The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  The jukebox absorbed every sixpenny bit I could purloin from my parents. I watched as the record was selected from a rack and lowered into place; the toy monkeys strummed and hit their instruments and the music poured out, its effect thrilling, galvanising and immediate. The bright piano arpeggios at the start of ‘How Do You Do It?’, the strummed guitar chord before Billy J. Kramer’s vulnerable, needy ‘If you ever leave me’, and the bold, wordless hook of the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’: ‘Dada dah, dada dum dum dah!’

  The jukebox was in Eirias Park, Colwyn Bay, a popular seaside destination for summer holiday-makers from Liverpool, with its promenade, donkey rides, Punch and Judy man, and occasional brass band. It was hardly any distance from Liverpool to North Wales, but the latter seemed exotic, another country with another language. At the beginning we took the ferry across the Mersey to New Brighton, then a steam train to Wrexham. Later, after my father learnt to drive, we went in the Morris 1000, its registration number imprinted on my mind along with all those songs.

  The retention of the Morris’s registration – and that of its successor, a Ford Cortina, and of the family’s telephone number – is a child’s memory at work. I have had subsequent phone numbers that I no longer recall, and have owned cars whose registration numbers I’ve forgotten; I struggle to remember the registration of my present car. But a child’s mind is like a new piece of fly paper: things stick. There were records in our home that bore scratches – clicks and jumps – that I still expect when I hear the same music today, and there is something disappointing about their absence.

  Of course music is meant to be memorable, and pop songs instantly so. The three-minute song doesn’t have long to make itself known, so it typically employs a chorus–verse–chorus structure, a lot of repetition and a striking sonority or interval or melodic hook right at the very beginning. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is a perfect example of a song that nearly everyone can identify – or at least recognise – from its first chord. If you spent your childhood listening to pop music, you will be able to pull off that same trick with dozens of songs.

  Classical music is different. There are pieces with memorable starts – in terms of instant recognition, I suppose the fifth symphony of Beethoven is the classical equivalent of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – but because classical works are generally longer than three minutes, and can sometimes last an hour or more, our memory tends to recall an impression of the music’s structure, as much as its detail. I’m not suggesting that the average listener – even the average musician – will identify and retain a grasp of the key relationships in a piece, but the pacing of the music and the unveiling of its events in time leaves an imprint of its form on our unconscious minds. Sometimes, especially if we’re children, we follow a piece of music as though it were a narrative, hearing a story, even where none is intended. Parents or teachers will sometimes reinforce this by playing children classical music that really does have a story, so that when the child runs up against a purely abstract piece – Beethoven’s fifth, for example – she will transfer the technique and make up a story of her own. It’s not a terrible way to listen.

  In terms of memory, though, there’s another aspect. Beethoven’s fifth, which lasts approximately thirty-five minutes, creates its own world, and as listeners, we enter and explore it. We probably discover slightly different things each time, because there’s a lot to find and thirty-five minutes allows us plenty of time. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which begins fading from our hearing after just two minutes and twenty seconds, offers a different experience. Whereas the Beethoven symphony invites us to enter its world, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ enters ours. If we really want to hear the Beethoven, we put our day on hold, but ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ makes itself part of our day.

  I think it’s probably for this reason that old pop songs induce nostalgia in a way that classical music generally does not. A chance encounter with a piece of classical music on the radio might bring back memories of the piece itself – a Brahms intermezzo or a Mozart sonata one has not heard for a long time – but when an old pop song suddenly jumps into our life, it often conjures up the time we first heard it: a face, a place, even a smell. Play me Russ Conway’s 1959 record ‘Side Saddle’, for instance, and I am in my Auntie Edna’s front parlour. I can see the portable record player – red and cream – and the record with its blue-green Columbia label spinning on the turntable, I can feel the leather pouf sticking to the back of my short-trousered legs, and I can smell something sweet and slightly soapy. It’s a warm, welcoming smell that might be knitting wool; a lot of knitting went on in that room.

  It’s the early 1960s, and I’m living with my mum and dad and little sister Kate in a semi-detached house in the Merseyside suburb of Thornton, just north of Crosby. We refer to Crosby as the ‘village’, which indeed it was from Viking times until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the trains arrived. But even though it is just a few miles from the centre of Liverpool, it retains a village atmosphere. Sharing the house with my mother, father, sister and me is my maternal grandmother. My grandfather, who has died before I was born, was a blacksmith by trade, latterly bedridden with chronic asthma.

  Each Wednesday, we visit my father’s parents in Kirkdale in the tiny rented terrace in which he grew up. It is not an exaggeration to call it a slum – there’s no bathroom and only an outside lavatory, and the whole neighbourhood will be torn down in the late 1970s – but it is a well-scrubbed slum. Living with my grandparents is Dad’s younger brother Harry, who has Down’s syndrome. Harry was a late addition to the family, a replacement for Dad’s elder sister Jean, who died of diphtheria at the age of six. My granddad is a pensioner and has known a lot of unemployment in his life. He was a tram-driver at one point, but like many unskilled men of his class in Liverpool also worked at the dockyard, arriving each morning to stand in a pen with other hopeful men, while a foreman decided who would work (and therefore, in some cases, who would eat) that day. In spite of their circumstances, my grandparents always vote Conservative.

  On Sundays either Auntie Edna (Mum’s sister) comes to visit us with her husband, Wilf, and their two teenage daughters, or we visit them and I request ‘Side Saddle’. Quite a bit of my musical education occurs in that lounge, courtesy of my cousins. Sometimes they play the piano, but more often it is records, and soon enough Russ Conway gives way to the Beatles and other pop, and also folk, music. This is the folk-song revival, and my cousins have records by the Johnstons and the Watersons, Alex Campbell and the Spinners. We listen to them all.

  I wasn’t a discriminating child when it came to music. Perhaps no child is. I had favourites, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me not to like certain records. My parents owned a few – mostly popular classics and 1950s pop – and I found them all fascinating. I can see them in my mind’s eye spread across the carpeted floor of our living room: Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture and his violin concerto, Dvořák’s New World symphony, Smetana’s Vltava and two or three Brandenburg concertos, Ronald Binge’s Elizabethan Serenade and Hugo Alfvén’s Swedish Rhapsody, and there was a seven-inch EP of some of the character dances from The Nutcracker. I think these were all my mother’s. There were also Dad’s Frank Sinatra 78s – ‘South of the Border’, ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ – and Ella Fitzgerald singing songs by Gershwin. And there were one or two records of sentimental value to both my parents, such as the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman, the Powell and Pressburger film they had seen on their first date, and Gertrude Lawrence singing songs from The King and I, which they’d seen in the theatre in London on their honeymoon. I listened to everything without judgement, and played the Sinatra records over and over until one day, in my enthusiasm, I knelt on ‘South of the Border’ and broke it.

  My favourite music, however, was Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. It remains a piece that I like very much and find endlessly interesting. I listened attentively to my parents’ recording of Erich Kleiber conducting the Amsterdam Conce
rtgebouw Orchestra, hiding behind the settee during the storm, emerging for the ‘Song of Thanksgiving’. According to family lore, my mother heard me singing that theme from the final movement while pedalling my tricycle round the back garden. I was either two or three years old, but lest this be taken as a sign of prodigious early talent, I must stress that there is no other evidence to support that theory.

  Music also came into the home via radio and television. In the early 1960s, most households owned one radio and one TV set, so everyone watched and listened to the same things. There was a lack of specialisation in radio, which meant that a host of musical styles could coexist on the one station. On the BBC Light Programme, for instance, you would be as likely to encounter Frank Sinatra singing ‘High Hopes’ or Harry Belafonte and Odetta’s version of ‘There’s a Hole in My Bucket’ as the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ or a new song by the Beatles. Television was the same. Just about every evening was some sort of variety show that might feature any of the above, and each Sunday lunchtime there was a program from BBC Wales featuring the harpist Osian Ellis. I was transfixed by his fingers, positioning myself side-on to a dining chair so that I could strum its back with both hands and play along.

  When it comes to inculcating musical sense into a child and encouraging listening and singing, a parent’s own singing is more important than records, radio or television. In my mother’s case, the song list consisted largely of traditional nursery rhymes that doubtless she herself had been sung as a child, rhymes dating from at least the eighteenth century (in some cases the sixteenth) that any English-speaking child would have grown up listening to in the twentieth century, and many still do. I like these rhymes for their lack of sentimentality and their sense of the past. I don’t mean to suggest that they satirise moments of history – that’s fanciful thinking: ‘Ring a Ring a Roses’, which is popularly believed to list the symptoms of bubonic plague, does nothing of the sort. The past that nursery rhymes capture is that in which mothers and fathers sang the same songs to their children a century ago, and two centuries ago and in most cases three centuries ago. It’s a continuum that resists ever-hastening change, and there’s a lot to be said for it. Children, after all, are still children.

  At bedtime, Dad often recited poems to me – Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, say, or Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ – but he also had a repertory of songs that was both more modern and less suitable than my mother’s. He sang ‘Frankie and Johnny’, ‘Cool Water’ and ‘Goodnight, Irene’, 1950s hits that were among his favourites. He also did a fine, spirited rendition of Red Ingle’s ‘Cigareetes, Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women’, complete with the cod temperance meeting at the top. But perhaps you don’t know these songs?

  ‘Frankie and Johnny’, we learn at the outset, ‘were lovers’; moreover, ‘Lordy, how they could love’. The trouble was that while Johnny was ‘her man’, he had ‘done her wrong’. So, several verses later, Frankie shoots him. It’s a murder ballad, and as a very small child I found it darkly exciting.

  ‘Cool Water’ was darker still. In this one, the singer and ‘Old Dan’ pretty much crawl across ‘the barren waste without the taste of water’, mirages to the left of them, mirages to the right, until Dan, evidently delirious, has to be slapped out of a demoniac vision: ‘Don’t ya listen to him, Dan, / He’s a devil not a man.’

  But ‘Goodnight, Irene’ was the darkest of all, even though it was the greatly sanitised Weavers’ version of the song that Dad sang me, not the original Lead Belly song. There’s a verse that goes: ‘Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town / Sometimes I take a great notion to jump into the river and drown.’ It wasn’t that I suspected my father of having suicidal thoughts – I was only three or four years old – but I did find the idea of his jumping ‘into the river’ alarming and can still feel the alarm.

  But I loved Dad’s singing. When a parent sings to a child, there is a special bond. To some extent, the actual song doesn’t matter, it’s the sound of the voice and the fact that it is a command performance. It is perhaps the first and best argument for live music.

  My teenage cousins’ records were another layer of musical experience on top of my parents’ records, on top of their singing, and on top of whatever came out of the radio and television. Gradually, I came to regard their choices as cooler than my parents’; their tastes informed mine and were only reinforced when I started school. Pop music in general replaced most of my other musical interests, and I was soon saving pocket money for records. The first single I bought was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. What was happening, I suppose, was a temporary narrowing of my musical tastes. It’s maybe inevitable, particularly at school: your classmates all seem to like the same music, so you do too. At least it was the Beatles; a decade later and it would have been the Bay City Rollers. Narrowing of taste, though, is always to be fought against, because it narrows our lives.

  The fifth member of Auntie Edna’s household was her mother-in-law, Mrs Roberts. I don’t recall a conversation with Mrs Roberts. On our visits, she always seemed to be sitting quietly in the corner of the parlour – Dickens’s Mrs Gummidge in a pale green housecoat – and I wouldn’t mention her, but for a story that is illuminating of the way most of us restrict our musical diets.

  Mrs Roberts might not have said much when visitors were present, but with her immediate family she was happy to voice her opinions, which included a strong dislike of the band leader Joe Loss. Who knows where this came from? It wasn’t the music to which she objected, but the man himself. The trouble was that on television in the early 1960s, Loss and his orchestra were ubiquitous. Still, first they had to get past Mrs Roberts, who would want the TV set switched off the moment they appeared. In the end, Uncle Wilf came up with a neat solution involving a fictitious band leader he called Joe Low.

  ‘Is that Joe Loss?’ an agitated Mrs Roberts would demand to know.

  ‘No, Mum. That’s Joe Low,’ Uncle Wilf would reassure her.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ Mrs Roberts would acquiesce, settling down to enjoy the music. ‘As long as it isn’t Joe Loss.’

  Though mild enough, it was musical bigotry in a nutshell, and we’re most of us guilty of it. We discount certain music without listening – usually certain sorts of music – and, unless we’re tricked into hearing it with innocent ears, may never know what it is we’ve missed. I’d say the three forms of music most susceptible to this today are hip-hop, country music and the sort of stuff I write – modern music for the concert hall. All that’s needed for the bigotry to take hold is a single bad experience.

  Once, on a train in London, I ran into one of the modern language teachers from my school. He’d just been to a concert where he’d heard the first performance of a piece by Hans Werner Henze, and he was personally affronted.

  ‘I’m never going to a first performance of anything again,’ he sulked. It was as though this music, which he’d heard once and hadn’t immediately liked, had ruined his life. For me, the conversation was evidence that teachers are just like other people, and some of them are fools. But it also shows the difference between music and some of the other arts. If we begin a book we don’t like, we might tell a friend that we’re finding it a bit heavy-going or difficult to get into; perhaps in the end we give up. And isn’t it the same with a TV series? We’ll watch an episode or two and then leave it. Music’s different. It gets past our defences and sometimes, if we are not feeling receptive to it, it can seem like violation. But being ravished by music can also be one of life’s most intensely pleasurable experiences.

  The only ambition I have ever had was to be an actor. When I was a small child, the standard answer (for boys at least) to the question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was ‘A train driver’, but I always wanted to be an actor. Perhaps it was simply that I was a show-off, or perhaps it was an early manifestation of the artist’s need of an audience, which may be the same thing. At high school, when I was finally given the c
hance to act, it turned out I had no special aptitude for it, but I am still fascinated by what actors do and how they do it, by their make-believe, their ‘let’s-pretend’. I probably got this from my dad, who always seemed to know the names of the actors playing even the smallest roles in TV dramas and old movies. When I stumble across a Western from the 1940s or 1950s and recognise Andy Devine or Edgar Buchanan, Walter Brennan or John Carradine, that’s my dad’s doing.

  I was not an avid reader in my early years, much as my parents encouraged it (my mother was a primary school teacher). Instead, I watched television. My favourite shows were what one might call costume dramas: Ivanhoe (with Roger Moore), Sir Francis Drake, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of William Tell and, above all, Richard the Lionheart, a wholly fictitious account of the absentee Plantagenet king’s reign, in which he spent his time riding around the English countryside with a few knights doing good deeds, Robin Hood in a crown. You can find episodes on YouTube. Richard is played by Dermot Walsh, an actor so wooden he could give you splinters, but the program’s signature tune continues to stiffen my sinews. Like pop music, TV themes are intended to grab our attention and stick in the mind, all the more so when TV consisted almost entirely of weekly programs. You’d hear the music from another room and come running, especially, in my case, if the music meant that knights were involved.

  Knights were an obsession of mine to the extent that one Christmas my mother knitted me chain mail. It was, no doubt, partly an early interest in history – those summer holidays in Wales included visits to the ruins of once imposing medieval castles in Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech – but mostly I wanted to be a knight, or at any rate an actor playing a knight. I did understand the difference, as I sat watching Richard the Lionheart in my woollen armour.

  Accessorising was an important part of my viewing. Another favourite TV program was the Western Laramie, which I always watched with my dad. At least, he watched it; I spent much of each episode getting myself properly attired. Laramie had two principal characters, Slim Sherman and Jess Harper. Slim wore a grey hat (at least it was grey on our black-and-white TV), Jess’s was black. I had both grey and black cowboy hats among the dressing-up clothes out in the washhouse. As soon as Laramie came on, and it was apparent which of our heroes would be the main character that week, I was off to find the appropriate hat and get myself in character. If it was one of Slim’s episodes, the transformation was relatively swift: I needed my grey hat, gun and holster. Becoming Jess took a little longer. He was a tough-talking, hard-riding kind of cowboy, and the front of his black hat was generally coated in dust. I discovered that my mother’s flour shaker could simulate this with considerable accuracy, and so, having located the hat, would make a detour to the kitchen cupboard in order to complete the effect, before racing back to the television to catch what was left of the show. Fortunately, one didn’t have to watch the first part of an episode of Laramie to understand the basic plot.