Of The
Spoken Word
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Of The Spoken Word |
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The sweet smell of warm vinyl and the clanking of the presses soothed me as I lay in the pram my father had fashioned for me from a go-cart. It had been jolted off its blocks by a stray dog and after gently gliding through the garden gate had rolled down the slight incline and come to rest against the gates of the Decca Records pressing plant, in downtown Battersea( London England).
Blessed with perfect pitch, my mother came to London from the West Country after winning a talent contest ( a beleagured attempt to give the Dorset Agricultural Show youth appeal. She faltered on the bottom rung of the ladder of success and landed with her legs in the air. My father was some ten years older than my mother and had served most of this time in a mental institution, finally being paraded as proof of the benefits of electro-convulsive therapy. As a public relations exercise my father was offered an opportunity to pursue higher education and elected to attend art college.Three years later he graduated to driving the fork lift truck at Decca Records - in this respect he was a typical product of art education.
After my parents married they honeymooned in Rhyl (Wales, Europe), winning the Pontins holiday camp talent contest as a duetting Adam Faith and Brenda Lee before returning to set up home in the shadows of the factory chimney. My father became increasingly restless and dissillusioned with his life and by the time I was born he had erected a ramshackle shed in the garden which served as his studio; he could be seen deep into the night, silhouetted against the grimy panes as he stood at his easel painting the dreams his insomnia denied him. Naked virgins in carnival masks leapt across the embers of dying bonfires while we slept.
I have fond memories of those early years when my parents would bring home reject pressings rescued from the re-cycling bin. Admittedly they were often warped or the hole would not be dead centre, and they invariably had the wrong label affixed but I loved them all. Dad would break out the homebrew and en-masse we would shimmy round the two bar electric fire until our little legs were like jelly - at least until the time my sisterís nighty caught fire, heralding not only the advent of central heating but a record player with more than one speaker.
My father became increasingly morose but a good tune could still see
him break out into a sweat. I, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly
frustrated by indecipherable lyrics and would often lie in bed at night
(the light from the garden shed illuminating the bedroom ceiling) and ponder
the relevance of the vocalists position.
One day, my mother brought home a double L.P. of Richard Burton reading
ëUnder Milk Woodí by Dylan Thomas. I was captivated by the beauty of the
prose and the clarity of the language but something was missing; words
without music were to me as meaningless as words without meaning. Little
did I know that an awakening,, a revelation of biblical proportions was
shortly to set me on a path which I would follow with missionary -like
zeal. A few days later I was sat at the dining room table listening
to Richard Burton whilst wrestling with logarithms when I decided to visit
the lavatory. Mum was in the kitchen listening to the radio and as my hand
clasped the newel post and I launched myself onto the first tread of the
staircase my senses were awash with a pleasure that grew to an intensity
not altogether right in a young lad. This was not due to the sound of Fleetwood
Macís ëAlbatrossí and itís proficient three chord progression, or Peter
Greenís melancholy noodling as his hand glided down the fret -board of
his guitar and over the finger fat of decades. Neither was my euphoria
due to the absurdly theatrical welshness of Richard Burton - but a combination
of the two, rhythm with clarity,
If only I knew now what I knew then. Who could have predicted that after
some thirty years of combining the spoken word with popular music, the
cultural establishment should see fit to afford me the opportunity to take
my mission to the Americas; but this is indeed what happened.
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