musical memories

A few days ago, I was listening to my ‘general playlist’ when a song started that can only be described as ‘weird’. “What’s this?” Paula asked. I explained that it triggered a very specific memory, and I began to wonder how many other tracks on that playlist would also set off such detailed recollections. Here are some of the highlights, ordered according to the date of the original memory:

Marvin Gaye — Can I Get a Witness
In the early 1960s, a vinyl single would set you back six shillings and eightpence, but once a month the local record shop was visited by a travelling salesman, who always left a pile of demo records. These were intended as a guide for possible future orders, but the proprietor merely put them on sale, and at a meagre two shillings and sixpence (half a crown) each, they were a godsend for cash-strapped teenagers like me.

This record is the only one I can now remember buying as a demo. It was released at a time when Tamla-Mowtown was not a separate label in the UK; it appeared on EMI’s Stateside label and was not a hit, although I consider it one of Marvin Gaye’s best records. Many years later, when I consulted a catalogue that listed the prices you could expect to pay for old records, I was not surprised to learn that this one would have cost £2, but I was amazed to discover that the demo version was priced at £50! By this time, the owner of the record shop was dead, but I’d have enjoyed winding him up about the fortune that he gave away for peanuts, because every demo is now worth considerably more than a commercial pressing.

Solomon Burke — Down in the Valley
In the autumn of 1964, I was in my first term as a student in Manchester, and at the end of every day I took a bus back to my hall of residence that passed a record shop called the Turntable. It had a sign in the window that read “45s, half a crown each or 10 for £1”. One day, I decided to get off the bus and check it out. The shop had so many must-have records that I ended up spending all my money and was thus obliged to walk the remaining two miles back to the hall.

This record, with its rasping brass accompaniment, was also not a hit in the UK, but it marked the emergence of soul music as a distinct genre. It was the stand-out record among those that I bought there, but when I returned to Manchester after the Christmas vacation the entire area had been demolished, so there was no opportunity for a return visit. I must have caught the tail end of a closing-down sale.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band — I’m the Urban Spaceman
In the 1960s, it was customary for big-name bands to play at student dances: the Moody Blues, the Who and the Spencer Davis Group all played at Manchester University Student Union while I was there. However, this memory relates to a dilemma I was faced with in 1967. The Faculty of Technology had its own student union, and one Saturday night the Move were playing at the main union, while the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band were on at the tech union.

I finally opted for the Bonzos, and I’ve never regretted that choice. Remember, this was meant to be a Saturday night dance, but the band put on a show, the first time I’d seen this done. And what a show: the hall was crowded, and nobody was dancing. It remains one of the most spectacular entertainments I’ve ever seen, and I still picture the onstage antics every time I hear this track.

The Who — Pinball Wizard
It is often alleged that proficiency at snooker is a sure sign of a misspent youth. The same might be said of skill on a Bally pintable. The Dunrobin, the coffee bar where I misspent my youth, had a pintable as well as a jukebox, and I was a frequent player. The custom was that you could play continuously for as long as you liked, unless someone else wanted to play. In that case, when your game was over, you gave way, except, that is, when you had free games on the clock. I often had the free-game clock at or near the limit, and I would eventually sell my games to the next guy.

In 1969, I found myself working in Great Yarmouth, a once genteel seaside resort on the Norfolk coast that had become, with the discovery of gas offshore, a major supply and service base for exploration and production in the UK sector of the southern North Sea. Like every other English seaside town, Great Yarmouth had its amusement arcades, with their pintables and one-armed bandits, and it wasn’t long before I located one. I found a pintable that was identical to the model in the Dunrobin. It cost me sixpence for my first game, after which I was able to keep playing because I kept winning free games. Finally, after about three hours, with the place full and people waiting to play, the owner gave me £5 and told me in a not very friendly manner to bugger off. And not come back.

Now, whenever I hear Pete Townshend’s crashing guitar chords in the introduction to this song, I am unfailingly reminded of this incident.

Earth Opera — The American Eagle Tragedy
If you’ve never heard this record, it’s the weird one referred to in the opening paragraph. I heard it for the first time while lying in hospital in IJmuiden in 1969 as a result of a near-death experience. I was listening to Hilversum, a Dutch English-language radio station, not paying much attention for the obvious reason that the beginning of this record is not attention-grabbing stuff. Suddenly, it kicked into gear with an arresting chorus:

And call out the border guard,
The kingdom is crumbling.
The king is in the counting house,
Laughing and stumbling.

Gosh! This is interesting. Who is it? I’ll find out at the end of the record. Well, no I won’t. There was no back announcement. For years, I asked everyone whom I thought might know, and I followed quite a few red herrings, but I never did find out, or hear the song again.

Until the internet came along. The only clue I had was that chorus, which had stuck in my memory. I tried typing it into Google, and I had one hit, a discussion forum where a poster had quoted it to make a quite different point. But he had the grace to credit the band, which meant that I could go about locating a copy.

I had no idea at the time that this was a Vietnam War protest song, but this was probably because I didn’t remember the rest of the chorus:

His armies are extended,
Way beyond the shore.
As he sends our lovely boys to die,
In a foreign jungle war.

Bucks Fizz — Making Your Mind Up
I am not a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, but this one had ‘winner’ written all over it in 1981. Bucks Fizz was a vocal quartet (two men, two women) who provided a vigorous onstage presentation of what is a very lively song. My elder son, Siegfried, was only slightly more than two years old, and I still remember his description—“Shaky bum dancing”, which he used every time he heard the song, even without the visuals—every time I hear it now.

loose ends

Looking back, a few of my posts during the past year left loose ends, which I will now endeavour to tie up. You can click on the title if you want to refer back to the original post.

a puzzle
I used to compile word puzzles because the ones appearing in newspapers were too easy to be worth bothering with. Some of these were posted in the early days, when I had few visitors, and I had no idea what kind of audience I would attract. I’m not planning to post any more, but I thought that you might like this one. It’s really just a question, but the answer has to be worked out, which is why I call it a puzzle. I ask only that if you do take a look that you do not post the answer in a comment. If you have the correct answer, you will know that it is correct.

fact or fiction
At the end of my assessment of the reliability of purportedly factual material in books, I described how I came across this sentence in the third edition of a standard university textbook on global environmental issues:

This was captured by John Turner in his paintings of the period.

The author was describing the famous eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 and how the huge quantities of volcanic ash that were fired into the stratosphere affected sunsets around the world for several years thereafter. I commented as follows:

If you think you know what is wrong with this sentence, do leave a comment. My reaction was to delete it completely, which in retrospect may also have been a mistake.

One reader pointed out that Turner had died in 1851, which makes the sentence a nonsense, but nobody seems to have noticed that it is not common practice to include a first name. Painters, like composers and writers, are usually referred to by their surname alone. However, if you do include a Christian name, it’s a good idea to get it right. Turner’s first name was Joseph.

So why did I suggest that deleting the sentence may have been a mistake? I could have rewritten it, because the paintings to which the author referred were painted around the time of the eruption, in 1815, of Tambora in Indonesia. This was four times more powerful than the 1883 event, and in addition to the obvious and predictable consequences, one unexpected byproduct (nothing to do with global environmental issues) was Frankenstein, written the following summer, the year ‘when summer was cancelled’ courtesy of the eruption.

probability
My discussion of probability ended with a description of a hypothetical television game show:

Imagine that…you are shown three locked boxes. You are told that one of the three contains $10,000, while the other two are empty. You are allowed to select one box, and if you choose correctly the money is yours. Let us refer to your selection as box #1. Now, before you are allowed to open your chosen box, the compere, who knows in advance which box contains the money, opens one of the other boxes (call this box #2) to show that it is empty. Now comes the offer: do you want to stick with box #1, or would you prefer to change your mind and choose box #3?

…if you know what you’re doing, you will choose box #3. Why?

If you haven’t come across this before, you may want to work out the answer for yourself, but if you’re interested in the answer but not in the working out, the answer is posted as a comment on the original article.

return to koon garden
After posting some of the photos that I’d taken in a ruined chee tong (spirit hall), I returned to take some more. I decided to add this one to the original post:

I’ve reproduced this photo here so that if you’ve already seen the original post you will not need to return to Koon Garden.

I call myself…

The habit may not be universal, but large numbers of Hong Kong Chinese have adopted Western Christian names. Not a particularly noteworthy phenomenon in itself, but the choice of names does throw up some points of interest. The practice also seems to have become widespread among young Indian professionals, if my experiences with Indian call centres are anything to go by.

First, a surprising number of girls and women have adopted names that in the West are now regarded as irredeemably old-fashioned, such as Agnes, Florence, Gladys and Mabel. Second, males often take on the formal version of a name, for example Kenneth, Richard, Thomas or William, but if you were to call someone with one of these names Kenny, Dick, Tommy or Billy, respectively, they would not respond, because Kenny, Dick, Tommy and Billy are seen as different names.

Then there are the outlandish choices, one of which stands out in my memory as the most bizarre of all: in the early 1980s, Yamaha employed an organ tutor who called himself Moondoggy Lo. I used to wonder what kind of music he might play at home. Judging by the name, I don’t think it would be music I would want to listen to.

All this makes me wonder what name I would have chosen if I too had had a free choice. Actually, there is only one candidate in the frame. I’ve had the same name for more than 64 years, and I’m attached to it. I believe that most Westerners would make the same choice, because a name is more than a label. Your name is your identity, which makes all the more puzzling a story I read on the website of England’s Sun newspaper over the weekend.

Apparently, a fan of Liverpool football club has changed his name by deed poll to Fernando Torres, the team’s centre forward. I cannot imagine that this fool feels any sense of identity with the new name, and I would expect his wife to continue to call him Shaun. And one can only assume that he felt no sense of identity with his original name either.

That this is also the case with Chinese who adopt Western names I deduce from an experience I had when I arrived in Hong Kong in 1974 to work at the Outward Bound School here. On one of my first courses, I discovered that there were two trainees in my watch who called themselves Richard. In order to avoid confusion, I suggested to one of them, I proposed to address him as Ricardo for the four-week duration of the course. At the end of the course, he informed me that he preferred Ricardo and that he would not be calling himself Richard in the future.

In my own case, I’ve been called by a few names over the years, but nowadays nobody calls me anything but Dennis. I was Hoddo during my school days (a corruption of my surname) and Razz (short for Rasputin) at university, and I continued to attract tiresome beard-related nicknames (Jesus, Fidel) for a few years thereafter.

However, it wasn’t until I went to work at the Eskdale Outward Bound School in the Lake District in 1971 that I experienced anything new in the way I was to be addressed. I was ‘Den’, which I didn’t like much, but in a cultural milieu where Adrian was ‘Ade’, Alan was ‘Al’, Colin was ‘Col’ and Stuart was ‘Stu’, I had little choice but to grin and bear it. But I was surprised to find names that I’d never thought of shortening being routinely chopped in half.

I had a similar experience working in a warehouse in Bermondsey, south London, in the late 1970s. Again I was ‘Den’, but I expected it this time, given that to a Cockney Derek is always ‘Del’ (cf. ‘Del-Boy’, Derek Trotter, in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses) Gary is always ‘Gal’, and Terry is always ‘Tel’. In earlier times, this practice of transposing l’s and r’s may have been more widespread (cf. Prince Hal, later to become Henry V, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV), but in modern Cockney usage Harry is always ’Arry. I’m tempted to describe this transposition as ‘Chinese’, except that, contrary to popular belief, the Chinese are far more likely to confuse l’s and n’s. It’s the Japanese who confuse l and r.

Of course, there are some names that will almost inevitably be shortened in use: Christopher will be chopped to ‘Chris’, David will be trimmed to ‘Dave’, Michael will become ‘Mike’, and Peter will be clipped to ‘Pete’. However, I’m careful to observe whether a new acquaintance prefers the original or abbreviated version of their name. This is especially important with female acquaintances: addressing someone as ‘Elizabeth’ when all her friends know her as ‘Liz’ is going to sound insufferably formal.

It should be noted that a perceived character change takes place when someone shortens their name. Had we been introduced to Anthony Blair as the new leader of the British Labour Party in 1994, he might have been scrutinized more closely, but ‘Tony’ sounds matey and reassuring, and millions were taken in by his glib platitudes and shallow showmanship. And his lies.

So, are there any circumstances under which I might consider changing my name? Yes there are, but it would have to be something extreme, such as having a contract put out on me by the mafia or other criminal organization, in which case I wouldn’t be writing this blog, and I certainly wouldn’t be telling anyone where I live.

call my bluff #2

This post is for those of you who find yourself with nothing to do on Christmas Day (i.e. none of you) and have somehow found your way here. Please accept my sincere apologies. There’s nothing happening here either. However, I have been informed by the management that since we have guests, it is incument on me to provide some entertainment. As you already know, I’m interested in all aspects of language, so I thought a little quiz would be in order. However, I’m not looking for the actual definitions, because I assume that these are all words with which you are completely unfamiliar. Try making up an amusing or otherwise apposite definition instead.

 1: What is a deadie?
 2: If you had been manted, what happened to you?
 3: What is a factaxe (British English spelling)?
 4: What is happening if you mollize something?
 5: What is a notivist?
 6: If you describe someone as duriatic, what are they like?
 7: What is a chipsure?
 8: If you describe something as plingent, what is it like?

If you come up with some good ones, please leave a comment. You can of course be reading this at a later date, but you can still join in the game. For background, you may want to read Call My Bluff, which will inter alia explain the origin of the words I’ve chosen above.