My Inheritance Tracks

On BBC Radio four every weekend is a one-hour show named Saturday Live. It's basically a live chat show with content suitable for an intelligent daytime audience, with one or two pre-recorded slots. One of these is Inheritance Tracks, where somebody you may, or may not have heard of, gets a few moments to talk about a musical track that they cherish from early in their lives and another track that they would like to pass on to future generations. So far so simple.

But when it comes to choosing my own inheritance tracks, so much harder. Not that I've been invited onto Radio 4 yet, but in the unlikely event that I am, I will be ready!

When I was small, I listened to the radio and the LP records my parents played on the radiogram. Some of their records were by smooth solo singers like Sinatra and Nat King Cole, which bored me. They were also into musicals and often went to see the newest movie or the occasional West End show. Some shows they had records of are now quite obscure, Irma la Douce and Kismet for example. 

Kismet had the most dramatic and. to my very young mind the scariest cover. The tunes were beautiful, remarkable and I always notice when I hear a snatch of them, not surprising when you know they were by Borodin. I didn't when I was seven.

But it wasn't a show tune or a great classical track that made the most impression on me. When we lived in England we had a big radiogram but sometimes we weren't in the UK. Father was a British Army doctor so we moved home a lot, the most far-flung place we lived was Aden. There we had a smaller portable record player. Some records came with us and we accumulated more, from the NAAFI, from Bhicajee Cowasgee which was the biggest department store in town and from passing ships, which included American warships. Aden was a very important international harbour in those days.

One day in Aden my dad came home with ‘Big Bill’s Blues’, an album of Big Bill Broonzy’s songs. I wasn't aware of the blues before, but Big Bill's rhythmic guitar playing and his straight forward lyrics, along with the great tunes appealed to me. One song stood out and I was just about old enough to understand. It was the beginning of my awareness of what was happening in the world outside my own nine-year-old bubble, and not just in my surroundings in Aden, but also across the world. 

‘Black, Brown and White’ is Big Bill Broonzy singing, in a very deliberately calm, laid back way, about his experience of racism;

"They says if you was white, should be all right,

If you was brown, stick around,

But as you're black, m-mm brother, get back get back get back."

                            *

I've never forgotten those lyrics or the impact they had on me. Big Bill Broonzy's Black, Brown and White'  (or Get Back, as it's also known) is my first inheritance track, it changed my view of life. I became aware that things weren't fair, even out there in the world of the grown-ups. 

Black, Brown and White has to be my first Inheritance Track and I'm in no doubt that my second has to be another song with a powerful message. I've always thought the words are more important than the tune, it's why I'm a writer. Much as I can enjoy music, I've never been musical. 

I've been thinking a lot about my favourite singers, bands and songs. The Beatles also have a song called Get Back, but that's a story rather than a specific message. The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction is a message of defiance, so is Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well. Leonard Cohen has wonderful, meaningful lyrics which feel too intimate, too personal to pass on as my choice. Bob Dylan has plenty of messages, but somehow songs like Masters of War and Blowin' in the Wind are too pessimistic for me to want to pass them on. 

Then I realised I was going back to where I was, when I began choosing my own music. Not the Beatles but to John Lennon and his song, Imagine. Yes this song has been derided, even despised for its idealistic, hippie message, but the lyric is more concise and powerful than the Beatles biggest message, All You Need is Love, which was always, to me, a bit simplistic, 

"Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too."

  *

Those lines resonate more as the 21st century progresses and the human race doesn't. 

Imagine says things that I believe. 

So yes, I'm an old hippie, is that a bad thing? 

*

Kismet Album Cover art by Al Hirschfeld

Broonzy photo from Frank Driggs Collection/© Archive Photos. Photographer unnamed.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Imagine cover by Apple

Leonora Carrington's work now worth 23 million

Les Distractions de Dagobert, painted in 1945, two years after Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico, is a marvellous and exceptional example of her work, where surrealism and European mythology are mixing with the bright colours of Mexico. 

The painting has just sold at Christies, New York, for £22,500,000. Now there's a sum of money that Leonora Carrington never saw in her lifetime. She died in 2011 at the age of 94.

The painting was sold to the founder of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Costantini, who after the sale said of the painting:- 

“An iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert is one of the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art. This masterpiece will be part of a collection where, amongst others, two important works by  Remedios Varo and another record-breaking Frida Kahlo are also found.”

...if nobody speaks of remarkable things...

... is a 2002 novel by Jon Mcgregor.

I picked it up because I'd heard his name and heard of his 2017 prizewinner, 'Reservoir 17'.  I'll read that next, just ordered a copy,

but back to ...remarkable things... 

“This is ecstatic writing..” said the TLS reviewer of this book and they are exactly right.

This is a Breughel painting of a story, set in a street in a Northern English university town. The writing seems straight from the mind in free flow, freefall even, it reads as uncensored, unedited, unaltered and I hope this is so. When the ideas, the words just pour from the mind and onto the page and keep coming and keep coming it is a kind of ecstasy. Most writers will then take it apart, edit, adjust, re-arrange into something more conventional, more deliberately structured. More ordinary. This book is extraordinary. It’s not perfect, it is remarkable. I will read it again once I’ve got my breath back.

That's how I feel about the quality of the writing, as a writer myself. I'd like to think non-writers can enjoy the book just as much, it isn't a difficult book. I'm sure I would have loved it 30 years ago before I considered myself a writer. It's a rolling wave of a book, carrying you along for almost it's whole length with the anticipation, then breaking suddenly and shockingly, even though you were expecting a shock, before dumping you on the beach, feeling forlorn that the ride is over.

The storyline holds so many characters, few with names, but their lives on a street during one summer day are so empathetically detailed that you feel you know them all: 

The little boy with a red scooter who travels joyfully and up and down the pavement of the short street. The graduate student slowly and methodically packing his somewhat bizarre collection of possessions before moving to another student house. The married woman whose resident in-laws have gone out for the day and who goes to bed with her husband for a short joyful interlude  while their children play cricket in the street. The mischievous twins who spy on a neighbour doing his exercises in the nude... There are students, young couples, families, old couples... all play a role in the narrative. 

If I mentioned all the characters I would write another book. One girl student's narrative weaves through the others in first person and leaves the short, one day timeline, although all the observations are not hers. This was the one part of the book which I found slightly less satisfactory, her story was perfectly good, I just found it distracted from the ride. However it tied in with the ending. 

I won't say more, no spoilers. I love this book! Do read it if you haven't.