My appearance on the ITV quiz show The Chase last month may not have brought me riches in the monetary sense (though how gutting to be so tantalisingly close to winning a third of the 30 grand that we’d got in the kitty!), but it did bring an old friend back into my life and, as a result, a trip down a very personal musical memory lane. She’d been feeding her grandson at the time the show came on the telly (grandson?? We were in our early twenties when we knew each other before, and shared a funny place in Snaresbrook in north-east London, and now she has a grandson??), when gradually a familiar voice permeated her consciousness and she realised who it was – me!! Nice to know my voice hasn’t changed too drastically over the years! She sent an email to ITV asking them to pass on her contact details to me, and assumed it’d end up lost in the ether, so had another surprise when I emailed her back a few days later, not exactly sure who she was as she’d given ITV her married name – but I assumed it must be my pal from the Snaresbrook days, and was glad when it turned out that that’s exactly who it was.
Very strangely, just a couple of weeks before seeing me on The Chase, she’d unearthed a cassette of the two of us ‘sodding around’, as the handwriting on the case said, and it gave a year… 1983… (eek!!). As she didn’t have any means of playing the archaic thing, she didn’t think anything more about it until seeing me on the telly two weeks later. When she told me this in the emails we then exchanged, I told her that I did still have a cassette player, and how amazing – and maybe awful – it would be to have a listen to it. Well, to cut a long story a little bit shorter, she came down to see me last weekend, along with said cassette, and I immediately stuck it in the player – to hear two young things giving a rather delightful rendition of my very first two ‘serious’ songs – ‘Crumble Inside’ (about fancying someone but not daring to let them know but hoping they’ll know anyway… ‘Surely you’ve seen me watching you closely, Whenever you’re near me but with someone else? And haven’t you noticed, don’t you think it unusual, This blushing confusion when your eyes meet mine?’ How innocently sweet!) and ‘Friends Last Longer Than Lovers’ (how prophetic of me all those years ago!)…
Thirty years on, and I’ve just got back from playing at the fantastic arts space in Eastbourne called the Under Ground Theatre. The (rather more recent) songs I sang tonight were ‘Slick as Texas Oil’ – about being lied to by some silver-tongued bastard – and ‘Bitter and Twisted’ – about being lied to by some silver-tongued bastard. I want to say ‘Look how much my songs have changed in those years’ – but actually the subject matter isn’t so very different. And neither did my friend look very different from how she’d looked three decades ago. Moreover, both of us, as we’d been back then, were once again single. It was only as we caught up on each other’s lives in the intervening years that we really appreciated what an enormous amount of time had gone by since we last clapped eyes on each other.
If the only thing to come out of being on The Chase was reconnecting with a friend from the deep recesses of my past, it was very definitely worth it. She’s planning on coming to see me when I play in London next month too, so it doesn’t look like another three decades are going to pass by before we see each other again… But if they did, I wonder what I’d been writing then? Something about some silver-haired silver-tongued bastard, no doubt.
Very strangely, just a couple of weeks before seeing me on The Chase, she’d unearthed a cassette of the two of us ‘sodding around’, as the handwriting on the case said, and it gave a year… 1983… (eek!!). As she didn’t have any means of playing the archaic thing, she didn’t think anything more about it until seeing me on the telly two weeks later. When she told me this in the emails we then exchanged, I told her that I did still have a cassette player, and how amazing – and maybe awful – it would be to have a listen to it. Well, to cut a long story a little bit shorter, she came down to see me last weekend, along with said cassette, and I immediately stuck it in the player – to hear two young things giving a rather delightful rendition of my very first two ‘serious’ songs – ‘Crumble Inside’ (about fancying someone but not daring to let them know but hoping they’ll know anyway… ‘Surely you’ve seen me watching you closely, Whenever you’re near me but with someone else? And haven’t you noticed, don’t you think it unusual, This blushing confusion when your eyes meet mine?’ How innocently sweet!) and ‘Friends Last Longer Than Lovers’ (how prophetic of me all those years ago!)…
Thirty years on, and I’ve just got back from playing at the fantastic arts space in Eastbourne called the Under Ground Theatre. The (rather more recent) songs I sang tonight were ‘Slick as Texas Oil’ – about being lied to by some silver-tongued bastard – and ‘Bitter and Twisted’ – about being lied to by some silver-tongued bastard. I want to say ‘Look how much my songs have changed in those years’ – but actually the subject matter isn’t so very different. And neither did my friend look very different from how she’d looked three decades ago. Moreover, both of us, as we’d been back then, were once again single. It was only as we caught up on each other’s lives in the intervening years that we really appreciated what an enormous amount of time had gone by since we last clapped eyes on each other.
If the only thing to come out of being on The Chase was reconnecting with a friend from the deep recesses of my past, it was very definitely worth it. She’s planning on coming to see me when I play in London next month too, so it doesn’t look like another three decades are going to pass by before we see each other again… But if they did, I wonder what I’d been writing then? Something about some silver-haired silver-tongued bastard, no doubt.
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