Mellon Collie and the Infinite Daphness

Apologies for the lengthy hiatus, having promised writing once a fortnight. A combination of personal circumstances and a major work project that demanded my creative focus meant that side-project creative fun had to go on hold. I promise to be better! This time, my Mum’s most recent birthday has caused me to look back a little and be grateful…

It is sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The scene is a kitchen in Bangor, Co Down. My mother is telling my brother and I about a conversation she’d had in work that day.

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Mum: “… and everyone was talking about how they didn’t have a clue what sort of music their children were listening to and it all sounded awful. And I said that you both left music in the car and I quite liked some of it. I said I liked Dodgy, and the Smashing Pumpkinheads…”

My brother and I, with condescending eye-rolls: “Mum! It’s the Smashing Pumpkins!'"

Mum (crestfallen): “Oh.”

A pause, and then

Mum (brightly): “Well, none of my colleagues had ever heard of any of the bands I mentioned, so I still sounded cool!”

I mean, fair play Mum, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is kinda heavy.

When I discovered that my Dad’s musical tastes ran to Charlie Pride, Foster & Allen, Barnbrack and Johnny Cash in his religious era, I turned to my Mum in the hope of something that spoke to me a bit more. And thankfully, Daphne did not let me down and the records that she brought into the house made for much more interesting listening.

This Ole House by Shakin’ Stevens and Making Your Mind Up by Bucks Fizz, bought for my fifth birthday. The number 1 singles when both my brother and I were born (for me, Save All Your Kisses For Me by Brotherhood of Man and for Gordy, The Winner Takes It All by ABBA), old singles by The Small Faces and Donovan. Albums by Donovan, by ABBA and Nana Mouskouri - though I have to confess that mostly, the Nana albums served as a reminder of how things might go if I made a dodgy selection at the optician; a running risk that remains to this day.

I eventually got to take an ancient record player up to my room and I loved it in all its 60s glory. It upsets me that I can’t remember the make and I can’t find the right combination of words to pull up a picture of it online, but it was a big, chunky wooden number that still had a 78 setting, and the single speaker also served as a cover for the player. I eventually got a very 1980s black stereo system and it might have been far better, sleeker and trendier, but that big wooden lump still occupies a very special place in my heart. Maybe, like many other firsts, you just never forget your first record player. Alongside my own first album purchases of Bridge of Spies by T’Pau and Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits, some of Mum’s records came too.

Watching a BBC4 music documentary recently about the making of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, I was instantly transported to lying on my bedroom floor and getting lost in Mum’s copy of the album. I was captivated by the massive, cathedral-like choir on The Only Living Boy In New York and was delighted to learn in the documentary that the parts were recorded in an actual echo chamber. I’m such a nerd about acoustics. The sparse dreaminess of So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly the end of the track, was always comforting but a bit unsettling to me back then, though it also sent me off to find out who Frank Lloyd Wright was and introduced me to a style of architecture I still love (I found a photo of Falling Water early on; the fact that I had a favourite house at the age of maybe 9 seems horrifically precocious, but 9 year old me was not wrong. I’d still love to live there). Is it odd to say that somehow the song sounds like his architecture? I love Paul Simon’s drifting, sparse vocal and the simplicity of the lyrics, compared to the music. There always seemed to be something angry about The Boxer; there’s such a sense of intense, building passion in the repeated final refrain. And the majestic, orchestral crashing climax of the title track is still moving and thrilling for me. I set myself the challenge of mastering it on the piano once I started learning, and I pretty much did: I probably can still play the introduction from memory and I haven’t had a piano for years. Mum also had Wednesday Morning 3am, and I loved and listened to it too, but there was something compelling for me in Bridge Over Troubled Water - all that orchestra and the bigness of the songs that didn’t sound quite like any other pop music I was listening to; but bigness that still allowed space for the intimacy of something like Song for the Asking. It’s an ongoing fascination to me how an orchestra can do that; hold you in the palm of its hand to such an extent that one minute you’re blown to the back of the concert hall with sheer power and volume, and the next have you perched on the edge of your seat, hanging onto every exquisite, delicate, gentle breath of a note. So to combine all of that with brilliant songs and two glorious voices that intertwine so complimentarily… what a dreamy album to fall in love with and I’m so glad it’s one that has stayed with me the older I’ve got.

Back when I started to learn the clarinet at the age of 7, my clarinet teacher told Mum to start me listening to classical music and going to see it live. My Mum already loved classical so this wasn’t a hardship; in fact, I think she was quite glad of a partner-in-orchestra-attending-crime. So along with Simon and Garfunkel vinyl, I got Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Sir Arthur Bliss conducting the Sinfonia of London, Bach Toccatas and Fugues and Malcolm Arnold’s English Dances.

I loved classical music immediately. I was a child that read voraciously and was frequently lost in the imaginary worlds books opened up to me. Classical music did the same thing and there was such escapism in letting my mind run free as I listened to those records. It’s still one of the things I love deeply about classical music and there’s honestly nothing better than the maelstrom of feeling, emotion and imagination that lets rip in the concert hall.

We went to Ulster Orchestra concerts too. I remember the newsreader Richard Baker narrating Peter and the Wolf, Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto, and timpanist David Openshaw wearing a sou-wester for the Thunder and Lightning Polka at a Viennese Concert. I felt grown up going with Mum to the Ulster Hall and slightly precarious perched on the temporary bleachers in Bangor Leisure Centre for those Viennese concerts, but wherever we were watching them, I loved the drama and story-telling that I heard and saw in the music.

We always watched the BBC coverage of both Young Musician of the Year and the Proms each summer. When I was about 10, we were watching the Proms and Mum said ‘I’ll take you some time’. That year, I’d been given a hand-me-down pink jumpsuit from one of my cousins in Limavady and I immediately assumed that a) we were going that summer, b) we were going to the Last Night because it looked most fun on telly and c) I’d be wearing my hand-me-down pink jumpsuit that I absolutely adored and my grey ankle boots (don’t judge me, it was 1986). I’d got a bit ahead of myself and in fact, not only did we not go to the Proms that year, we’ve actually never managed to go together - and the Last Night would very much no longer be my pick. Last year, I booked a few Proms concerts and as I packed for London, it dawned on me that I now owned a pink jumpsuit again so it felt like an appropriate nod to 10 year old me to wear the jumpsuit. Next time I go to the Proms I’ll take both it and my Mum.

I feel like big, orchestral pop and classical music is an excellent musical inheritance to get from my Mum - thanks, Daphne! You were wrong about one thing all those years ago, though. You didn’t sound cool; you were, and are, cool. Infinitely cool. Love you x

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