Continuing the celebration of the 30th choir anniversary. From the magazine.
written by Andy Johnston
Our esteemed co-ed kind of asked if I wanted to write a few lines for the Winter Newsletter. He said that he’d still got my last bit on ‘something or other about Ireland’ and that it would probably be going in. It didn’t make it in the Summer Newsletter and I thought it was considered the ‘wrong stuff’, so I asked what the right stuff would be. “Something about music,” said David. “But I don’t know much about music. I’m a back bencher, deaf, and a bass to boot. Will something else do?” I had the impression that it wouldn’t do at all.
One of the wonderful things about music is that snatches of a tune, or a riff, can drag you straight back in time. It’s the same with smell, so I thought I would recall and a few sounds and smells that touched my formative years – maybe they touched yours too.
First, an early smell or two. Marmite. Rubbish sweets in a brown paper bag. Brylcreem. Carbolic soap at Infants. Your dad’s shed. Next door’s dog. I was reminded of one recently on a local radio programme – the smell of a rubber hot-water bottle. It takes me back to age 7. My bottle was shaped like a rabbit, and was a hand-me-down from my big brother. Do you remember taking the rubber plug off and sniffing in those heady, steamy, rubbery vapours? However, I’ve a confession to make – the first time the truth has been exposed in nearly 50 years. Although it’s scent improved with age, the old rubber rabbit eventually got the worse for wear. Then, oh no! one winter evening, a primal urge took over. I’d acquired a small penknife and I had been reading The Three Musketeers. I mercilessly put Roger the Rabbit to the sword with a daring lunge. It has been on my conscience a bit lately.
In the same era – the mid 50s, I fell in love with Doris Day and the magnificent Black Hills of Dakota. Our neighbourhood gang would meet in Jimmy Toolan’s alleyway and sing it over and over again. It was the same with “Born on a mountain top in Tennessee /Greenest State in the Land of the Free”. You can sing the rest yourself, surely! Time travel to that glorious evening in 1965 when the 17 year old goddess, Marianne Faithfull filled the 14 inch, black and white TV screen on ‘Top of the Pops’, and exploded the imagination of every red-blooded boy with those immortal lines “Winters almost gone, Oh how I’ve waited so long, for summer nights. When there’s magic in the air, And I don’t have a care, All that matters to me, Is that you are here And so am I”. Wonderful poetic words sung so sweetly by that vision of promise and innocence. It was a seminal moment in more ways than one.
Fast forward a few months to 1965 and student days when we smelled of Gold Leaf or Consulate and, though we would rather forget it, the pop charts still had ballad singers. Then along came glorious liberation and ‘Talking about my g-g-generation’ ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ ‘Maybe the Last Time, I don’t know-ow, Oh No!’ and ‘Hey, Hey we’re the Monkees’. Sergeant Pepper and Lucy in the Sky with Diamondsblew us all away and into the next life phase.
Some whiffs and riffs just do it for us, don’t they?
