Remember
Do I remember Paris? Do I? Paris?
The bridges and the barges on the Seine.
The hotel’s seedy bidet, Place Clichy and the clichés,
The Metro, and Montmartre in the rain.
And Paris is a lover who’ll never let you rest.
She’ll knock you out while knocking out your eye.
The painters’ drizzly pictures, the hustler’s grisly jest,
And all because the lady loves Versailles!
Slaty grey rooftops, their angle just right,
Railways aglow with a pink-purple light,
The wet-salted ferries that thud through the night…
Do I remember? When shall I forget ?
Life is like a mountain, a path of yesterdays
That lead you ever onwards up that hill.
The sights we best remember can vanish in the haze,
Yet every day I turn towards them still,
Even now I yearn to have them still.
Do I remember twenty? Do I? Plenty.
The Levis, and the love affair with truth,
The discos and the dances, the roses and romances,
The acne and the ecstasies of youth!
And college was a fortress that nothing real could take –
No principles, no money and no cares.
The Horsetrough every morning, the Parks to ease the ache,
The rooms, the books, the squalor and the flares!
Long summer dresses and loud summer balls,
Quadrangles, courtyards, towers and halls,
Honey-gilt girls in the warmth off the walls…
Do I remember? How could I forget?
Life is just a memory, the choices that we made,
And what we are is all that we recall.
The scars beyond all mending, the smiles that never fade,
And good or bad I’m learning from them all.
Right or wrong, I burn to keep them all.
Do I remember reading? Do I? Reading?
Tarzan swinging through my head till dawn.
And doing little jobbies. And what about the hobbies?
The Action Men, the Airfix and the porn.
And sketching every summer, an easel in the sky,
And writing big and being three feet small.
The stories without number, the hopes a mile high,
The ladder of your youth upon the wall…
Getting impatient for things still ahead,
Feeling regret for the thanks never said,
The warmth and the love and the life to be led…
How could I forget them?
When shall I forget them?
Why should I forget them at all?
1989
PS
Where do songwriters get their inspiration from? Apparently the answer is “anywhere and everywhere”, you just have to be receptive to the possibilities. This is my ‘Penny Lane’, plundering the past to produce my most autobiographical song.
The accompaniment I came up with for the melody was certainly one of my most ambitious, using chords and areas halfway up the fingerboard that I had rarely if ever visited before, but because the whole thing was such a joyous departure from my usual strain of dour introspection, I thought it was worth trying to push the boat out. (The fingering is so far up there, in fact, that I can only ever play this on my trusty old jumbo, the one my parents bought me for my sixteenth birthday. Bless them for taking me so seriously. The classical guitar fingerboard is too wide for me to span firmly, and the strings simply too far away from the board to make proper contact. That’s a little tip for any of you classical guitarists out there who might think they could lightly toss this one off as an encore one night after the Concerto di Aranjuez. Try it, that’s all. See how far you get.)
The mood and rhythm of the tune were strongly inspired by a song from the early seventies by Christopher Neil called ‘If I Was Close To You’ (emphasis on the “if”), one of those sparkling finger-picking numbers whose style was so popular at that time, from the likes of Nick Drake and Duncan Browne through Gordon Lightfoot to James Taylor, Jim Croce and beyond. I had no chance of reproducing anything like that level of digital dexterity, so I simply grabbed by favourite plectrum and had at it, six strings at a time. To this day I have no idea what the time signature is – no one has ever been able to explain to me what the point of the lower number is – and not that that mattered much, because I was never able to settle into a consistent strumming rhythm anyway. There was some powerful spooky magic woven into this song and no mistake – my favourite for many reasons, but the rhythm is so complicated I can’t even play it properly myself.
Every image is taken from life, moving backwards from the rough present of 1989 into the distant past when I was barely “three feet small” and having my height marked on the living room wall as I grew. K and I had only recently been able to afford holidays abroad and Paris was both attractive and reachable. We used to sail over from Newhaven to Dieppe, thudding through the night on a ferry wet with salty sea spray. The “painters’ drizzly pictures” were a feature of the Place du Tertre in Montmartre and “the hustler’s grisly jest” was directed at me one night as we strolled near the Moulin Rouge. One of the ticket touts darted out from the doorway of some sleazy dive and told me (if I understood him aright) to ditch the missus and come in and see the show. My wife, bless her, took it all in good spirit and has never let me forget it…
The second verse is all about Oxford. (I particularly like “The acne and the ecstasies of youth”.) “College was a fortress” means once you (or at least I) were tucked safely inside, in my case lovely old St John’s, the real world never impinged. I didn’t read a newspaper or watch the news all the time I was there (was there some kind of local disturbance in southern Asia?), so there is a great hole of ignorance in my knowledge of the world from 1974 to 1978. “The Horsetrough” is my fictional name for a favourite little café off Cornmarket called The Nosebag, where you were served by quiet young women in green aprons who always made me think of the Amish for some reason. I only recently learnt the place has closed down after fifty years of trading. How sad for them, and there goes another treasured fragment of my youth.
Verse three is about discovering my first loves – reading (Tarzan books), hobbies (Airfix modelling kits), girly mags (very soft porn indeed) and drawing. The “easel in the sky” was a little back room on the top floor of our Victorian terrace which looked out beyond the edge of our suburb Bedminster towards green fields (half built over now, of course). “Jobbies” is what we called number twos, and was the only feasible rhyme I could come up with for “hobbies”. I wasn’t expecting much airplay on Radio 1 anyway.
“Feeling regret for the thanks never said” is the saddest line in the thing. My parents are long gone, but on the whole I feel they deserved more from me than they got. I wish now I’d talked to them more, especially about Oxford, but I had been shy and lonely in the first weeks, the work had been a real struggle, and I didn’t want them to know how unhappy I was. Then once the folk clubs and the revues kicked in, I was suddenly too busy and engaged to keep in touch. That’s what I told myself anyway. I just hope they were happy enough to know I was there, the best place I could have ended up, and that I couldn’t have done it without them.
“How could I forget them?
When shall I forget them?
Why should I forget them at all?”