Music
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”.
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.
Steady, as She Goes
Sometimes there are pieces of incidental music that you’ve been hearing for years without knowning where they originally came from, until you stumble over it one day. The theme to Radio 4’s Saturday Live is one such piece. I didn’t know it was taken from the opening bars of The Raconteurs’ “Steady, as She Goes” until I heard it on the radio just now, but now I know.
And knowing is half the battle.