done with some pruning. Inside 500 odd pages was a useful 200 pages struggling to get out. And as someone who has been proof reader for a number of writers over the years, it could have done with more work. You can get away with spelling to some degree today, because modern computers have spell-checks, and grammar and syntax can be very individual. If James Joyce can write Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy in Ulysses with virtually no punctuation, who are we to argue – other than mutter something rude about pretentiousness…  But a proof reader’s art is to spot where a writer defines things they’ve already explained in detail but forgotten. Or where the writer assumes they have covered something and in the final incarnation they haven’t, presenting you with a jigsaw with missing pieces.  A proof reader has to read the complete product from start to finish if they are to spot these problems. Well, the biographer of Tey could have done with a bit more of that. 

However, very much on the positive side, the book did solve several questions about her life. She was born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Scotland and as a young adult went into nursing and teaching, qualifying as a physiotherapist and PE teacher. But she had to give up her career in England to go back to Inverness to nurse her mother until she died, and then spent nearly 30 years caring for her father. As soon as she got her freedom after he died she was struck down with cancer and died within fifteen months herself. But over the decades, she got away to London on the railway twice a year by employing a temporary housekeeper and under the pen-name Gordon Daviot had a huge hit in 1932 with an historical play on the West End stage (Richard of Bordeaux) that made the career of John Gielgud. Three volumes of her collected plays were published after her death.

But then under the pen-name Josephine Tey she wrote a series of detective novels, especially after the Second World War, including the three mentioned at the start of this article. The number one winner of the best crime novel Daughter of Time has her main policeman stuck in a hospital bed totally bored out of his skull, who then starts researching the murder of the Princes in the Tower (c. 1483). Tey, through her detective, “proves” that the usual suspect Richard III was not guilty! The same plot device, detective in hospital solves ancient case, was reused by Colin Dexter with Inspector Morse and The Wench is Dead. Tey died aged 55 and could have written many more classics had she lived.

The biography dispels a myth about her last days. The usual story is that, knowing she was mortally ill, she came to London for one last time. She stayed at her club. She contacted no-one. What did she do? Where did she go? When her death was announced in the newspapers it caught the theater world by surprise.

In fact, the truth was far more mundane. She took a trip south to have an operation in a London hospital. While staying at her “club” sounds a little esoteric, it was an accommodation address for nurses, sharing premises with The Royal College of Nursing, for which she qualified from work during the First World War. The operation showed her to be in the terminal stages of cancer. She went back to her sister’s home in London, where the family nursed her for a short time until she died. That she’d planned to go straight back to Scotland after the operation is indicated by the fact that the water pipes in her home in Inverness all froze up without attention, and when the family eventually made the trip after her death, water had been pouring out of her home for some time and the neighbours apparently didn’t have a contact number. Much in the house was ruined, but fortunately not the manuscript for her last novel The Singing Sands, which was published posthumously. But the other tale with its hints of mystery in the midst of tragedy sounds better. As one of the last lines in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Because she was such a private person who never married there was an aura of mystery about her. A modern novelist has used her as a character in a detective series of her own, and portrays Tey as a lesbian. In reality, correspondence shows Tey rebuffing advances from a famous actress, and like so many she lost a boyfriend in the First World War, and her second love, a poet, died in the 1920s. History created a dearth of men for the 1920s and her situation was by no means unique.

So what was she really like? Half the fun of reading her books today is looking for clues, although different readers will interpret differently. I believe she saw herself as Marion Kane in the Franchise Affair (loosely based on the 1753 Elizabeth Canning case). Her waspish portrayal in the same novel of a predatory teenage girl probably came from her experience as a teacher. Her dialog of theatrical poseurs probably comes from her contacts in the 1930s London theatre world and shows off her skill as a dramatist – which as noted above she believed to be her first calling. But her plays are long out of print and unperformed; whereas all her detective novels have remained consistently available.

What the biography has done is send me back to the original books. One of my favourites, based on the phoniness of the London theatre world of the 1930s and 40s with a bit of cross-dressing thrown in for good measure, is To Love and Be Wise. I think I’ll start again with that.

A Tribute (Mom)

(from 2017)

In Britain she would be Mum, in much of America, Mom, and in Wales, Mam.  Mam also seems to turn up in a bad dose of the Al Jolson’s – down on one knee, black face, and a politically incorrect croon of Mammy…

I come from the UK, so Mum was the standard. My Mum passed away a couple of months ago aged 98, and those in the know made a few nice comments on this blog and back-channel.

So this is a brief review of her life.

She was born in 1919 to older parents. Her father was in his 40s, having risen to become company secretary for a very large Bradford concern. Her mother has nursed a sweetheart for ten years before he died of MS and was well into her 30s. They met during the First World War at a Gilbert and Sullivan choir practice in London, when he was down south on business and where she came from. He’d put on shows at the Bradford Alhambra Theater, and my grandmother came from a theatrical background and was a singer, accustomed to doing most the (cruel) older women parts in G and S. They clicked, they married, and along came a single daughter who was doted on and probably spoiled rotten.

Her world came crashing down when her father died suddenly when she was 13. Her mother got away from Bradford as soon as she could having never been truly accepted as a southerner, and finally settled back in London.  My mother grew up but then went back to the Bradford area by accident when training as nurse during the Second World War. (Nearly seventy years later we took her back again and met school friends she hadn’t seen since a child.)

My grandmother, when not singing became manageress of a large holiday hotel that put on concerts for residents. On a wartime family visit to join her, my mother met the compere and host and resident official comedian. He was a widower, in real life a company secretary like her father, also an entertainer like her father, and more than old enough to be her father.  Just the ticket. On his side he wanted to join a family he really clicked with and the easiest way was to marry the one unattached young female in the party. Remnants of that family still remember him with great affection, which is more than my mother did.

Hence my parents got married, both with totally unrealistic expectations.

As a child I regularly saw my father on the stage – “That’s my Dad” “Shuuush” – and both parents. They did a routine impersonating two well-known singers in the UK, Ann Zeigler and Webster Booth. They would announce that Ann and Webster had been booked, but weren’t able to come – so instead… My father would be in drag as Ann Zeigler and my mother would do a Vesta Tilley routine as Webster Booth. There was an old vaudeville act in the UK for about 50 years called Wilson, Keppel and Betty who did an Egyptian sand dance, and who kept going so long they used to change the girl playing “Betty” every seven years. My parents did a pared-down version of their act with just the two of them – I remember that too. I used to think my father’s act was wonderful (and my mother’s contribution not bad) – only later in time did I discover where he stole all his material from. (Towards the end I did some writing for him, which was probably even worse, but that’s another story).

Not that long after they married my mother embraced a religion that dealt in certainties. She still supported her husband in shows and an annual pantomime at a huge American air base near us, but now drew the line at supporting him in ladies’ night at the Masonic Temple, where he was Grand Master. Keeping up appearances and getting on in business were almost paranoid obsessions of his, and eventually he did a runner.

He used to say his first wife led him a dog’s life – he was a little careful about what he said about my mother to me – but his subsequent third marriage was equally unhappy for him. My mother summed him up as very funny on stage but a right misery off it. I suspect she had a certain prejudice by that time, but there was probably a kernel of truth in it.

Anyhow, this is about my mother. She worked full time for the religion she had adopted for several years and then as the sole breadwinner went back to nursing. She kept on nursing all her working life, ending up working in a nursing home where she was older than most of the residents. She loved her work and was nothing if not determined.

We moved from the suburbs back into London to care for my grandmother when she grew old, and there my mother met her second husband, E. I left home to do voluntary work as soon as I could in my late teens and I think that was an arrangement that suited all of us.

My abiding memory of my mother over the years was the performing. The meetings she attended gave a certain limited scope for theatricals, which she embraced with a gusto that meant you never knew what you were going to get. Quite often it wasn’t even what she’d planned – she had the let’s-drop-the-props-and-bump-into-the-scenery quality about her – but could improvise. When it was her turn on the platform we would settle down and wait for it.

There’s an anecdote I’ve told before on this blog a year or so ago, but it sort of fits here again. One of the religious meetings I attended with her was called a school. People rehearsed before an audience how they might approach different sorts of people with their message in such a way that they might get a hearing ear.

My mother was never contents with just doing it straight. She would dress up for the part. As a little lad I remember she had one special friend who we shall call Eve. They were often put on together. The audience loved it. You never knew what you were going to get. The intent may have been serious, but the results were often Laurel and Hardy.

We had one Hall on the outskirts of London that had formerly been a welfare institute for Railway workers. Using what was already at hand, it had quite a high raised platform at one end, and the backdrop was three large panels. The middle one was brought forward about three feet. It meant that you could enter from the rear, either stage left or stage right, walking around the middle panel.

So picture the scene. My mother appears from rear stage left and sits at a table with her props. She is shelling peas or something similar from that era, wearing an apron and humming a nameless ditty. Everything is lined up for the Oscars. Move over Marlon Brando, this is method acting for all it’s worth.

Eve is supposed to mime knocking on a door so that my mother can rise and greet her, invite her inside to then be disarmed by Eve’s presentation. Perhaps they had some illustration lined up that would fit the scene. Who knows?

So my mother sits there, humming away while fiddling with the vegetables, but starts looking less than pleased as long seconds go by. There are appreciative titters from the audience. They’ve no idea what this is about, but it looks like it will be a lot more interesting than the previous part of the program. My mother frowns, and in the loudest of stage whispers known to the hard of hearing mutters out of the side of her mouth - “Eve....Eve... Come on, come on...”

Nothing happens. My mother scowls. Now she could stop a naughty boy in his tracks at a hundred paces with just a glance. Next, she gets up from her table and with a look like thunder goes to investigate rear stage left.

The split second she disappears rear stage left, Eve bounds into sight from rear stage right, to be faced with a totally empty platform – no partner, and an audience now in hysterics. The look of first surprise and then panic that covered her face has stayed with me down through the years. The presentation never recovered.

The years went by and she and her husband left London and came to live near us. From this era, her granddaughter has a memory of being teamed with her – most unwillingly – in a sketch where an older person helps a young person to reason on certain matters. My mother made a big production of presenting my daughter with a notebook and pen, instructing her to write down the litany then presented. My daughter was of an age where she pretended to write and allowed her mind to wander elsewhere, only to be brought up horribly short by her grandmother demanding she read back what she had written… They used to time these playlets and ring a bell when your time was up. If ever “saved by the bell” was apt, this was it.

The group regularly put on social gatherings where different ones did their party pieces. (Some would be dire, some would be quite good, and as I became older and respectable I generally escaped by being behind a camera.) Well into her mid-80s, now widowed, my mother would recite Stanley Holloway and Moore Marriot monologues that Brits of a certain age would remember. I would be out there in worry-mode, mouthing the lines along with her in case it all went pear-shaped, but she remained word perfect and had the Yorkshire accent off to a T.

Her last years were sad. She lost her mobility, then her sight, then her hearing to a large degree. We fought and won battles with officials who can only tick boxes and watch their own backs to keep her in her own home as she wished as she went from using a motorized wheelchair in supermarkets (running down other shoppers) to a wheelchair we propelled, to permanent bed and carers around the clock, waking up only to be fed.

Everyone in the area knew her. Her very direct old-school proselytizing was well known, and even though neighbours didn’t share her views they would never turn her away and had a huge affection for her, and some attended her memorial service along with the carers.

For me, a history and a lot of memories.