15 f Ranting & Reeling


he chronological rerunning of Top Of The Pops (minus any episodes removed because they contain historical nonces) has reached 1981. This was the year when music started to affect me in ways that would be lasting, profound and get me beaten up by bigger boys.


T My first musical passion arrived when


I was still in nappies. “I was 28 years old…” But while I’d been transfixed by the multiple beauty of ABBA, jittered by Sparks and claimed pop as my overriding interest by the mid-’70s, 1981 was when I discovered it could do stuff to your insides as well as your face. Stuff that made my life feel significant (even if that was just Toyah Willcox getting amateur dramati- cally cross about hair dye.)


Watching that year’s TOTP now, I know these songs so well. But I also know the impressions they left with me, like visiting a house you used to live in. Imagination’s Body Talk, with its sloth-funk bassline tan- talisingly too old for me, conjures a youth club jukebox and girls way out of my league (because I was an actual child). The Stray Cats sound like the nerves I disguised whilst lying to some teenage rockabillies about my true musical leanings, after they


spotted my leather jacket. Adam & The Ants is feeling like I belonged, not to my own town but to London where everyone, I imagined, had a white stripe across their nose. I knew what Stand & Deliver was about when I was ten. I don’t any more.


These songs and their effects are so familiar because I used to tape them off the telly, then play them incessantly. In time-honoured fashion a small cassette recorder was placed against the TV speaker where the recording would be inevitably ruined by dog barks when the milkman came to collect his money. It seemed like if I didn’t capture them they’d disappear and be replaced by something terrible by Coast To Coast or Stars On 45. It became an obsession.


And this is where I crowbar an indul- gent stroll down my own memory pave- ment into a tenuous reference to folk music. Because I’ve just bought the two new additions to Topic’s Voice Of The Peo- ple series, the first of which contains a blood-pumping selection of tunes played by Irish musicians in London in the 1950s and ’60s. Recorded in pubs and flats by the likes of Peter Kennedy, Bill Leader and the album’s compiler Reg Hall, It Was Mighty! exists only because these men


were so


enthralled by what they


heard they felt compelled to record it. This is a specific time and place on tape, the inci- dental noises almost as important as the music. The sound of a peo-


ple making themselves at home.


If my C90s of mono ’80s pop and woofing had survived they’d be of no use to anyone. Adam Ant had the fore- sight to record his music in a studio, ren- dering my efforts with a pause button futile before I’d begun. But the value of these recordings of The Early Days Of Irish Music In London is inestimable, in addition to the abundant quality of the tunes and musicianship.


Where would we be without obsessives with portable tape recorders? Still here, but the music wouldn’t be as good.


Tim Chipping


The Elusive Ethnomusicologist “W


hat do people want to read over breakfast? Do you honestly think it’s you stripping back


your skin so that your insides splurge all over the page? No. It’s ugly. Self-indul- gent. Pay for a therapist.” Taking notes, I panicked. There was me, writing here about my dad last time, because I couldn’t see beyond him. Was it too personal, too overwrought? “Also, never ever refer to your previous work (bugger), and ease up on the personal pronoun.”


I was at a column-writing seminar at


the Guardian. And then a stranger wrote to me, a lovely man called Bob Bossin emailed fRoots. I’m assuming he’s lovely and not an axe-murdering psychopath because a) he said ‘thank you’ for my col- umn about my dad in a short single line, when if people write at all they use quite a few – generally to explain that I am in fact an uninformed twat with a total inability to communicate clearly having such useless language skills. And b) he’s a Canadian folk singer.


I googled him. He founded The Stringband in 1971with singer Marie Lyn Hammond, writing songs that are politi- cally engaged, wry snapshots of life. A Canadian broadcaster, Stuart McLean,


writes “Only a handful of songwriters have created a body of work that consti- tutes a portrait of our country. Stan Rogers did that. So did Gordon Lightfoot, so does Bob Bossin.”


His music’s found fans across the world particularly when it can’t be broad- cast, as in Show Us The Length, based – apparently – on a real event, a jolly sing- along with a catchy chorus. It follows here after the first verse.


“Girls as the principal of Terra Nova


High School/ Once each year it's a plea- sure for me/ To introduce you to the Mayor of the City of Pacifica/ To say a few words about our annual Queen.”/ “Who'll be,” said the Mayor, “a very lucky maid/ To represent Pacifica to all of the state/ And who could go on to be Miss Califor- nia/ Or even Miss America herself! I expect to see some volunteers.”


When one girl rose and without any fears, she said: “Mr Mayor/ Show us the length of your cock/ Are you hung like a beaver or hung like a bear?/ Let me check the weight of your rocks/ So we can have a standard by which to compare/ You men don't worry if it's very very slender/ The personality is as important as a member/ Drop your trousers and make the news/ Or don't judge lest we judge you.”


Pete


Seeger called him “Funny, informative and inspiring at the same time.”


To which I


can add “Kind. And thought- ful.” Currently touring Davy The Punk, a one-man show about his “father’s life in Toronto’s gambling under- world of the 1930s and ’40s,” my first thought (“It’s Toronto, how bad can it have been?”) was swiftly chased away by how brilliant it is that he’s able to explore his dad’s life and their relationship through music. Not by sitting alone sadly with what’s left of his father’s record collection, but through creating a humourous cele- bration of his life in song, so that it comes to mean something to people he’d never even met. There’s a testimony for you.


“Erm, never address your readers


directly.” Right, now I’m off to type up my notes from the masterclass. Better late than never.


Elizabeth Kinder


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