Curating songs lets you tell stories
NOT long ago on this page Joe Bennett told of being on a Desert Island Discs type of radio show. He got away with it, so I see no reason why my own triumphant appearance on such a programme should not solve the perennial problem of what the hell to write about!
It was in 2016 in Songs of My Life on what I still call National Radio. It filled up that awkward time after Christmas when the airwaves are mercifully free of politicians clamouring for attention.
I am about as musical as a power pole and at funerals I always mime the words of Abide With Me to save my fellow mourners the agony of hearing a tone deaf rendition of what I’m told is quite a moving melody.
In spite of my handicap, I was able to rustle up some records for Songs of My Life.
Of course, the genuine music lovers usually pick their favourite Chopin piece or a burst of Beethoven but that was no use to me. I needed something you could sing along to and neither Chopin or Beethoven provided quite the relaxed knockabout quality of Does You Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight? or that great kids’ song The Wheels of the Bus.
What I ended up doing was choosing music which had a story behind it, thus avoiding rabbiting on about ‘‘the polyphonic bass line’’ and other signs of sophistication. I opened with a tune which lifts the spirits or at least gives some sort of emotional reaction. The Dam Busters March fits the bill and I was able to tie it in with an interview I’d recorded with New Zealander Les Munro who had been a pilot on the
Dambusters raid. (His aircraft was damaged by flak and he had to return to base without dropping his bomb). Some lyrics have now been written for the tune and they are sung with drunken enthusiasm by fans of the Lincoln City soccer team. Thankfully, I won’t be called on to join in as Lincoln City don’t play too often at the Patearoa Domain.
My second choice was Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Wild Women by Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. It’s a 1940s song performed as if part of an American Biblebelt revivalist meeting in which a saved sinner lurches on to the platform and denounces the evils of his past. It’s a great rollicking shambles with a rowdy catcalling audience. Just the way organised religion should be. Of course, the record had a story. Radio New Zealand had a collection of ‘‘not to be played’’ records which I often listened to discover what naughtiness had caused the banning. In the case of Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Wild Women the moment comes right at the end when a drunk in the audience becomes belligerent and Red Ingle mutters, ‘‘Will someone get that bum outta here!’’. There’s just nothing as good as that in Chopin or Beethoven. ‘‘Bum’’ was not acceptable on New Zealand radio in those days even if the sense was the American one of ‘‘tramp’’. When I told this story to a young lady recently she asked why they kept such a record if it was not to be played. Then came an explanation I never imagined I’d ever have to give. I pointed out that an oldtime gramophone record had two sides. Thus, even if side A was littered with ‘‘bums’’ and other profanities, the record had to be kept because side B could well contain a squeakyclean rendition of something like that great old tear jerker A Mother As Lovely As You (written by a New Zealander, incidentally).
My last choice wasn’t easy, but I felt it should have an
Otago flavour.
For over 20 years I’d insisted on broadcasting live from Dunedin which rather bemused the Radio New Zealand hierarchy who were hellbent on Aucklandising their network. ‘‘The Dunedin Sound’’ had passed me by so I was fossicking around in much older stuff. Tom Bracken’s poem about the joys of
Macandrew Bay, Dunedin from the Bay, had been set to music and was a frontrunner as I lived ‘‘down the bay’’, but then I found a song which could give me a chance to tell of my pending retirement to Central Otago. Naseby poet Ross McMillan (‘‘Blue Jeans’’) had written Down a Country Road I Know and Phil Garland had set it to music. What’s more, the Pioneer Pog ‘n’ Scroggin’ Bush Band had recorded it at the Danseys Pass Hotel. So, in Songs of My Life I farewelled the wireless years with, ‘‘The city roar is in my ears, the glare is in my eyes, Yet in my heart I long to see those sunny Central skies’’.
Naturally, I didn’t sing along.