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.