Imaginary places of escape

At different points in the movie Gallipoli one or both of the two lead characters run, and each time the two heroes run the music that accompanies them is by Jarre: Oxygene II.  At the time I first watched Gallipoli while on holiday in New Caledonia I had never heard anything like that music, and I desperately wanted to hear it again.  By chance it was playing in a shop in Noumea the next day, and I pointed it out to my mother who was also struck by it.  I’m not sure if she asked the shop assistant what the music was or not, but whatever happened, by the time we were back in New Zealand we had either forgotten or never knew the name of the composer.

It is incredible to me that we hunted down the music.  I remember going to a record store with my mother and trying to explain to the woman who worked there what kind of music it was.  Somehow she managed to decipher my probably monosyllabic descriptions and produced the album Oxygene.  It was love at first sight because at the age of ten I thought the album cover was about as cool as you could possibly make an album cover, and when we got the cassette home and played it a whole wonderful imaginary world unfolded in my head.

Music is a very emotional thing for me.  It really has to take me somewhere.  The two albums that stood out for me in the 80s were Purple Rain and Welcome to the Pleasuredome because both of them seemed to take you on a journey, and be attempting – however imperfectly – to connect up each of its songs in a way that suggested a larger idea.  Now I wonder how much listening to Jarre and opera as a kid had to do with my desire to escape into music for longer periods of time than a three minute single would allow.

Opera was probably the first music that I really heard as a child.  My mother had cassettes of Puccini’s greatest hits, and Verdi’s arias, but she also had full works by Bizet and Wagner (I’m not kidding about the Wagner).  Her father was a fan of operatic singing and had a lot of very old records that we inherited but which were unplayable on modern record players, and which we one day passed on to a family friend with a wind up gramophone. 

What was remarkable to me about these arias that my mother sometimes played was their emotional intensity.  Some of the Puccini arias are so overwhelming in their emotion that I find it hard to get through them without welling up.  Full operas have unsurpassable power.  I realise that opera leaves a lot of people cold, and even to people who love it opera is a somewhat bemusing and inexplicable thing.  I certainly can’t explain it to you, but it triggers strong feelings in me.

It therefore makes perfect sense to me that the other major musical moment in Gallipoli, aside from all the Jarre, is operatic: an aria, the aria, from Bizet’s Pearl Fishers.  It comes the night before the boys of the Lighthorse go over the top to “glory”.  When the commanding officer sits in his sandbag bunker alone and plays the aria it is so poignant because it seems to be all the fragility of civilisation’s achievements pitted against the inevitability of barbarism’s victory.

I have a small box of cassettes that my grandfather made of himself singing hymns, and light opera songs.  He has a good voice, and there are at least four of these tapes with handwritten lists of all the titles in a cursive script.  I am sure that music was a place he could escape to, and I wonder where it took him.  How far away could he get when he sang, or played opera arias?  I suppose that my mother might have some idea.  There is very little of my mother’s father left to me: perhaps two indistinct memories, some photos, and a box of cassettes of him singing.  I am happy to have all of those things, but most of all I think I am happy to have him left to me as a voice in song.

Which is a curiously intimate memento for a person I barely remember, but it is one that makes me feel connected to him.  In general I am disconnected.  Looking at photos like the one above is strange; they’re photos that I am in but that may as well be of a different person in another country.  They do not cause my memory to rise in response.  There is a blank space where a memory should be.

But with the idea of him sitting down at a table one day with a tape recorder and singing songs I do feel a tie.  I have spent a lot of my own time sitting at the table with a tape recorder and a guitar singing songs.  At the time I was readying myself for stardom, but now I wonder if these tapes will one day be pulled out of a drawer and played by a distant grandchild with a kind of embarrassed fascination.

Which is probably how I should feel about Jarre.  A lot of his music has dated.  Cathy dislikes him.  She makes faces at me when I delicately balance a Jarre album on my fingertips as I transport it to the stereo.  I reverently bought quite a few of his albums again, because I had owned almost all of them on cassette and these tapes had long since perished.  I am only slightly ashamed to say that I have eight Jarre albums.  Of those eight I am prepared to still stand behind three: Oxygene, Zoolook and Concerts in China.  All three still take me on journeys.  All three still transport me. 

The opening track of Zoolook used to so enthrall me that I made up an imaginary screenplay to accompany it.  As I recall, my Zoolook screenplay began in a huge alien starport with slow, docking ships covered in lights.  I think the reason that Zoolook still sounds good is that Jarre used a lot of real instruments on this album, and at times this music manages to sound like a pretty funky, world music band.

Concerts in China takes me on a more literal journey to (ahem)… China.  It’s actually a sort of early greatest hits album, but a lot of the songs sound a lot better on this album than they do on the original Equinox or Magnetic Fields.  I think this is because they are played live, and don’t have as many unrealistic playing speeds and effects.  Jarre also managed to capture the exoticism of China, as well as the ennui and dislocation of travel, which gives the whole a kind of poignancy.

Oxygene though is best.  Even though it is the oldest, and uses the simplest musical machines, it has the most powerful hold on me because it was the first.  I can’t tell you where Oxygene takes me, and anyway, you probably have never heard it or, if you have, like Cathy, you would probably find it mostly laughable.  So I can’t tell you what it is, that place it takes me, but I can tell you what that place isn’t.  It isn’t a mortgage, or Monday morning at 8.00 am, or doing the dishes late in the evening.

It is, I suppose, an imaginary place of escape where I might meet you, my friend, when you let yourself drift to the place of your dreams, or – perhaps – where I might see the ghost of my grandfather singing like Caruso.

Eurovision, 1973

Mexico – Les Humphries Singers

Number one in New Zealand 16 November – 23 November, 1973

No, I’ve never heard of them or the song either.  They were a German group with a large cast of singers and numerous albums of covers.  Mexico was number one in New Zealand for a solitary week.   It appears that this number one hit was largely a rip off a song called The Battle of New Orleans.  The follow up “hit” for the band was called Mama Loo.  A cursory listen to this tune reveals that it is Barbara Ann with the words changed.  They represented Germany in the Eurovision song contest of 1976 with one of the worst pop songs I have ever heard, with definitely one of the stupidest song titles and choruses ever written, Sing Sang Song.  I include it here, but I defy anyone to listen to more than thirty seconds of it.

Which leads me to Eurovision in general.  I am led there because I can find out nothing about Les Humphries Singers that you can’t find out yourself by looking at Wikipedia.

Eurovision 1973 was hosted by Luxembourg and the winning entry was from… Luxembourg.  I was particularly drawn to this fact:

In the light of events at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, there were fears of a terrorist threat, particularly directed against Israel’s first-ever entrant, leading to unusually tight security for the contest. This gave rise to one of the best-known Eurovision anecdotes, frequently recounted by the UK’s long-serving commentator Terry Wogan. He recalled that the floor manager strongly advised the audience to remain seated while applauding the performances, otherwise they risked being shot by security forces.

Having heard the entries for Eurovision 1973 I feel there might have been more risk of people getting shot when they tried to leave in disgust than of a standing ovation breaking out.  On a not unrelated point, how is Israel part of Europe?

Most of the entries are dull, but let us linger on three.  Firstly, the entry from Sweden, You’re Summer.  I would like to draw your attention to the look the two singers exchange at 1.10 in the video immediately after the lyric: ”I want you and I long for your caress.”  This is followed by the immortal line, “your breasts are like swallows in nestling.”   Maybe this plays better in Swedish and melts nordic hearts, but the girl/summer comparison throws up some odd images, “you’re the summer, life grows in you, summer wind blows in you, summer rains flow in you… you never tell me no.”

Is this a song about farting and weeing? 

Speaking of songs where chicks don’t say no, we should have a look at the entry from Norway which seem to be a jazz prototype of ABBA (who broke through with Waterloo in Eurovision 1974).

I am not going to say anything about facial hair.

Here are the lyrical highlights:

Oh, when we pet don’t get all upset, it’s a game

Place a bet, play the game, come on and join us

It’s a game of girl-and-boyness

So don’t you upset us, stay loose and just pet her

Keep cool and you’ll get her

And finally, this song’s greatest line: “We’re giving  our all and just living and balling.”

The best for last (please persevere, the dancing from 2.10 onwards makes me laugh out loud everytime I replay it).

You will be pleased to know that this couple, who married in 1971, are still recording together and were given an award in 1990 for their contributions to the Flemish entertainment industry.  Bless.

Curiously, it might turn out that Nicole and Hugo are unacknowledged pioneers.  If you read the Wikipedia entry for ABBA’s Waterloo (the Swedish entry in 1974) you get this:

The song broke the “dramatic ballad” tradition of the Eurovision Song Contest by its flavour and rhythm, as well as by its performance: ABBA gave the audience something they had never seen before in Eurovision: flashy costumes (including silver platform boots), a group not singing in their native language, plus a catchy uptempo song and even simple choreography.

Well, you and I know better.  1973 was in fact the first year when countries didn’t have to sing in their native language, and Nicole and Hugo deliver a far more spirited dance number with costumes that put ABBA’s in the shade (a hard thing to do with all the glitter).  Not to be a real stinker, but even Benny’s guitar looks like he nicked it from Slade.

Still, it’s the best song to ever come out of this dreadful competition.

The lyrics of Waterloo inspired me to make write this joke letter many months ago, and I see no reason not to repeat the joke now.

Dear ABBA,

in what way was the relationship you describe in your song Waterloo, similar to the principal causes of Napoleon’s defeat at the aforementioned battle, which are listed as, first:

the arrival, skilfully combined, of Blücher, and the false movement that favored this arrival; the second, was the admirable firmness of the British infantry, joined to the sang-froid and aplomb of its chiefs; the third, was the horrible weather, that had softened the ground, and rendered the offensive movements so toilsome, and retarded till one o’clock the attack that should have been made in the morning; the fourth, was the inconceivable formation of the first corps, in masses very much too deep for the first grand attack.

Yours sincerely,

A concerned fan.

To draw this post about nothing to a close more or less where it started, the only thing I can find to say that is even slightly interesting about the song Mexico is that the “writer” of the song - Les Humphries – was a British born German, and when he wrote the lyrics of Mexico he chucked in a few pro-British references.  The original song, The Battle of New Orleans, on the other hand, is all about how the Americans beat the nasty Brits and showed them what for.

Hey, I said it was only slightly interesting.

This post is part of a series about the number one songs of 1973 in New Zealand.  The series can be found here.