CPL 593H



I’m slightly too young to have known Roxy Music as anything else but that band wot did “Avalon” or not think of Bryan Ferry as an aging creepster, but Sandra had been just the right age for glam rock in general and Roxy in particular. Roxy was the first great band of her generation, some years before punk, coming from but not actually having been a part of the whole hippie/psychedalic rock movement. Did you realise they’re forty years old this year?

Yes, I know. A couple of decades and all those small differences between rock movements aren’t all that important anymore but to music nerds, which Sandra never was. That sort of obsessive compulsiveness cataloging and categorising is usually more of a male pursuit anyway (certainly was in our hosuehold). She just liked the music that she liked, had a keen sense of why she liked certain bands or genres, but no desire to become all stamp collecting about it…

And this was her favourite Roxy Music song.

Abide with me



Like me, Sandra had long put away the religious faith she was raised in, but, again like me, had kept her appreciation for some of the hymns she had grown up with. One of those hymns was Abide With Me, which she had been talking about only days before her death. Last night at the Olympics it was used in the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombings. Even without that personal connection the performance would’ve given me goosebumps, now it was enough to make me tear up.

The icing on the cake is that this hymn has a political meaning as well. It has been used at every Rugby League Challenge Cup final since 1929 and rugby league is the northern, working class version of rugby, a song held deeply by generations of miners. Using it is therefore a subtle rebuke to the legacy of Thatcher, whose heirs now rule the UK again, just like the use of Jerusalem, another of Sandra’s favourites, could be seen as a clarion call for English socialism. Whether or not this was Danny Boyle’s intent…

London can take it



In less than five minutes the Olympic Games officially start and we’ll find out if all the obnoxious security measures and corporate corruption was worth it. I don’t think there will be any great disaster, just the usual crap associated with the modern Olympics. There will be debts and white elephants and all the nuisances you get from hosting the Olympics, but as the Public Broadcast Service say, “London can take it”.

(The original WWII propaganda film)

Bruuuce

The New Yorker has an excellent profile of the Boss:

The songs were a way of talking to the silent father. “My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn’t really have a conversation with him,” Springsteen told me. “I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain’t the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered. He’d get asked, ‘What are your favorite songs?’ And he’d say, ‘The ones that are about me.’ ”

One of the few genuine regrets in my life is not having seen Bruce Springsteen with the complete E-Street band when I had the chance.