Best of All Possible Worlds

I’ve just got back from a round trip to visit my parents – seven hours of driving in intermittent downpour in order to have lunch and complete assorted tasks involving stepladders, heavy lifting, wading in ponds to move water lilies and so forth. And then coming away with two bottles of sparking wine, a jam jar full of ramshorn pond snails, a complete set of Tintin in French (they’re having a very, very slow clear-out, and for some reason my philistine brothers weren’t interested in these) – and one of the funniest ‘sliding doors’ possibilities for my life I’ve ever imagined. I’m going to tell the story rather differently from the version my father told me this afternoon, as his lacked narrative coherence…

The one tangible success of my entire musical career came back in the early 1990s, when a selection of my self-recorded songs – ah, the wonders of the old Tascam four-track recorder – won a competition in the student newspaper. I must have shared the cutting with my parents, or at any rate my father, who was delighted by the fact it made reference to the homemade equipment in my recording setup (he’d built the Great British Spring Reverb for the sheer engineering joy of it, as well as my guitar amplifier), and tickled by the lyrics that were quoted. He therefore shared these with his great mate – an Oxford-educated, crossword-solving, OED-contributing polymath called Mike Barnes, who must have endured a lot of updates on my intellectual exploits over the years.

Mike was sufficiently interested and amused then to mention this to an old university acquaintance of his, a Rhodes scholar from Merton College with whom he had boxed once a week, who had eventually gone on to a successful musical career. Yes, this is where it suddenly becomes clear why my father had suddenly remembered the story; his best friend had been in regular correspondence with the recently deceased Kris Kristofferson. Even more hilariously, Kristofferson had actually liked my lyrics, and wrote back to Mike that the lines in question really spoke to him, and if his (Mike’s) friend’s son would like to send over a tape of songs he’d be happy to offer some advice.

My father never passed on this message to me – he’d obviously decided that I would be much too focused on exploring the economy of Ancient Rome to consider such a thing. And the very little I knew of country music at the time was mostly unfavourable, and the songs I was writing were striving in a completely different direction, and I imagine Kristofferson would have been entirely unimpressed. But on the other hand I can appreciate the musical craft in this genre, and the emphasis on lyrics and story-telling, and the fact that someone like Kristofferson could happily build a song around the line from Doctor Pangloss about the best of all possible worlds – and so there is a conceivable timeline in which Neville then abandoned the University Library for Nashville, not to become a star – that cut-glass English accent was never going to cut it – but to churn out a respectable number of hit songs, ideally in a less cynical vein than Sven in Questionable Content.

Obviously Kristofferson comes out of the story best; not just the Rhodes scholar and boxing Blue part of his legend, but the fact that he sent regular birthday and Christmas cards and letters for decades to the bloke with whom he’d sparred for a year, regardless of his stardom, and was perfectly willing to offer genuine advice to the son of a friend of this friend. And I get to say that a song-writing great once liked one of my verses. But what my father thought he was playing at…