Entertainment For Lively Minds
Keep it in the family.
When I was about 14, my dad had a work mate who played and sang in folk clubs on "singer's nights". He came round to our house sometimes for tea on his way to a folk night in a pub somewhere, and parked his guitar, in its case, in our hall. Now I'd never really tried playing a guitar before, so I piped up with some interest, out came the guitar and a few rudimentary chords were taught. Trying to improve on that hesitating start has given me pleasure ever since.
He also passed on a recommendation for an album he'd bought by a new singer-songwriter from the midlands called Harvey Andrews; the album was called "Writer Of Songs".
My dad soon bought the album, the first folk LP of his collection, and I got the sheet music. With my first guitar under my arm, I played that record over and over again, sore fingers throbbing, wrist aching, barre chords buzzing as I tried to play along.
All the family loved Harvey's songs, rich with imagery, laced with a working class morality we all felt and shared. I took a cassette copy of it off with me when I first left home.
On every subsequent visit to my mum and dad's house, I played dad's copy on his stereo. It formed a musical link, a shared experience, going right back into schooldays, a token of our shared passion for music and my thanks for the start in life my parents had given me.
Years passed, and I bought my own vinyl copy, then the CD when it became available. My brother too had his own copy.
And still I sought the album out on dad's LP shelves whenever I returned to the fold.
Last night, Harvey Andrews played a gig at a folk club back home in Plymouth. I drove down and took my dad and my brother to the club to see him play. Harvey's 65 now, and my dad is 85. You wouldn't have known it last night.
I shall forever be grateful for the musical thread that runs back across the years for my family and for me, crystallized by that record, and brought sharply into focus once again last night at one of the best gigs I've ever witnessed.
Do any of you share my experience? Is there one special record that your family shares fondly, across the generations?
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Lovely story...
...but no I can't say that about music. Rugby maybe, and the introductions my Dad made in that would make John Inverdale envious.
Very poignant Vulpes
Unfortunately I wont experience the same scenario as my old man often boasts that the only 2 records he ever liked were Strangers in the night and Greensleeves. His opinion is that come the revolution all the music stars should be stood against a wall and shot - still love him though.My experience if it comes will be as the father in the father and son relationship - my son has reached 18 and i just took him to see Eels 2 months ago and since my wife will be out of the country next week i am taking him to see Springsteen. His taste is pretty eclectic and I am hoping that we will share some moments similar to those you described - we mutually appreciate quite a few artists however i cannot get him interested in either Elvis Costello or Richard Thompson.
Your dad sounds like a great bloke and more power to you. Thanks for the cd by the way.
Glad it arrived safely.
Play it to the nipper!
Jake
Vulpes, as ever you are so on the money a fiver should have a fox's head on it.
My Dad was a tremendous music fan, and one of my favourites of his modest record collection was "Jake's progress" by Jake Thackray - I remember as a lad marveling at his clever and slightly risqué lyrics and diverse songs with their incredibly sophisticated chords. I hadn't listened to Jake for years but after my Dad died I tried to play that old album which was sadly beyond repair. However, some serious loft archeology unearthed my teenage cassette of it, and with the miracle of modern technology I transferred it to CD. I can listen again to those songs recorded over 30 years ago onto a C45 cheapo tape and they sound fucking great. My own little boy loves them too - though he can't understand them yet there is something about Jake's music which says "love me" whatever your age or tastes. Noone combines funny/tragic/droll/social comment into one coherent whole better than Jake.
There's little by the great man himself on YouTube but this clip had me reaching for the kleenex - sit back and admire one of our greatest and largely lost songwriters.
Anyone seeking to see what good lyrics look like could do worse than have a butcher's here
http://www.jakethackray.com/content/category/3/66/27/
I won't bore you with a load of reprints but "The Blacksmith and the Toffee Maker" is a good place to start. Oh, I mean "The Hole". No no, "The Castleford Ladies Magical Circle"........
Oops
I now feel an urgent need to carry out some in-depth research into the influence of Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly on British popular music.
Don't turn that dial. (Just run for the hills instead.)
Me too!
Jake Thackray was the one constant in long car journeys when I was a kid. Last year, I noticed that my parents' cassette copy of Jake's Progress was knackered, and got my mother a Best Of CD for her birthday. We stood around in the kitchen singing along and it was 1978 again.
'We've got no dark ancestral halls
No haughty portraits on our walls
No family monuments at all
Unless it's my cousin Sheila's
Stupendous cleavage'...
Braden: a name that is synonymous with infamy
That pernicious Canadian destroyed the Thackster's career - just as he did with Julie Felix's. Instead of being taken seriously as proper artists, they were processed into mere "And now...." musical interludes for a Sunday evening. This vile trade would, of course, be continued by Braden's nemesis and successor as consumer champion, Sir Esther Rantzen, who, with characteristically brutal, artless cynicism took Britain's finest female poet since Sylvia Plath and turned her into the nation's favourite yokel housewife, reduced to a three-minute slot between Mr Fletcher's misprints and the dog that said "sausages".
Bernard "Terminator" Braden: a legacy of pure wickedness that should never be forgiven.
His wife was very pleasant, though.
Another 'me too'
I've never shared my old man's musical taste - he's a church organist and choir master with a taste for light operetta, brass bands and musicals. I doubt he would have wanted me to either; due to my psycho mother he needed an escape from the house and found it in the music he has loved since he was a boy. (I found mine in books and rock music.)
The one point where our tastes meet is at Jake Thackray. I vaguely remember his TV series (I was very young at the time) and recently bought a 'best of' for a couple of quid in HMV. Finally, at the age of 40, I had to admit that my father did get one thing right.
Hmmm
Funny business, the genetic pool...... My Dad was a Cliff Adams enthusiast: Sing Something Simple, with a very small rack of LPs- Kenneth McKellar, Moira Anderson, Harry Secombe. And the Seekers. I won't say I have tried to love them: I have them imprinted on my psyche like a bad tattoo. My mother was a Val Doonican and Jim Reeves afficionado. Where did all my crazy accumulative living and breathing music come from? (No suggestions, please: a glimpse of my folks would confirm I could be from no other source!)
But, like Steve, I have hope thru' my kids. My son has a searching nature, hopefully as mine, and has sent me off into areas otherwise under- and unappreciated, as documented many a time on this site. My daughter is at least exhaustive in her loves, with as fine (?) a collection of Spice Girls, Kylie, Take That etc etc as even Simon Cowell could covet, albeit "maturing" now into Amy Pintglass and whatever the current word for what I still call techno is.
Sadly, like Steve again, Elvis and RT remain beyond their comprehension, each lumping both into what they perceive, maybe correctly, as my love of dirges.........
They have even collectively soured Mrs Path against John Tams, as cheery and uplifting a jolly japester as one could wish for. Takes all sorts, eh?
John Tams
I played Harry Stone to my son as I think it is a great song and a fantastic piece of music which is also spiritually uplifting. What did I get? Nada.
Maybe when I die and he inherits my cd collection he will hear it again and shed a tear. Or maybe not!!