books monthly march 2023
April 2023 - there are new instalments of The Four Marys...
Music that changed meThere's a regular column in the BBC Music Magazine, inside the back cover each month, entitled "Music that changed me" - last month's issue, it was the turn of my favourite writer and broadcaster, Gyles Brandreth. There is no doubt that music changed me, and I thought I would try to recall the music that changed me through my long life, just for this issue. I lived in a household where there was no television - we had a radio, and later a radiogram (of which more later) and it was always on. Listen with Mother was the earliest programme I can remember, and it had a very gentle theme tune, which always caught my attention before the lady on the radio began to read my favourite stories, stories from Toytown, about Larry the Lamb and Dennis the Dachsund. The music was by Gabriel Fauré, and it was played on the piano (we had a piano, of which more later) and it was part of a suite of music called The Dolly Suite - which I only found out much later in life, when I was married, in fact. There are many hundreds of brilliant recordings, and I don't know enough about piano music to be able to recommend one, so let's move on. I would always stop playing, and sit in front of the radio, rapt, which the nice-sounding lady read to me, bringing my favourite characters to life. As I started school at the age of four, this daily entertainment would have been whilst I was two-three years old, and sitting in the front room playing with toys and reading my comics (Robin, and Jack and Jill, I think. Everything stopped for Listen with Mother. As I said, the radio was always on, and it was one of those radios with a big tuning knob. We were able to receive all three BBC stations, the Home Programme, the Light Programme, and the Third Programme. My favourite was the Light Programme, because it on there that I was later able to listen to Children's Hour, with its dramatisations of Angus McVicar and Anthony Buckeridge books - Jennings and Darbyshire. Jennings was my favourit character that I heard on the radio. All of my Enid Blyton books had characters who were always home for the holidays from boarding school. Jennings was also at boarding school, as were the lads at Greyfriars School, where Billy Bunter was a pupil, and for a while, with my comics also featuring boarding school stories, I wished I also went to one. I didn't know how I would cope without Mum, Dad and my sister Jean, but I desperately wanted to be like Jennings, and like Harry Wharton, who was the leader of the Greyfriars Famous Five, not to be confused with enid Blyton's Famous Five. On with the music. I was introduced to various folk tunes at Primary school, but the next piece that changed my life was Rossini's The Thievish Magpie. My violin teacher at the Crypt Grammar School, who was secretly grooming me, wanted me to play it after I had taken my grade three violin exam (I went straight in at grade three, and was playing in the school orchestra as well, but my experience with this odious man left me disillusioned with the violin, and I started to teach myself guitar instead. So The Thievish Magpie changed me, but not in a good way. Next on my list is Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band playing In A Persian Market Place. This is, without doubt, one of the finest examples of the Paramount Jazz Band's playing, and the tune is catchy, too. It prompted me to concentrate on buying every album I could lay my hands on by Acker Bilk, and I was at the same time captivated by the sleeve notes, which are available to read on the Books Monthly site; in fact there is a link to the Acker Bilk page on this page, right at the top. I had always enjoyed the classical music concerts played on the BBC stations, and I had various favourite pieces of music in the classical repertoire, by composers such as Beethoven, Prokoviev, Richard Strauss, Johann and Josef Strauss, Rossini, etc., etc. Other composers became firm favourites in later life, such as Shostakovich, for example, whose Seventh Symphony is simply mid-blowing. But in 1973, my life changed forever when I watched Leonard Bernstein conduct Mahler's Second Symphony, The Resurrection, in Ely Cathedral, in 1973. It introduced me to Mahler in a the most brilliant way possible, and I still have the DVD of this concert in my collection. I went on to discover all of the Mahler Symphonies, and the Eighth, the SYmphony of a Thousand, has become my absolute favourite piece of music, but that first introduction to Mahler on such an epic scale, was life changing and immense. Finally, my fifth piece of music that changed me (you are only allowed five pieces in the BBC Music Magazine, of course, was something I first heard in 1977, and it was Mr Blue Sky, from the ELO's Out of the Blue double album. I first heard Mr Blue Sky on Capital Radio, the pirate station which was dominated, in the main, by the disc jockey genius that was Kenny Everett. I was so struck by Mr Blue Sky, that I persuaded my wife of ten years that we should save our odd pennies towards buying the album, and a few weeks before Christmas, we treated ourselves. ELO became firm favourites of all of us, including our eldest son Martin, and I now have the definitive version of the song on the CD/DVD set of Jeff Lynne's Wembley or Bust concert. I am a huge fan of Jeff's, I choose every new album he releases for birthday and Christmas presents, and Martin, this year, kindly bought me a limited edition signed photo of Jeff from the concert. Only 150 were released, and mine is number 4. Can't thank you enough Martin - Jeff Lynne's ELO certainly changed me!