Desert Island Discs

Yes, this is perhaps a predictable blog topic, especially as DID is in its 70^th year.  I love Desert Island Discs, have it as one of my regular podcasts.  Sunday is my day for the horses, so if I’m left with the mucking out, I’ll plug in the headphones and lose myself in someone else’s story for a bit. Very rarely am I bored or disappointed by the guest, but then being asked to be a guest on DID must be terribly flattering and exciting, and Kirsty Young is so splendidly good at her job, gently probing and revealing the human beneath the status and title.  The only thing that disappoints me with the podcasts is the restriction on the length of time the tunes are played.  Usually the ones you like most are tiny snippets not the whole thing.

I find music terribly important.  I cannot think clearly without music as a background.  As a student I had a selection of tapes that I played writing essays – Alan Parsons I Robot and America’s Greatest Hits were amongst the diverse mix that made up the selection, with the sublime Horse with No Name an incomprehensible joy.  Not that I was cool enough to have chosen them myself, oh no, usually they were copies from my brother or someone else who had really delved into music.  I fell upon the selection provided, but it came to comfort and sooth, clarifying my thoughts that otherwise raced.  These days I am more proactive in my choices, if you count choosing Mozart piano concertos as proactive.  I was late discovering Mozart, and still have so much to learn.  I know that if I have a task that requires my utmost concentration, then only Mozart will do.  I was left with almost all the paperwork from ‘our lives’ to sort out, the Absent Father just selecting a few choice essentials and leaving me with the lion’s share of the chaos.  It was petrifying (almost literally) looking at the boxes and boxes of stuff to sort and wondering how on earth I would manage it.  I haven’t quite yet, there is still one more stacking crate in the cellar to get through, but all the essential stuff has been done. 

To get the job done I need a clear time in the school holidays, one of those ‘down’ days – a half term Wednesday or the like, and my Mozart.  Piano concerto or symphonies are generally the best thing.  But the most important thing to realise is it cannot all be done at once and you have not failed a task if it is not completed in one go.  As my brother said to me, when I gazed at him in terror at the job in front of me not long after the Absent Father left ­ -‘How do you eat an elephant?’  The answer: ‘One mouthful at a time’   The Mozart always enlivens my mind, despite knowing it well, somehow it just refreshes and sharpens my thoughts, never, despite the familiarity, boring me.  The space it creates allows me to close off from the world and pull into myself.

My father used to say he could never fix his 8 items for Desert Island Discs, they would change because he had a long list of things he loved, and their importance would jostle in his mind.  I was hoping to find his list, so perhaps I could draw comparisons and distinctions between him and me.  But I can’t, so I’m having a go at my own 8 songs to take with me to that Island I have so clearly defined in my head, perhaps you do too.  It’s almost certainly a different place from my island, but maybe that’s the point.

1.       My Declaration – Tom Baxter

2.       Bach Double Violin Concerto played by David and Igor Oistrach

3.       Mollie’s Song –Beverley Craven

4.       Windmills of Your Mind – Noel Harrison

5.       Mozart 39^th Symphony

6.       Bach Brandenburg Concerto No 5

7.       Debussy Clair de Lune

Oh dear, this is getting really hard.  Do I really want the Debussy?  It was a sort of whim, actually there’s Concerto di Aranjeuz, the Songs of the Auvergne (Victoria de los Angles singing), the Goldberg variations.  Do I leave out Satie? I know the gymnopedies are a bit trite these days, but the gnossienne?  Which bit of the Mozart Requiem, then there is Faure’s requiem or the Pavanne.   Do I keep Verdi’s Tuba Mirum because it reminds me of Daddy, what about The Girl from Ipanema, 1950s Frank Sinatra (Night and Day, maybe).   Would I leave out ‘Send in the Clowns’, which reminds me so much of Mummy, and as I get older I find more and more resonant, or what about ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ which was my parents song of their magic years.  I remember playing it from Itunes on one family evening with my Aunt (actually my mother’s cousin but she is Aunt to me and the nearest thing I have to a parent, lucky me) and both of us weeping quietly in private memory for the companionship we had lost in different ways. 

Should the Desert Island songs do this?  Might they need to be improving, buck up and march onward tunes?  Well, that ticks the box for My Declaration by Tom Baxter.  If you’ve never heard it, find it on Spotify.  It’s the song I used to play myself through the early abandoned years on dog walks and sing along boldly.  Certainly Holst’s Mars would fit the bill.  I tend to see that as a piece for my girls and I, in my mind we are buttoning ourselves into armour, standing up and standing tall marching towards a battle, perhaps with the Absent Father’s Woman, and of course destroying her with savage strong blows.  Maybe not the piece I should take for quiet contemplation in a lonely prison where survival is a struggle and rescue unlikely.  So maybe I should remove Peggy Lee’s ‘The Folks who live on the Hill’? I used to listen to it in the kitchen at Shamrock and hug myself inside that my life seemed to be a ‘happy ever after’.   The song seemed to underline that life moved through stages, and although there were down bits, essentially I was part of a unit and a home, with a future mapped out.  Definitely need to take that off the list, or I’ll be walking into the waves by day three, and surely after all this thought and preparation I want to test to see if my eight records really do comfort and enliven in equal measures.

However, a definite is the Hadleigh Choral Society’s 2006 recording of the Mozart Requiem in D, the Rex Tremendae.  Because if you listen very carefully you can hear me, singing my heart out, as the Absent Father sat in the audience of St Mary’s Hadleigh (which obviously you can’t hear ).  What I didn’t know at the time was he was in the midst of the Affair that destroyed us.  How far into it I have no idea, but I can hear my passion channelled into that exquisite music and I remember the release I felt, freed from the grief of my Mother’s death earlier in the year, freed from the doubt and depression that was enveloping me as I tried to be the person I thought I should be on that metaphorical hill.  I had no idea of the meaning of the words at the time, but a quick google search has revealed that somehow I knew very well what I was singing for:

King of tremendous majesty,
who freely saves those worthy ones,
save me, source of mercy.

Therefore, I know what my luxury would be without a doubt: the score of the Mozart Requiem. I could sing along with the orchestra in my head.  With the Rex Tremendae to play from time to time my tuning shouldn’t be out by much, and I could plead for my rescue as I did all those years ago.  Was I rescued?   It’s a thought that crosses my mind occasionally when I remember the hopelessness and how I found release in sadness I fought to keep at bay.

Should I avoid the misery music?  I’m very fond of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake and Suzanne Vega, but maybe they could be confined to the also-ran list?  I used to listen to Nick Drake a lot, but forbade myself in the early years after the Absent Father’s departure.  I was at such serious risk of suicide, not that people were aware of quite how much after the first year, that I took the ‘buck up’ view of not immersing myself in another’s misery.  It’s beautiful music, but if I’ve learnt one thing about my musical choices, I know they reflect the atmospheres around me, or that atmospheres I can create.  So the Pet Shop Boy’s peerless ‘Numb’, a tune I found so addictive towards the end of my marriage, along with the last Johnny Cash songs, especially ‘Personal Jesus’ and ‘Hurt’, should definitely stay off the island.  Which brings me back to Mozart.  The music that allows me to pull into myself and find that part of me that reaches beyond and sees the bigger picture.  I’m here because I have to be, even though I’m still not sure I really want to be.  But my eight records are an ever changing list, at no point am I fixed or defined by anything, not by a house on a hill or a personal Jesus.  I have things to do, places to see and people to love.  And a tune to take with me on the journey.  Lots of tunes.  Not all of them Mozart.