...And Battles Long Ago . A few responses to readers about 'Meet on the Ledge'

I���ve had many responses , most of them constructive and thoughtful , to the post I wrote a couple of days ago about ���Meet on the Ledge���. I can���t respond to all of them, but this is an extended version of a reply I���ve inserted in a comment made by Olav from Oslo���. It begins with his comment:  

��� Mr. Hitchens,

Let me add that Meet On The Ledge (a song I hadn't heard before) is a beautiful song, and I don't think it's cheap.

 

You seem to argue (correct me if I'm wrong) that modern music automatically is cheap, even if the song moves you.

 

But can a cheap song really move you in this way? If so, by what criteria do you call it cheap? That they happened to deliver the song with different instruments than the classical composers?

 

Do you think it's the case, that modern songs (even those who moves you deeply) automatically can be labelled as cheap, and classical pieces (even the forgettable ones) automatically can be labelled as a higher form of art? If so, why?

 

The lack of answers to these questions brings me to the conclusion that you're judging modern music on political, cultural and social grounds.

 

Sorry again about my notorious bad English.

 

********

My reply begins here:

It's a reference to a remark usually attributed to the playwright Noel Coward but actually one he put into the mouth of the character Amanda in 'Private Lives'  "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is" . I've looked it up and she says the line in a quarrel with her husband Elyot, from whom she has just been divorced. They are bickering about Coward's own song 'Someday I'll find you', the words and music of which can easily be found. Elyot says it is a 'nasty insistent little tune'. Amanda retorts by pointing out its power to move. Both are of course right in a way.  But Amanda is more right. When  'Private Lives' was first performed, Elyot was played by Coward, who thus had the pleasure of publicly sneering at his own song.

 

I owe this information to an interesting Guardian article about Coward  by Ian Bostridge, who also quotes a knowing passage from another Coward play 'Blithe Spirit' . He writes: 'Music in Coward's work has an access to the unconscious. "Are you susceptible to music?" asks Judith of Richard in Hay Fever, Coward's first comic hit. "I'm afraid I don't know very much about it," he says, to which she replies: "You probably are, then." '

 

The reactions of several contributors to 'Meet on the Ledge' (a very different song from 'Some Day I'll find You') have been similar to Elyot's . They say it's a dirge, or dismal, or they point out that there is better and more moving music to be had. Tell me about it. I cannot listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony without being completely overcome with awe and wonder, and I was recently given some Paul Tortelier performances of Bach that defeat my powers of description. Any fool knows these are great. But I still like 'Meet on the Ledge' , probably for the same reason I liked it when I first heard it, redoubled by nearly half a century of life and regrets.  There���s something true and sad about it, and I like sadness almost as much as I like truth (not least because they are often close companions) . I think I knew when I heard it , and I think Richard Thompson knew when he wrote it, more than we realised we knew.

 

I'm with Judith. People like me, ignorant of music and of how it works, can be beguiled against our will and without understanding what has happened to us. I'm old enough not to be ashamed to admit it.

 

When I was 17, by contrast, I kept many of my tastes in books and music to myself . One reader seems to think that liking this song makes me some sort of follower of Fairport Convention. I'm not. I wasn't then, and am not now. I didn't know who they were when I first heard it, presumably on Radio London (the seaborne pirate version)  on the small cream plastic Ferranti transistor radio which for some reason picked up the best signal on 266, though it couldn't often pick up the rival Radio Caroline. I didn't tell anyone else I liked it, or know anyone else who liked it. I haven���t made any special point of listening to them since.  I think I may well have been embarrassed that I liked it. It wasn't, as another reader points out, typical of Top 20 songs of the time. I was surprised (and not altogether pleased) , years later, to find out that it had won a sort of cult following. But I knew why, just as I know why Richard Thompson���s mother asked him to sing it at her funeral.  It contains an unstated hope that in the end, after all the car crashes and suicides and divorces and abortions and young, untimely deaths,   *everything will be all right* . We will meet on the ledge.

 

 

Or ,as Julian of Norwich put it more lastingly 'And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well'

 

As to what its author thought it meant, I'd add one other thing that I do know for sure. Writers seldom know what will please people. I never do. I���m not even sure how conscious writers are of what they are about to say, or how strong the barriers are between thought and word, and how little of what we really mean to say ever gets through the stubborn filters of vocabulary and grammar (not to mention keyboards which sometimes mock the clumsy efforts of our fat fingers) . Most have the experience of things that have come unbidden to their pens, or their fingertips,  not in some obviously mystical way but because thought does not always form and harden into words as you expect it to.

 

I am sure this is even more so with poets and the writers of songs. How many of them know which of their words will bring sudden tears to the eyes of readers long after they are dead? I hate to think how much superlative stuff has been thrown into the fire by great writers who didn't appreciate their own work.

 

But in the case of 'Meet on the Ledge', I think there was a growing sense of danger in our minds as the Sixties went wildly and rather unstoppably on (they ended for me, in a series of self-inflicted personal melodramas in August 1969, but for everyone else, I think, in the sudden slamming on of the economic brakes by the Yom Kippur war in 1973).  But in 1967 and 1968, there seemed no limit to it. Everything we had been told we couldn't or shouldn't do, we were now doing. If you were in your teens, it was a very insecure time, full of combined longing and apprehension.   The comprehensive revolution was beginning to change the schools out of all recognition. Forbidden words were being broadcast on TV. Forbidden and previously unnamed actions were being openly discussed.  And our parents' marriages were in many cases foundering, as the new Divorce Laws took rapid effect, one of the most underestimated and under-recorded factors in the Sixties revolution.

 

Another reader asked if musicians only had drink problems in the 1960s. Well, no, obviously this has always happened, though I think it quite rare among classical musicians. Kathleen Ferrier, he owner of an even lovelier voice (listen to her singing ���Blow the Wind Southerly��� and see what you think. The song had a special resonance in the years after the war, for all of those who knew that no ship and no wind would ever bring back their husbands, sons , brothers and fathers)  also died young, but of breast cancer, which she would probably have survived in these times.  But young women raised in the London suburbs didn't tend to have drink (or drug)  problems before the 1960s, not much, and I can't think of any other combination of circumstances that might have led poor Sandy Denny to such an early end in any other recent time. The cheerful amorality of the age actually went further, in my recollection, than most people would go now.  So did its politics. But those of my generation remember what they did and thought then, even if they don't like to talk about it much now,  and are still influenced by it. It still seems to me to have been a very sad time, and a regrettable one. We could have shaken off the postwar grimness of our country in a different and kinder way.