Crocodiles and Tchaikovsky....

I made my return tonight to Out of the Bedroom, playing live for the first time since last November

I was very nervous and fluffed the start to the first song “Love and War” – even dropping the plectrum. After all these years I don’t know why I should still get so nervous about singing a couple of songs in front of a few people….but I do.

The song went well though – eventually - with a new ending being created by the audience who’d never heard it before. After the key changed final verse there’s supposed to be a long silent gap before one last chorus – but they all started clapping thinking it was over – and so, it was.

“Half a Lifetime Away” went down well too. I played it more slowly than the version on the new EP but slightly faster than I was playing it last year. I wrote it on 1st May 2004 when I realised that it was over half my lifetime away since 1st May 1980 which I’d spent with all my friends in Felsberg, Germany, where I’d been living since August the previous year.

Labour Day in Germany is a day when everything closes down completely. We’d made sure we had loads of drink and sausages and stuff and a big group of us made our way up the hill at the back of the village first thing in the morning and proceeded to drink all day round a big fire on which we cooked our food. It was a great day I’ll never forget – and I’ll never forget the hangover either – hmmm maybe I should write a follow up about the 2nd of May 1980…

By coincidence, my old chum Jorg Sonnenschein had called me from Felsberg to wish me a Happy Birthday just before I left the house for OOTB. Jorg is the one referred to in the song in the line “The friends I once knew, now all but one are gone”. He has a big old house in the middle of Felsberg which he’s renovating single-handedly whilst still working a normal eight hour day and spending time with his wife, Yvonne and their three children Xenia, Ansem and Teja – Ansem is our God Son. It was good to hear from him and I hope we’ll see each other sometime this year.

Last time we met up was in the summer of 2003 and his father was very ill with cancer. As it turns out, my own dad died suddenly within a week or so of his dad, Oskar’s death….

My last song was “The Crocodile Song”. It has a nice happy go lucky tune, which I co-wrote with my nephew, Andy Wilson but the words are a wee bit disturbing. I seldom write a song like “Half a Lifetime Away” where I have a clear idea of the ideas to get across in the song and write the lyric accordingly. Mostly I just write what comes into my head and it seems to take on a meaning later on – and so it was with Crocodile Song.

I took a book off the shelf, “The Viper’s Knot” by Francois Mauriac, and opened it randomly, coming across the line “Crocodile I am and crocodile I shall remain” and proceeded to write a lyric straight off based around that line. As you might imagine, if someone is describing themselves as a crocodile, they’re probably not a very nice person hence the lines..

“Crocodile I am and crocodile I'll stay
So let me take your hand on a sunny day
I know you want to be with me
Even if it seems like something else to you”

All in all I enjoyed it and I think the audience did too, I sold quite a few CDs afterwards…

Earlier in the day I’d spent more of my birthday money on a couple of classical box-sets – Claudio Abbado and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recordings of Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies plus various other works – a six CD set and an eleven CD box highlighting the cello playing of Dutchman Anner Bijlsma issued by Sony on his 70th birthday last year.

So I fell asleep tonight with Tchaikovsky in my headphones – he was one of my dad’s favourite composers and one he used to spark my interest in music back in the sixties….