I got my first proper Christmassy shiver listening to this just now. There’s something about carols, isn’t there? Perhaps I will rejig the upcoming songs to make room for more carols. This is an especially pretty one, which I wouldn’t have thought of myself, so thank you to Susan for suggesting it. Susan is super fun and very kind, and a person I would like to be more like, because she absolutely knows her own mind and follows her own path, and as someone whose mind is changed about nearly everything every time I talk to someone new, I find that hugely admirable. She is also a Palace fan, and she has a brilliant daughter, so double points for all of that.
You know when you are small and you accept your family for exactly what they are, it never occuring to you that anything could be different? And then one day you realise that they are real people and you are free to like and dislike them? And the joy of discovering that the relations you adore because you grew up with them are actually also really super people? Well, that. This song was picked by my cousin David, who as well as being a blood relation and therefore naturally superior is, as it turns out, one of the nicest, cleverest, funniest people the world has ever made. So that’s good. He is also married to one of the sweetest and most charming people I have ever met (the list comprises her, my dad and my brother-in-law).
Yay David! Happy Christmas to you and Susie. Here is your song which, as it happens, is also in my top five:
I haven’t heard of all of the songs people have nominated, and of those I don’t know some are, frankly, quite weird. So I am glad that other people nominated old favourites, and Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song is pretty much the definition of an old favourite. Do watch the video as well as listening to the song, because there is something endlessly charming – something, despite his youth here, somehow grandfatherly – about the way he looks when he sings.
This song was chosen by Katie, who was my best friend at university back in the dim and distant past. Over the last few years we lost touch for various reasons, but then she turned up on Twitter and her tweets were so funny and cute that I remembered why we were friends and was annoyed that we’d ever stopped being. So now we’re back in touch, which is an excellent Christmas present.
I’d never heard the full introduction to White Christmas before, but when Lindsey nominated this song she specifically mentioned it, so I searched out this version and I’m glad I did, because it’s lovely – and, I think, more interesting and a little bit more wistful than the Bing Crosby version we all know and love.
I don’t know Lindsey very well, but she’s one of those people I immediately fall into conversation with whenever I see her, because she’s such witty and entertaining company that I can’t help it. She’s the sort of person you might accidentally confide in, but it wouldn’t matter because she would keep your secrets and make you laugh at the same time.
This is one of my favourites, and as well as it being a good song to start with, Tom is a good person to start with, because he is EVERYONE’S FRIEND. I have almost never met anyone as kind, open, generous and without side as Tom: when Tom looks happy to see you, it’s because he’s happy to see you, and he’s always happy to see you. He also looks after my little sister like a big brother, and although she already has one big brother, there’s nothing wrong with having a spare.
Happy Christmas, Tom. I don’t know which tune you prefer, so have one of each:
Forgive my prolonged absence. I’ve been busy getting married, among other things. Also, I always get lazy about blogging in November in the knowledge that when December comes I’ll be posting at least once a day. Yes, it’s time for the annual Gladallover musical advent calendar!
I ran out of good Christmas songs two years ago, so last year I changed the format and did a 24-day countdown of the best Christmas number ones from my lifetime. This year I needed a brand new idea, so a few weeks ago I asked my friends on Twitter and Facebook to nominate their favourite Christmas songs. I got quite a lot more than 24 replies, so I have whittled them down to my 24 favourites (songs, not people), and this year each day’s entry will be a song chosen by someone I know from either Twitter or Facebook, with a note on the song from me and also, to make it more interesting, a bit about the person who nominated it. Some of the people who chose songs are related to me, others I know in real life and some I don’t know at all. But I promise to be nice about everyone. After all, it’s Christmas.
I am cross with myself. I am cross with myself because when Davy Graham died three years ago, I decided I would make a conscious effort to go and see all the musicians I love best who I’ve never seen live and who won’t be around forever. High up on that list was Bert Jansch. I could have seen him performing with Pentangle at Glastonbury, but it clashed with something else, so I didn’t. And I could have seen them at the Festival Hall in August, but I had promised to go and see a friend’s band that night, so I didn’t.
And now Bert Jansch has died, and I could have seen him, and I didn’t, and now I never will. What an idiot. Here’s what I missed:
I am going to make a list, now, today, of people to see before they, or I, die. And I am going to post it here, and if you see any of them coming to London, please shout at me and tell me to go and see them. And if I say I’m busy that night, tell me I’m an idiot.
I don’t usually listen to music on the way to work. I read, or look out of the window; music seems a little too invasive and involving for that time in the morning. But today – with the sun out and the weekend looming – it felt like a day for music.
I put the iPod on shuffle and the first song it played me was the Magnetic Fields’ Busby Berkeley Dreams, which, as it turns out, is a terrible song to listen to on the bus, especially if, like me, you cry at the drop of a hat and happen to be wearing mascara. Fortunately I was also wearing sunglasses, so I think I got away with it.
Unrelatedly, I went to see the Pet Shop Boys’ ballet this week, and it has a stunning section in the middle which includes a kaleidoscopic dance, where bodies stop being bodies and become synchronised parts of a mesmerising machine. Of all the performing arts dancing is the one I understand the least, but sometimes it can be transfixing and transporting in a way that nothing else is.
Anyway, some dude on the internet has put together a video sequence to accompany the song, and since I can’t share the ballet with you this is the next best thing, just as long as you have your hanky at the ready:
I can vividly remember the first time I heard Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. I was fourteen years old, it was late July, or maybe early August, and I was in a field in Wales. I was at a church camp (I’m Jew-ish, but it’s complicated) where every minute of every day was filled with activity, but for some reason there was nowhere we had to be just then; and somebody – probably Marsha, who would go on to make a career out of introducing people to new music, but maybe her impossibly cool older brother – had smuggled in a cassette player, and into the hazy afternoon sun snaked the crashing chords of Prince In A Pauper’s Grave. My tiny mind was blown. It was the most exciting song I’d ever heard.
So when I got home I taped someone’s copy of 30 Something and listened to it obsessively until the following year, when 1992: The Love Album came out at almost exactly the time I met my first ever boyfriend. By the time the relationship ended three months and four days later, I knew all the words to every song. It was a heady time.
That autumn I got a Saturday job at the hippie stall. The hippie stall probably had another name for trading purposes, but I never heard anyone call it anything else. It was run by Pam and Martin, a proper hippie couple, and they hired a series of schoolgirls attracted by the subversiveness of selling candles and incense in the middle of Bromley, where everybody else sold curtains and lampshades.
I worked the morning shift. One day I was early, so I hung around listening to my walkman while I waited for Pam and Martin to arrive. When their beaten-up old van lumbered up, I took my headphones off. Martin got out of the van.
“What are you listening to?”
I hesitated. Martin could be witheringly sarcastic, in a way that was breathlessly funny if you weren’t the target, but less so when you were.
“Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine.”
“Oh yes, I’ve heard him. Very good at playing his…machine, isn’t he?”
It’s not a him, it’s a them, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. They play guitars as well as machines, I nearly said, but I didn’t. What’s wrong with making music on a machine?, I should have said, but I didn’t.
I expect I just shrugged, not realising then that casual dismissal of something I thought heartstoppingly good was to be a standard reaction from other people for years to come. When I went to HMV in Bromley to queue up to meet Johnny Rotten and have him sign a copy of No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, I was careful not to mention it to Martin. I knew his limits.
Nobody ever liked the music I liked, so in later years I learned to like the music other people liked, and my CD rack grew heavy with albums by Blur and Pulp and David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. And I do like them all. But I didn’t find them for myself, and I bought their albums because it was something people did. Carter will always hold a special place in my heart because for a little while they were only mine. (Secretly, I still think they are.)
Which is mad. Everybody should listen to them. They are brilliant. The tunes are brilliant, the arrangements are brilliant, the energy is brilliant, the words, especially, are brilliant: witty, biting statements against the world interspersed with moments of melancholy and occasional whimsy, firmly set in an all too recognisable South London, and sung in a rough diamond, devil-may-care voice that you recognise in an instant.
I was an orderly, list-making sort of a teenager. 1992 was the best album. Prince in a Pauper’s Grave was the best song. Suppose You Gave a Funeral And Nobody Came was the best song title. The best lyric, from My Second To Last Will And Testament, was perfect in its simplicity:
The genius of their lyrics was always in taking the banal and the familiar and twisting it into something new. Rubbish contained a reference to Elmers End. I lived in Elmers End. Nobody lived in Elmers End: it was tiny, and people from five miles away had never heard of it, but this band, my band, had made it famous.
I learned to draw the red-and-white band logo, and I traced it carefully across my bedroom wall, over the back pages of notebooks; on to the canvas flap of my school bag. The hardest part was making sure the words “The Unstoppable Sex Machine” were centre-aligned in relation to “Carter”. You had to start with the “Unstoppable”, halfway across the “A”, and work outwards from there.
(Other logos I have obsessively drawn: the grafitti spray of BAD from the Michael Jackson album; the clenched fist of the Socialist Worker Student Society.)
But nobody liked the music I liked, so I never went to see them play live, because I could never find anybody to come with me. And they’ve played a few reunion gigs over the years but I’ve somehow missed them all, and when they announced “big news” a couple of weeks ago I knew they were going to be back again, but the London show is on our wedding day, and we’re getting married in Dublin, and even if we were getting married at home I don’t think I could get away with leaving the reception to go to a gig.
(Could I?)
So maybe I’ll never get to see them, and although that breaks my heart a little bit, it also lets me persevere with the delusion that their music belongs to only me. So I’ll keep listening to them through headphones and squirming with secret delight at every delicious angry joke. I might tell people I’m listening to Radio 4, if they ask.
Should you happen to be charged with choosing music for my funeral, however, I have a suggestion. You needn’t go with it, because I’ll be dead so I won’t care, but at sixteen I decided that I wanted to be waved off to the sound of the last two songs from 1992; Skywest and Crooked and The Impossible Dream (they always did cover versions better than anyone else, better than the originals), and I’ve never found a reason to change my mind:
This summer will mark the twentieth anniversary of that day in a field in Wales. Crystal Palace Football Club is the only entity I’ve loved for longer, not counting actual people, but football’s different because it causes at least as much pain as joy, especially if you support Palace. When you find a band you love, though, your life gets uncomplicatedly better, which is why music is better than football.
Now, excuse me while I go and turn up the stereo really loud.
Festive frivolities have played havoc with my body clock, so I find myself wide awake at 6.30am on a Sunday while the beloved snoozes peacefully next door. I like this time of day, especially at the weekend: I like being awake when nobody else is and I like the idea that the day still holds unlimited possibilities. Mostly, I just like that it’s quiet, because on a crowded estate full of kids and drug dealers it’s almost never quiet. Even my typing sounds loud, and each time a car passes outside on the main road I can hear it from a long way away and I have time to wonder who’s in it, and where they might be going at this unlikely hour.
Anyway, being awake when I don’t need to be gives me the chance to write a post which has been percolating for months, or maybe years. I’ve shared my theory about The Phantom of the Opera at dinner parties and seen eyes glaze over and people quietly excuse themselves to go and hide in the bathroom until I’ve finished, so I think it’s only fair to bring it to a wider audience. If you find your attention wandering before I get to the end I suggest you go and read a book instead.
Put simply, the theory is this: the really interesting love story in the musical version of The Phantom of the Opera is not the story of the Phantom and Christine Daaé, but the story of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sarah Brightman. There are some obvious parallels: genius composer with an unprepossessing appearance falls in love with beautiful young singer for whom he holds an unexpected fascination. She is in his power for a while, but ultimately they must part.
When the Phantom discovers that he has a rival for Christime’s affections he laments:
He was bound to love you When he heard you sing
which I think is about as close to a personal declaration of love from the composer to his leading lady as you can get.
In the original novel there is no suggestion that Christine loves the Phantom; she is frightened of him and desperate to escape his clutches and return to her true love, Raoul. The musical is much more ambiguous – compare and contrast publicity images for an early film adaptation of the book:
And the stage show:
I think that when Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote The Phantom of the Opera what he was really writing was history’s most extravagant love letter. In Love Never Dies, the follow-up, Christine’s love for the phantom is reaffirmed, and we even learn that, contrary to the fairly well established plot of the original, he rejected her the last time around:
The Phantom
And when it was done, Before the sun could rise Ashamed of what I was Afraid to see your eyes. I stood while you slept And whispered a goodbye. And slipped into the dark Beneath a moonless sky.
Christine
And I loved you, Yes I loved you. I’d have followed any where you led. I woke to swear my love, And found you gone instead.
But that’s OK, because, ahem, love never dies, you see, so it doesn’t matter that they’re not together any more:
Love never fades Love never falters Hearts may get broken Love endures
So yes, perhaps the Phantom ran away before Christine could tell him she loved him, and well, perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber met his third wife before he’d strictly moved on from the second one*, but love endures. And if the Phantom and Christine really are Andrew and Sarah then there is something rather beautiful and moving about the revisiting of the story many years later. I don’t want to give away the story of Love Never Dies in case someone bought you tickets for Christmas, but you could, if you were so inclined, read it as a loving goodbye to something important, and if that’s what it is then Lloyd Webber has followed up his expensive and extended love letter to his wife with an equally extended and expensive letter of farewell to her, which is charming, and something that only he would have the chutzpah and the wherewithal to do.
*I read a brilliant story once about Andrew Lloyd Webber introducing his third and current wife, Madeline, to someone and referring to her as “Sarah” throughout the conversation. Apparently she was unfazed by it. I like to think that Sarah was his muse and his inspiration but Madeline is his soul mate so knows she needn’t worry about Sarah. It’s possible I have spent too much time considering the love life of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Glad All Over 